University of Melbourne Vice-Chancellor Glyn Davis opened the conference. He spoke for 15 minutes and for the next three days other presenters kept quoting his remarks.

Glyn mentioned:

• Clark Kerr, a long-serving President of the University of California, who was criticised by Ronald Reagan as a ‘dangerous liberal’ for his stance on free speech and political protesst. Kerr wrote memoirs about his time at UC and a survey of the higher education and research landscape called “The Uses of the University.” Managing universities “is not for the fainthearted.”
• Geoff Garrett and Graeme Davies’ book “Herding Cats: being advice to aspiring academic and research leaders.”
• Deregulation of student numbers; some Australian universities increased their student numbers by one-third this year.
• Crown Casino is largest employer in Melbourne, universities are second and third largest
• Education is the largest export industry in Victoria.
• Only 23 per cent of Melbourne University’s income is sourced directly from the federal government: in Europe, Melbourne’s funding balance would see it classified as a private institution.

In a recent blog post he explores the combined potential of a national schools curriculum and the advent ofthe iPad.

Through the National Curriculum, he says, “every educator and every student throughout the nation can be drawing from and contributing to a ‘common wealth’ of shared materials, whether they be podcasts of lectures, educational chatrooms, lesson plans, and on and on and on.  As the years go by, this wealth of material will grow as more teachers and more students add their own contributions to it.  The National Curriculum isn’t a mandate, per se; it’s better to think of it as an empty Wikipedia.  All the article headings are there, all the taxonomy, all the cross references, but none of the content.  The next decade will see us all build up that base of content, so that by 2020, a decade’s worth of work will have resulted in something truly outstanding to offer both educators and students in their pursuit of curriculum goals.”

To achieve this potential, we need to change how we think about teaching, about students, about the education process itself. We must recognise teachers and students as creators of value.

“Educators spend endless hours working on lesson plans and instructional designs – they should be encouraged to share this work.  Many of them are too modest or too scared to trumpet their own hard yards – but it is something that educators and students across the nation can benefit from.  Students, as they pass through the curriculum, create their own learning materials, which must be preserved, where appropriate, for future years.

“We should do this.  We need to do this.  Right now we’re dropping the best of what we have on the floor as teachers retire or move on in their careers.  This is gold that we’re letting slip through our fingers. We live in an age where we only lose something when we neglect to capture it. We can let ourselves off easy here, because we haven’t had a framework to capture and share this pedagogy.  But now we have the means to capture, a platform for sharing – the Ultranet, and a tool which brings access to everyone – the iPad.  We’ve never had these stars aligned in such a way before.  Only just now – in 2010 – is it possible to dream such big dreams.  It won’t even cost much money.  Yes, the state and federal governments will be investing in iPads and superfast broadband connections for the schools, but everything else comes from a change in our behavior, from a new sense of the full value of our activities.  We need to look at ourselves not merely as the dispensers of education to receptive students, but as engaged participant-creators working to build a lasting body of knowledge.” [Pesce's emphasis]

University Website - xkcd.com cartoon by Randall Monroe

Every university home page is a delicately judged balancing act.  As the main door into a large, complex organisation, the home page must serve many different audiences — prospective students and their parents, alumni, professional staff, academic staff, current students at all levels, the media/marketing department, journalists, visiting academics, employers, sponsors and investors, government agencies, professional associations, benefactors, random members of the public who heard about a public lecture they’d like to attend and it starts in, like, 15 minutes from now, could you just tell me where it’s happening?

Claire Spencer and I presented a poster at Ausweb 2005 on emerging best-practice for university home pages. The poster was based on a competitor research project comparing 68 university web sites.

In turn, the competitor research was part of a larger project aimed at making some evidence-based decisions about the design of a new home page for the large research university that employed us.

We undertook several types of research:

• user research — an online survey about preferences, ideas and opinions
• business requirements analysis — a survey of internal stakeholders, asking them to prioritise different types of information and online service; and a review of corporate strategies, plans and other documentation about business goals (changes in the student enrolment profile, increased openness about research activity and outputs, key marketing messages, etc)
• user personas — task analysis, identification of key user groups and characteristics
• usability assessment – task-based testing in a usability laboratory, expert walk-through of our web site and several others
• web standards – identifying the coding, accessibility, performance and related standards we wanted to use in the new design templates
• content analysis – extensive review of the content and services already available on the University’s many, many (many!) web sites and in its publications (brochures, newsletters etc)
• site traffic analysis – understanding which parts of the University web site are important or heavily-used, and who uses them (or should use them)
• search log analysis – identifying sought-after content, understanding the language our web users employ (so we can use it in our web content); by undertaking ‘test searches’ we gained an understanding of why users preferred search over link-clicking for some types of content
• stakeholder consultation – interviews with senior managers, communication and marketing officers, content owners, subject matter experts and other internal stakeholders, to understand their ‘pain points’ and identify how the web site might help to resolve these

This research took about three months of intensive work by Claire and me, with help from other members of the project team. At times our manager and some colleagues chafed about the effort that went into this research phase.

However, when it was all synthesised into a design brief and proposed site structure, the value of the preparatory work became clear.

An immediate benefit was that the development stage was relatively fast and simple. Everyone knew what was required and what technical standards we needed to meet. We had a clear task list and timeline. Testing of the prototypes was mainly technical — validating code, checking download times,  and so on. Some lightweight user testing confirmed that we were on the right track with the navigation and visual design.

Another benefit of doing the groundwork emerged when we reached the ‘final approval’ stage for the new design. Whereas previous home-page designs had been the subject of months of debate before being signed off (if they were signed off at all), this time the proposed design was almost immediately endorsed by the relevant authorities, with only one or two minor changes requested.

[grins] Did I say “relevant authorities”? Don’t let that term mislead you: our web governance model at the time was nothing to be proud of. Several senior executives — and quite a few of their direct reports — each thought they had the final say over what went onto the home page. Even a minor change to the wording of a link could lead to months of argument, competition and resentment.

For the web team, tucked into a low-profile niche quite a long way down the organisational hierarchy, the only way to resolve disputes was by careful consultation and negotiation with the higher-ups, often at arm’s length (eg our manager’s boss might conduct the negotiations on our behalf, instead of letting the project manager speak for herself). We had no power and very little access to senior decision-makers. Instead of trying to acquire formal authority ourselves, we took a dual approach that established our credibility.

First, as outlined above, we invested time in ensuring our decisions were soundly evidence-based — an absolute must in large research-oriented university where every staff member believes they are entitled to question every decision.

Secondly, we worked on developing relationships with people who had an interest in the web and could advocate on our behalf. We provided a range of services to faculties and departments, including a broad-ranging training program, professional support via a community of practice, and a consultancy service to help them undertake their own web redevelopment projects. Business managers, communication specialists, IT managers and web staff all benefited from these services, and in turn they provided lobbying support for the redesign project and other University-wide initiatives related to web management.

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Bonus: Gregory Beyer’s review of a non-existent book, “The Devil and the Rising Sun: A Year Inside the West Carolina University Admissions Department” by Cortoroy Chen, makes me wish it existed. Very funny, if you’ve ever worked at a university.

And a non-humorous bonus: web managers and content strategists will find lots of useful standards, frameworks, checklists and other tools on the Victorian eGovernment web site.

T-shirt logo for Ada Lovelace Day 2010 - click for details.

…to Female Science Professor, a researcher at a large US university who blogs about working in physical sciences, an academic field dominated by men.

…to Rachel Webster, Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Melbourne, a leader of the Square Kilometre Array telescope project. Received a Nature award for scientific mentoring in 2006 and helped introduce the Women In Physics program at Melbourne, increasing the number of female students in that field. Added to the Victorian Honour Roll of Women in March 2010.

…to Elizabeth Blackburn, the Australian Nobel Laureate (2009) who co-discovered telomerase, an enzyme that replenishes the the telomere, a structure at the end of chromosomes that seems to be involved in ageing.

…and to the microbiologists, metalworkers, engineers, physicians, chemists and the many other working women listed in the Australian Women’s Register.

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This post was written for Ada Lovelace Day, 24 March 2010, an international celebration of women in science and technology. This event was founded by Suw Charman-Anderson – yay, Suw!

Given an essay topic, for example, you start with optimism, confident that some useful information will emerge from your initial search. As you acquire facts about the topic you start to feel swamped, faced with too much information and uncertain about how to make sense of it all. Then you start to analyse, joining pieces of information together and forming your own ideas about the relevance and value of the data, perhaps drawing some conclusions. At this stage, your confidence returns and you feel relief at having found a viable way to tackle the topic.

Kuhlthau illustrates the parallel emotional and cognitive changes that occur during the search process: she calls this the Information Search Process model.

Kuhlthau et al (2008) have reviewed more than 30 studies relating to some aspect of the Information Search Process model, and themselves conducted a new study with 574 school students. They conclude that the Information Search Process is generally sound as a theoretical model and as a practical framework for identifying when to intervene in a student’s learning process.

Other observations from their literature review:

• boys tend to gather and complete, while girls prefer to investigate and formulate
• girls tend to start with optimism and end with doubt; whereas boys tend to be more confident as they complete the research process
• in a digital environment, students tend to assume information will be readily available; the search process tends to end because of deadlines rather than because the original question has been answered satisfactorily, and students’ sense of relief is related more to task completion than to a successful learning outcome
• in educational settings, and particularly when online resources are involved, people tend to skip the early stages of planning their research; however, time spent on refining the topic and developing a research strategy has been shown to produce less frustration and a smoother transition from information-gathering to synthesis and acquisition of knowledge
• “When the model is used as a framework for guiding inquiry, students move away from simply collecting and compiling information to please teachers; rather, they become involved in thinking processes that require extensive exploration of ideas and formulation of thoughts before developing their own deep understanding of their topics and presenting it. By allowing time for reflecting and formulating while they are exploring and collecting information, they avoid missing the critical stages of learning.”
• “If students are aware that increased frustration and anxiety is to be expected mid-way through the construction process they become less discouraged when it happens… Teachers and librarians who guide students through inquiry projects can emphasize this for students and be ready to intervene in helpful ways.”

Except for the last two points, which are quotes from the article, the note above are my interpretation of the article’s findings. What catches your eye in the original paper?

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Reference

Kuhlthau, CC, HeinstrÖm, J and Todd, RJ (2008). “The ‘information search process’ revisited: is the model still useful?” Information Research, 13(4) paper 355. Available at InformationR.net/ir/13-4/paper355.html

• information-intensive scholarship
• data-intensive scholarship
• distributed scholarship
• collaborative scholarship
• multidisciplinary scholarship

Collectively, these are known as e-scholarship practices. They are types of academic behavior. They are not descriptions of the tools or technologies used in that behavior.

If academic librarians and IT staff are to provide appropriate collections and infrastructure, they need to understand e-scholarship and plan accordingly. Borgman suggests this is best achieved with library and IT strategies that “focus less on the technology per se and more on advances in scholarship and learning—that is, strategies supporting the ‘scholarship’ in e-scholarship.”

This was an important element in formulating a set of principles to support the Scholarly Information Strategy recently adopted by the University of Melbourne. We knew that, because of the rate of change happening in technology and society, the strategy itself would need to be updated every few years. In designing the principles, we wanted to provide a decision-making framework that would last unchanged for a decade.

References:

Christine L Borgman (2008) “Supporting the ‘Scholarship’ in E-Scholarship” in Educause Review, volume 43 number 6, November-December 2008, pp32-33.

Christine L Borgman (2007) Scholarship in the Digital Age. MIT Press.

Most Australian universities have an online repository of their research papers, articles and theses. Some have adopted a policy of requiring academics to add their finished documents to these repositories (copyright and publishers’ contracts permitting, of course).

Striking an attitude of well-meaning befuddlement, Lane identifies an opportunity for institutions that are keen to improve the public impact of their research. In general, I agree with him; Australian universities don’t do much to promote their eprints repositories as sources of free learning. Thus far, we’ve tended to leave the repositories in the hands of librarians, computer programmers and occasionally to the advocates of so-called e-research.

By recognising eprints as valuable information assets, and treating them as we would other business assets, we could substantially improve the levels of public awareness of, and access to, the brilliant research being done across the country.

It ain’t rocket surgery. For starters it would be relatively simple to:

• provide a link from the main university home page
• provide a link (or even a search box!) from the university library’s home page
• feature new Open Access publications in the “news and events” section of the institutional web site
• include repository contents in results from the university search engine
• link repository records to the online staff directory and to the web pages that profile individual staff members
• as Melbourne University has done, link the repository records to the “find an expert” list that’s produced mainly for the benefit of journalists and prospective PhD researchers
• track and publish statistics on the finding and usage of those Open Access documents

What else could you suggest? How could your institution make more use of its eprints?

If you work in a large company, could you find a similar use for the articles, white papers and other documents your people produce?

How could you link people and systems to streamline the procedures for collecting and using this kind of information?

Submissions to the Inquiry are now available online.

I’m reasonably pleased with the Melbourne University document (PDF 1.2 Mb). M’colleague Sally and I were able to gather some useful input from well-informed people on very short notice — observe, if you will, the lengthy list of acknowledgements at the back of the document.

More than one of the contributors raised a wry grin when I told them we couldn’t publish the University’s submission on the University’s web site — we were obliged by the Inquiry’s terms of reference to wait until the official version was published on the Parliament web site. (This was an inquiry about access to *public* information, after all!)

The Commission delivered three key documents to the University community:

1. Final Report of the Steering Committee, describing the consultation process, summarising what we learned, and analysing the major areas of contention
2. Melbourne’s Scholarly Information Future: a ten-year strategy (“Zis iss ze big vun,” as Otto von Chriek might say)
3. Implementation plan, including a budget proposal and a governance proposal

The Final Report was noted by the Academic Board and University Council. This now becomes part of the University’s official records, providing information about why particular decisions have been made.

The Scholarly Information Future strategy was endorsed by both Academic Board and Council. This makes the strategy an official part of the University’s planning and reporting framework. The strategy describes what we want to do, and by when.

The implementation plan was presented at the annual Planning and Budget Conference where money is allocated for the forthcoming calendar year. (So yes, there is a six-month lag between approval of budget and the appearance of actual money on the (virtual) table. Previous experience has shown that much can happen in those six months — universities are very political organisations.) The implementation plan describes how we will make the strategy’s aspirations into realities; the governance model specifies who will be responsible for achieving the desired outcomes.

Decisions are made outside the committee room

Getting a new strategy, governance model and funding proposal approved is not simply a matter of writing the documents and sending them to the relevant committee secretaries. The real decisions of committees and boards are made outside the boardroom.

With the Information Futures Commission, we had the perfect project sponsor — a CEO who is adept at engagement with both ideas and people, who has a reputation for getting things done and who carries great personal credibility within the organisation.

We also had a project leader who combines expertise in her professional fields with a strong emphasis on finding the best possible outcome for everybody involved in a given situation.

Within the project team, we rehearsed many different ways of telling our story. These rehearsals influenced how we wrote the final documents, how we talked at meetings and forums, the selection of examples and anecdotes for presentations. We drew pictures on our whiteboard, we stuck flurries of Post-Its to the walls, and we talked across the partitions at least every half-hour (or whenever inspiration happened to strike). This verbal and visual creativity also provided a fair bit of laughter for the project team, and free entertainment for members of other project teams who worked in nearby cubicle pods.

Eventually some concepts and language became canonical — we reached a rough consensus about how we wanted to express our ideas to others — and this informed our discussions with the Steering Committee.

Throughout the life of the Commission, our sponsor and our leader each spent quite a bit of time and energy on meeting with individuals and groups, explaining the strategy and answering questions about what it means for the University. This intensified in the last two months, as the deadline for decisions drew nearer.

We also called on members of the Steering Committee, and other senior stakeholders, to add their voices to the general conversation — to talk with their colleagues and peers about adopting the strategy, to find money for its implementation.