LIB 4900 – Social Informatics – Fall 2015

Reenvisioning Teaching and Learning: Opportunities for Campus IT

MLA Citation:

Malcolm Brown. “Reenvisioning Teaching and Learning: Opportunities for Campus IT.” portal: Libraries and the Academy 14.3 (2014): 383-391.Project MUSE. Web. 3 Nov. 2015. <https://muse.jhu.edu/>.

According to the Johns Hopkins University Press, “portal: Libraries and the Academy [is] an international refereed quarterly journal, publishes articles that focus on all aspects of librarianship, knowledge management, and information services and studies within higher education. portal articles are intended for an audience that is interested in the broad role and impact of libraries within the academy.”

Research Question:

How are the roles of the chief information officer, academic technologist and campus academic technology infrastructure being transformed?

Methodology:

This journal article is does not use any of the methodology we discussed on class. Rather than employing tactics such as usability tests, interviews, etc., this article instead uses the consolidated approach. The author gathered his own research, analyzed it and interpreted it in a way that poses a solution to the research question above.

Extent to which this article takes a social informatics approach to the research study:

This article embodies the principles of social informatics, in the sense that emphasizes the importance of institutional subtext. In fact, this article is entirely about how institutional bodies within the infrastructure of higher education must be adjusted. In Brown’s words, “The ever-increasing variety of curricular resources, course models, technology, and staffing support available to instructors provide a similar opportunity to create pathways constructed out of new connections. The institution, too, has fresh opportunities to deliver a more personalized learning experience for students, constructed in part through both traditional and nontraditional partnerships” (384).

Brown is conscious of the interdisciplinary interplay that happens around ICTs. He even speaks upon the concept of disruptive innovation, stating that “We have seen disruptions occur over the past fifty years in other sectors of the economy, such as manufacturing, music, journalism” (385).

Though this article does not apply directly to web portal technologies such as CUNYPortal, it builds upon this notion that infrastructural issues need to be worked out from many levels. Brown focuses in on the campus IT offices, such as the roles of the CIO and the academic technologist. He outwardly says that “the new situation for higher education is calling for a cultural change, something that is always difficult” (389). In other words, he is speaking to the truth of co-shaping.

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).