The tour & catching up . . .

After a few days of downtime after Tuesday's assignments I finally got myself back into work on Saturday morning. I have been struggling with the growing size of the tour topic (which once focused on a specific project and now threatens to include a recap of learning styles, information seeking models, and organizational models). Following the discussion on Tuesday I went back and read some Kuhlthau and sure enough there was some good connectivity with educational theory. In fact, I kept seeing those connections in some other articles so the expectation that I had that these connections were not being made at all was not on target. . .

At the moment I am trying hard to round off this project and get it into presentable form.. .I can comment that none of these learning/info seeking models address what happens when the info seeking runs against a deadline or imposed structure. ..senses of frustration, boredom, and the corresponding pressure that gets created when there is a gap between the need to 'complete' an investigation while much of the information is still leading in new directions.

Joining research & practice 11/14

Perhaps it is because my focus has been on other work (881 mini review & tour topic) over the last few weeks that I could not get that excited about the two readings today. While I found the visual interface article interesting it failed to spark any new thoughts/perspectives. Likewise for Dervin's comments which - despite being laid out in easy to digest propositions, seemed rambling.

Having spent the last two weeks reading about educational psychology, teaching methodologies, and their answers to information seeking/use/learning questions I am left agreeing with Dervin's assertion that the split in sociology based fields is undermining the efforts and credibility of researchers and work. Why does IS literature not mention any of the psychologists & philosophers that the Education field does (and vice versa)? The perspectives of Piaget, Bruner, Vygotsky, and Dewey seem to lay the foundation that Bates, Dervin, Chatman, Kulthau and Belkin use in formulating their models. Why isn't there any cross-over? The education field has taken these concepts and created practical teaching methods (I have concentrated on constructivism and inquiry based learning) from these models. Has the Information Science field gotten that far in using information seeking models to inform search systems?

Exploring connections between Education and Information Science literature

As research through Inquiry based learning, problem/project based learning, education & cognitive learning theories has progressed I am finding that the topic is getting larger rather than smaller. It is interesting to see how ideas from Piaget, Vygotsky, Bruner, and Bloom are central to the ideas presented in IBL literature. I am curious as to why we do not see these works referenced in informaiton science literature. Many of their theories (Vygotsky & Bruner in particular) show an emphasis on social & interactive development that is central to Chatman & Dervin’s information seeking theories. Favorite quote so far. . ."To perceive is to categorize, to conceptualize is to categorize, to learn is to form categories, to make decisions is to categorize"- Bruner as cited by Anderson (http://facultyweb.cortland.edu/~andersmd/cog/bruner.html). This idea, also stated by Vygotsky in his discussion of the adaptation of the individual to they symbolic systems of society gets back to the work of Lakoff, Johnson, and Patrick Wilson and yet, looking through reference lists, the two areas never seem to interact. The concept that learning is the application (or adaptation) of organizational & symbolic systems on experience (Bruner/Vygotsky) seems to be the exact ideas expressed by Lakoff/Wilson . . .Am I missing some connection here?

Catching up - late semester projects & the tour. . .

I have been a bit lax in posting over the past week but only due to the rapid pace of school & work related items. In fact I have made some good progress. The mini-review I for 881 is in final draft, the tour topic for 715 has solidified & I am focusing on reading/review at the moment. On the work side of things catawiki (http://wiki.zsr.wfu.edu/catawiki) got off the ground, and the strategic planning process is moving forward. If I can just push through DigitalForsyth &the second Mini Review (881), I can focus on a quiet December!

In short. . .Some good advances in a project a WFU regarding the hist390 class and the stumbling (by myself) across an article which mentioned an educational foundation for the work that class has been doing has me going off in a direction on my tour topic. I am glad to have a concrete thing to look at, rather than a more nebulous 'topic' which was quickly threatening to break my will to write literature reviews...

The topic, how digital libraries support inquiry based learning styles, is the outcome of a seemingly simple project that started in the fall - the goal of which was to 1)educate students in a history research on primary resource research adn 2)help build a digital library from an emerging-expert perspective. There have been lots of ideas from the library end on how to look at the project, from a suggestion that we evaluate the quality of the metadata to ideas surrounding looking at how the students feel about the process. I created a simple survey designed to get some qualitative feedback & hope to compare it against the data/logs (for some quantitative data). It may be hard to get to student motivation, but at least perhaps we can find out something about what they thought about the experience.

Through reading, i have been intrigued with PBL & IBL - it has been nice to read in another field (the ideas seem new & not so obvious!) I may still struggle with integrating some of these ideas but have the idea that these learning styles really describe (from a slightly different perspective) the information seeking styles we looked at early in the semester. . .