Scholars from both sides of the Atlantic, including panelist Syracuse Professor Jian Qin,
met Wednesday morning to talk about developing a joint European Union-United State digital library curriculum.
The Bologna Project, which was created in Europe and is dedicated to improving graduate education programs internationally, has started taking steps toward building these collaborative partnerships.
For example, in the past language and the variation of meaning in the same academic discipline even prevented joint courses from being taught in European countries. Now, they have changed the framework to focus more on learning outcomes so that people are clear what the objectives are and what skills will be taught, which translates across national borders.
In the United States, however, collaborative digital library courses often occur around common topics and among American Library Association accredited schools.
Also, digital libraries in the United States focus more on the cyberinfrastructure and information management related issues, while Europe is more interested in cultural heritage issues.
The panelists provided an update on the status of the efforts to develop joint EU-US Digital Library Curriculum, and invited others to become active with a group of the 10 American and European universities and institutions to help move this process forward.
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
Online Teaching Experiences
Many college students—whether campus based or distance learning—today have taken at least one course online and most are very familiar with online learning environment. A group of faculty and Ph.D. students, led by panelist Syracuse Professor Kevin Crowston, gathered Wednesday morning to discuss how online courses have changed the teaching experience for faculty and learning for students.
The group raised a variety of issues including the impact to content, social interactions, assessment, privacy, plagiarism, and learning styles.
Participants varied in their experiences when it came to campus-based students’ enjoyment and involvement in taking courses online. One school reported that its graduation rates were highest among students who both took campus-based and distance-learning courses.
Online learning works well in skill development courses and in stretching the amount of time for interactions among students and teacher beyond the traditional scheduled “class hours.”
Sharing work in a public online forum also tended to raise the bar for students. “If you know your peers will be checking your work, maybe you’ll try it a little harder,” Crowston said.
Participants that they had to find new ways of assessment as all quizzes and tests had to be “open book,” and most had done away with timed exams, opting instead for final projects that showcased the application of the knowledge acquired over the course of the semester.
Questions were raised about the definition of learning and knowledge. Is it mean being able to apply what you learn or be able to recall the information from memory?
“In the courses I teach, knowledge means being able to use tools,” Crowston said.
The group also discussed tools to detect plagiarism, which is easy to do with so much information available online.
"It's easier today for us to catch plagiarism than it is for students to do it," one participant concluded.
The group raised a variety of issues including the impact to content, social interactions, assessment, privacy, plagiarism, and learning styles.
Participants varied in their experiences when it came to campus-based students’ enjoyment and involvement in taking courses online. One school reported that its graduation rates were highest among students who both took campus-based and distance-learning courses.
Online learning works well in skill development courses and in stretching the amount of time for interactions among students and teacher beyond the traditional scheduled “class hours.”
Sharing work in a public online forum also tended to raise the bar for students. “If you know your peers will be checking your work, maybe you’ll try it a little harder,” Crowston said.
Participants that they had to find new ways of assessment as all quizzes and tests had to be “open book,” and most had done away with timed exams, opting instead for final projects that showcased the application of the knowledge acquired over the course of the semester.
Questions were raised about the definition of learning and knowledge. Is it mean being able to apply what you learn or be able to recall the information from memory?
“In the courses I teach, knowledge means being able to use tools,” Crowston said.
The group also discussed tools to detect plagiarism, which is easy to do with so much information available online.
"It's easier today for us to catch plagiarism than it is for students to do it," one participant concluded.
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
Ph.D posters
ICTs for Syngery: A Case Study of Scientific Knowledge and Local Farmers' Innovative Activities in GhanaBenjamin Addom
Winner of the Best Poster Award
Automated Detection of Subject Area for Question Triage in Digital Reference
Keisuke Inoue
Computational Community Interest and Comments Centric Analysis RankingXiaozhung Liu, Vadim Brzeski
Image-Enabled Discourse: A Preliminary Descriptive Investigation
Jaime Snyder
Group Maintenance Behaviors in the Decision-Making Styles of Self-Organizing Distributed TeamsMichael Scialdone (with Qing Li, Kevin Crowston, Robert Heckman)
Exploring Impacts on Older Adults' E-Services Usage
Johanna Birkland
The Value of Public Sector Information As a Strategic Resource to Civil Society Organizations' in South Africa: Evidence from the Fight to Eradicate Poverty
Raed M. Sharif
The Classification of Religion Topics in Wikipedia: Examining an Evolution
David M. Pimental
Interdisciplinary Diversity in the iSchool CommunityAndrea Wiggins
The Impact of National Culture on Knowledge Sharing Activities in Global Virtual Collaboration: The Chinese Case Kangning Wei
Exploring the Use of Ontological Relations in Information Retrieval
Miao Chen
Two Cans on a String: Technical, Social, and Legal Barriers to Effective Information Sharing Among Federal, Tribal, State, and Local Law EnforcementJoseph Treglia
- How Does Web Advertising Affect Users' Information Seeking, Website Evaluation, and Source Evaluation?
Youngseek Kim
- The Theory of Trustworthiness Attribution for Countering Insider Threats for Virtual Organizations
Shuyuan Mary Ho
Insider threats and trustworthiness
Insider threats—security risks posed by people from within an organization—accounted for 37 percent of the $57 million in losses to fraud last year. Employees maliciously stealing information or carelessly handling sensitive information is a serious issue in a variety of industries, government agencies, and other organizations.
Syracuse Ph.D. Shuayan Mary Ho seeks to understand this phenomenon and describe trustworthiness in a way that can be quantified.
Syracuse Ph.D. Shuayan Mary Ho seeks to understand this phenomenon and describe trustworthiness in a way that can be quantified.
Unfortunately, no company is willing to open itself up to share this type of data so Ho created her own environment to study this behavior.
Using student volunteers, she created a game within the Syracuse iSchool learning management system that tested the students’ perceptions of the trustworthiness of their team leader. The leader of each team had an extra 200 imaginary cash (MerryBux), and the game involved whether the leader shared the money or pocketed it.
A mole was planted to influence the teams’ behaviors, including wearing away people’s suspicions of their leader to see if they follow a predictive model. They did.
Leaders who showed an inconsistency between words and behavior received low scores from team members on trustworthiness. Over the course of the five-day scenario, some team members started planning to stage uprisings and oust the team leader.
Ho hopes to expand on this study and apply to other environments.
Using student volunteers, she created a game within the Syracuse iSchool learning management system that tested the students’ perceptions of the trustworthiness of their team leader. The leader of each team had an extra 200 imaginary cash (MerryBux), and the game involved whether the leader shared the money or pocketed it.
A mole was planted to influence the teams’ behaviors, including wearing away people’s suspicions of their leader to see if they follow a predictive model. They did.
Leaders who showed an inconsistency between words and behavior received low scores from team members on trustworthiness. Over the course of the five-day scenario, some team members started planning to stage uprisings and oust the team leader.
Ho hopes to expand on this study and apply to other environments.
iSchools responding to man made catastrophes
What are iSchools doing to help prepare for and respond to man made disasters such as a terrorist attack? That was the topic of a panel Tuesday morning that featured Syracuse iSchool Dean Elizabeth D. Liddy.
The panelists outlined the areas in which they felt iSchools could contribute to dealing with these major catastrophes: modeling scenarios, prediction, mitigation, response, real-time synthesis, and human performance and training.
Pittsburgh iSchool Dean Ron Larsen described a project he worked on for the Department of Defense that sought to detect underground nuclear facilities. His role was to collect what he called second-order information—not using ground penetration radar, but rather tracking heavy equipment shipments or materials delivery. He stressed the iSchool’s holistic approach to problems—combining technical information with social and psychological information.
Liddy focused much of her comments on the role iSchools play in predicting and preventing these catastrophes by analyzing communications, such as e-mails, text messaging, and blogs through natural language processing.
“In these man-made extreme event scenarios, the police, defense, and intelligence communities frequently do have some means to anticipate such events, and thereby make them more predictable and therefore potentially more preventable,” Liddy said.
She talked about how researchers can develop and apply predictable models to this data to weed through the massive amounts of information to find the “needle in the haystack,” or expressions about a planned attack.
Natural language processing has gotten good at mining words with their denotative meanings, and now researchers are focusing on developing automated process to examine the connotative meaning of words and emotive words, Liddy said.
To do this, Liddy said researchers have to find public data from which they can study and build these models and technologies. The data from such cases as Enron are being used, as are data from open source developers who are building archives of e-mail exchanges, papers, and other communications relating to the development of that field.
Other panelists talked about the role psychology and international context can play in these extreme events. Panelists agreed that iSchools are the optimal source of research and solutions in these extreme events because iSchools excel in human-driven technology, information that needs to be processed by both humans and machines, and evaluating the usefulness/effectiveness of technology for humans.
The panelists outlined the areas in which they felt iSchools could contribute to dealing with these major catastrophes: modeling scenarios, prediction, mitigation, response, real-time synthesis, and human performance and training.
Pittsburgh iSchool Dean Ron Larsen described a project he worked on for the Department of Defense that sought to detect underground nuclear facilities. His role was to collect what he called second-order information—not using ground penetration radar, but rather tracking heavy equipment shipments or materials delivery. He stressed the iSchool’s holistic approach to problems—combining technical information with social and psychological information.
Liddy focused much of her comments on the role iSchools play in predicting and preventing these catastrophes by analyzing communications, such as e-mails, text messaging, and blogs through natural language processing.
“In these man-made extreme event scenarios, the police, defense, and intelligence communities frequently do have some means to anticipate such events, and thereby make them more predictable and therefore potentially more preventable,” Liddy said.
She talked about how researchers can develop and apply predictable models to this data to weed through the massive amounts of information to find the “needle in the haystack,” or expressions about a planned attack.
Natural language processing has gotten good at mining words with their denotative meanings, and now researchers are focusing on developing automated process to examine the connotative meaning of words and emotive words, Liddy said.
To do this, Liddy said researchers have to find public data from which they can study and build these models and technologies. The data from such cases as Enron are being used, as are data from open source developers who are building archives of e-mail exchanges, papers, and other communications relating to the development of that field.
Other panelists talked about the role psychology and international context can play in these extreme events. Panelists agreed that iSchools are the optimal source of research and solutions in these extreme events because iSchools excel in human-driven technology, information that needs to be processed by both humans and machines, and evaluating the usefulness/effectiveness of technology for humans.
Gaming in iSchools
The diversity of participants in the gaming discussion Tuesday morning at the iConference paralleled the broad range of research interests related to gaming.
Gaming enthusiasts and researchers representing geographic areas from Croatia to China to State College, Pennsylvania, gathered together to discover what others are doing in advancing gaming as increasingly significant field within iSchools.
Syracuse Professor Scott Nicholson and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs Ian MacInnes led the discussion and described their recent research interests as they relate to gaming.
Nicholson heads a $1 million project that is examining the use of gaming in libraries to attract new patrons, mainly teen-agers and adults without children, and create a community hub. He and his research team are creating tools to assess the use of games in libraries and will make those assessment tools available to librarians across the globe through an online form.
Their responses will feed the data pool, which then can be analyzed and returned to game developers and others about the demographics of gamers in libraries.
Nicholson reported how a local Syracuse library instituted 14 new gaming events over the course of a year and how that activity not only attracted teens to the library, but also how those young people formed relationships with senior citizens who also took up gaming at the library.
MacInnes said his interest in gaming stemmed from the monetization of virtual worlds and the business model that was developing for companies to participate in these new spaces. One such idea was the development of paid advertising within virtual worlds—avatars drinking Coca-Cola or wearing Ralph Lauren, for example.
Others, such Ph.D. student Joey Lee from Penn State were interested in designing games for education use. One of his projects involved creating a game that would educate people about Asian American identities and fighting stereotypes.
Another researcher created serious games about health issues, such as getting college bound students to get their shots by showing a dorm filled with creepy crawlers ready to infect them. The idea, she said, was to ridicule the gamers who had not gotten their shots and creating peer pressure to do so.
The group also brainstormed ways in which the iSchools could bring something unique to gaming that other disciplines might not be able to do. Ideas ranged from educational uses to collaborative design to influencing game development and other areas that bring together multiple disciplines and perspectives.
Gaming enthusiasts and researchers representing geographic areas from Croatia to China to State College, Pennsylvania, gathered together to discover what others are doing in advancing gaming as increasingly significant field within iSchools.
Syracuse Professor Scott Nicholson and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs Ian MacInnes led the discussion and described their recent research interests as they relate to gaming.
Nicholson heads a $1 million project that is examining the use of gaming in libraries to attract new patrons, mainly teen-agers and adults without children, and create a community hub. He and his research team are creating tools to assess the use of games in libraries and will make those assessment tools available to librarians across the globe through an online form.
Their responses will feed the data pool, which then can be analyzed and returned to game developers and others about the demographics of gamers in libraries.
Nicholson reported how a local Syracuse library instituted 14 new gaming events over the course of a year and how that activity not only attracted teens to the library, but also how those young people formed relationships with senior citizens who also took up gaming at the library.
MacInnes said his interest in gaming stemmed from the monetization of virtual worlds and the business model that was developing for companies to participate in these new spaces. One such idea was the development of paid advertising within virtual worlds—avatars drinking Coca-Cola or wearing Ralph Lauren, for example.
Others, such Ph.D. student Joey Lee from Penn State were interested in designing games for education use. One of his projects involved creating a game that would educate people about Asian American identities and fighting stereotypes.
Another researcher created serious games about health issues, such as getting college bound students to get their shots by showing a dorm filled with creepy crawlers ready to infect them. The idea, she said, was to ridicule the gamers who had not gotten their shots and creating peer pressure to do so.
The group also brainstormed ways in which the iSchools could bring something unique to gaming that other disciplines might not be able to do. Ideas ranged from educational uses to collaborative design to influencing game development and other areas that bring together multiple disciplines and perspectives.
Are blogs and social networking sites fair game for researchers?
For researchers, virtual environments and social networking sites are full of rich data that can be used in a number of ways—to better understand how communities/groups develop, how technology is being adopted to reach a variety of goals, and a host of other interdisciplinary research topics.
But what are the issues of ethics, privacy, and ownership that arise in harvesting this data?
People post information about themselves to sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, SecondLife, Twitter, and blogs—public sites with limited restrictions on access. So if people are willing to publish this information openly, can’t researchers use it?
It depends, according to participants involved in a session on online survey-based data collection led by Syracuse Associate Dean Jeff Stanton and Ph.D. student Aggie Kwiatkowska.
Several regulations, including the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) and institutional review board (IRB) guidelines, limits the use of data—particularly qualitative information—that can be traced back to a specific individual.
Some researchers said they try to develop their own online communities with volunteers who are willing to participate, but the work and resources that go into building the community takes away from the research they hope to conduct in this space. It’s also a controlled environment as opposed to the more natural environments such as Facebook.
Another researcher raised the issue of why blogs can’t be quoted like any other published article or book, and another wondered if student work that is posted on a public space such as blog or web site can be used in research or if that violates IRB or FERPA rules.
Panelists said these questions are currently being answered on a case-by-case basis, and that there is no black and white when it comes to these emerging social networking spaces.
But what are the issues of ethics, privacy, and ownership that arise in harvesting this data?
People post information about themselves to sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, SecondLife, Twitter, and blogs—public sites with limited restrictions on access. So if people are willing to publish this information openly, can’t researchers use it?
It depends, according to participants involved in a session on online survey-based data collection led by Syracuse Associate Dean Jeff Stanton and Ph.D. student Aggie Kwiatkowska.
Several regulations, including the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) and institutional review board (IRB) guidelines, limits the use of data—particularly qualitative information—that can be traced back to a specific individual.
Some researchers said they try to develop their own online communities with volunteers who are willing to participate, but the work and resources that go into building the community takes away from the research they hope to conduct in this space. It’s also a controlled environment as opposed to the more natural environments such as Facebook.
Another researcher raised the issue of why blogs can’t be quoted like any other published article or book, and another wondered if student work that is posted on a public space such as blog or web site can be used in research or if that violates IRB or FERPA rules.
Panelists said these questions are currently being answered on a case-by-case basis, and that there is no black and white when it comes to these emerging social networking spaces.
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