LIB 4900 – Social Informatics – Fall 2015

We are just one person short of having a 100% response rate for the course evaluations. If you are that one person, please complete your evaluation. You can log in to do it at:

http://www.baruch.cuny.edu/ote/evals/

If you missed a class, you can still get credit for the freewriting exercises we did that day. Just go back to the “Classroom Activities” page on the course website, scroll down to the day that you missed, and find the freewriting prompt. Then complete the exercise (allot yourself the usual ten minutes) and share the Google Doc with me.

I’ll accept these missed freewriting opportunities up to 6 pm on December 17 (the day of our final exam).

Almost every year that I’ve assigned an annotated bibliography assignment, one of my students has made the fateful mistake of copying phrases or sentences from the abstracts of the articles (or from the text of the article) they have listed. Please make sure that in your annotated bibliography and in your literature review, you always use quotation marks to indicate language that isn’t yours or you may also paraphrase.

For advice about how to paraphrase or use quotation marks, please see these guides:

• “Quoting, Paraphrases, and Summarizing”
• “Using Quotations”
• “Paraphase and Summary”
• “Paraphrase: Write It In Your Own Words”
• “Verbs for Referring to Sources”

If you need help, please contact me or stop by the Writing Center.

In the past, I’ve had to give an F on the assignment when a student has plagiarized.

Please remember that this Thursday (November 5) we will not meet in our usual classroom but will instead meet in a Google Hangout. We will start at 6:05 pm and end around 7:15 pm.

Please make sure that you are participating in the Google Hangout using a laptop or desktop computer. If you have technical troubles at any point, please email me at my Gmail or my Baruch email address or text me (I gave out my cell phone number on the first day of class).

In advance of the class, please be ready to share a version of your research question in this format:

We are studying __________, because we want to find out _______, so that our reader understands ____________.

The first blank (the one that follows “We are studying”) should be a narrowed topic. The second blank (after “because we want to find out” should be your research question that starts with how or why. The final blank (after “so that our reader understands”) is where you explain your motivation or the significance. This chart from Baruch’s Writing Center offers some examples of questions using this format:

Identifying a Research Question with Significance

I also expect that everyone will have done a blog post for the assignment where you have to talk about a specific journal article (details about the assignment can be found on this page of the course website).

Just a reminder that you have until 6 pm tonight to complete your first blog post for the assignment where you talk about a peer-reviewed journal article. Any late posts will have 1 point taken off for each day they are late.

Here’s the assignment description from the course website:

Find 3 peer-reviewed journal articles that discuss the results of a research study of an ICT that you are studying. Write a separate blog post for each article. Each post should have:

• Proper APA or MLA style citation for the article
• Description of the research question
• Description of the methodology used
• The extent to which this article takes a social informatics approach to the research study

Due:

• First blog post: October 22
• Second blog post: November 5
• Third blog post: November 12

Points: up to 10 points per blog post (30 total)

Here are some resources that shed light on values and norms here at Baruch.

• Student conduct
• Academic honesty
• CUNY Policy on Acceptable Use of Computer Resources (pdf)
• Maintenance of Public Order
• Combating Sexual Assault and Other Unwelcome Sexual Behavior
• CUNY Bylaws that relate to student behavior
• Baruch Student Handbook (pdf) go to page 62
• Baruch Faculty Handbook

In addition, see some of the resources (such as the strategic plan and the self study) listed in yesterday’s blog post, “Sources of Info about the College and Our Students.”

As you work on your research projects, you may find some of these reports helpful as background sources:

Baruch’s Strategic Plan (2013-2018)

• Main page on the college website
• Executive summary (pdf)
• Complete strategic plan (pdf)

Baruch’s 2010 institutional self-study report prepared for Middle States accreditation

• comprehensive self-study (pdf)

Data about Baruch

• Baruch at a glance
• Fact sheet
• Factbooks
• Factbook 2014 graphs (pdf)
• Common data set 2014-2015
• Student satisfaction inventory

Data about CUNY Colleges (with school-to-school comparisons)

• Factbooks and databooks
• 2014 student experience survey (pdf)
• Staff (and faculty) facts 2014 (pdf)

On the “Assignments” tab of the course website, I’ve added details to the critical literature review assignment. If you have any questions, feel free to post them here to the blog or ask me in class.

Please bring the worksheets you did last Thursday about developing a research question. In class, we’ll be doing more work in teams with research questions.

Also, make sure you’ve watched the video about literature reviews.

As I mentioned last week in class, I’m going to push back the due dates for the first two blog posts about journal articles. Instead of making two of the three blog posts being due by Oct. 15, let’s make one due by Oct. 22, another due by Nov. 5, and the third due by Nov. 12.

We’’ll talk about this in class tomorrow.