Adventures of an InfoMage in Training

Monday, October 27, 2003

Alive Again Well, after having been sick for the past few days, I'm alive again. I seem to have caught some kind of 24-hour bug, having spent Saturday fighting a 101.4 fever. My LIS 550 class is wrapping up: we turned in our group paper last night (a policy document implementing CIPA for a large metropolitan public library) and will spend the last two weeks in small, online discussion groups discussing Manuel Castells' The Internet Galaxy: Reflections of the Internet, Business, and Society. I still have to turn in one last (short) assignment on Sunday but things are definitely wrapping up there :) LIS 510 however, is turning into quite the steamroller. I love the topic (Information Behavior), the professor (Dr. Karen Fisher) is great, the text is a good read (Looking for Information by Donald Case), and the assignments are very meaningful. Unfortunately, my project group for this course is one of the first to present online to the rest of the class which is due about the same time as an individual paper. Anyhow, we're all in a bit of panic because of the amount of work that has to be done in such a short time, but I'm sure we'll muddle through somehow. Once we get past this part, we'll just get to sit back (sorta) and enjoy everyone else's presentations :-) And then there's one final paper due near the end of the quarter (mid-Decemeber). Yeah, I'm looking forward to getting to the other side of this next push :-)   10:00:33 AM      comment []    trackback []

Wednesday, October 15, 2003

iSchool Professor Awarded Outstanding Information Science Teacher of the Year by ASIST This just in from Mike Eisenberg, the dean of iSchool at the University of Washington (the program I'm enrolled in): To the entire iSchool community - I am honored to announce that our own Raya Fidel is winner of the 2003 American Society for Information Science & Technology (ASIST) Award for Outstanding Information Science Teacher! Established in 1980, the award is co-sponsored by ASIST and the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI). The $1,000 award is presented to "an individual who has demonstrated sustained excellence in teaching information science." This is a highly competitive award, and the judges carefully look at the nominee's record including letters of support from colleagues, students, and alumni of the nominees. Although Raya's many professional activities and prodigious research contributions served as supporting evidence, this award specifically recognizes Raya as an exceptional teacher of information science. Raya is in outstanding company in receiving this award. Former winners include F. W. Lancaster (1980), Pauline Atherton Cochrane (1981, to whose festschrift Raya contributed the article, "The User-Centered Approach: How We Got There"), Tefko Saracevic (1985), Linda C. Smith (1987), and current ASIST president (and iSchool outstanding alumni) Nicholas Belkin (1990). Congratulations to you, Raya, from everyone at the iSchool. Mike   11:04:48 AM      comment []    trackback []

Monday, October 06, 2003

Of Surveys and Strangers So for LIS510 today ("Information Behavior"), I headed out and attempted to get 10 people to answer a 5-minute survey. I chose to stand in front of Fred Meyer and nab people on their way out. It actually went pretty well -- some better than others, of course. People are funny creatures and I got some interesting and some bizarre responses. One of my favorites was where one woman turned me down (which was fine, about one in three folks did), came back while I was with another woman and then came up to me, apologized and asked to be interviewed! I told her not to worry about but she insisted :) Each student is required to get 5-10 respondents, submit their notes (basically, an electronic version of the instruments), tabulate the results, write an individual analysis/report, and then write-up a group report (with three other studnents). The topic is pretty interesting -- the professor has come up with a very cool area of investigation and her paper on the topic is currently under peer review and should finalized this week or next -- I'll share more about it then :-) I'm determined to get my results out to my teammates tonight before going to bed and getting my paper done tomorrow. So that means I need to be doing that, er, now. 10:59:27 PM      comment []    trackback []

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