eScience: From My New Article

Large, collaboratively managed datasets have become essential to many scientific and engineering endeavors, and their management has increased the need for “eScience Professionals” who extend librarianship into solving large scale information management problems for researchers and engineers. Researchers in fields ranging from high energy physics, to climate change, to proteomics are struggling with the size and complexity of the datasets they and their colleagues generate and analyze. Yet these large, complex, often collaboratively managed datasets have become absolutely essential to successful discovery. Whether using the term "eScience," which was coined in Britain and is used extensively across the world, or "cyberinfrastructure," the term preferred in the U.S., the use of large scale datasets and the immense information technology infrastructure that supports them has become fully entwined with the contemporary practices of science and engineering.


Forthcoming in the Journal of Education for Library and Information Science: http://jelis.org/about/vision-goals/

Recruiting Women Faculty in STEM

STEM refers to science, technology, engineering, and math. Finding and hiring women faculty members in STEM is important for a variety of reasons, not least because research shows women students benefit from learning in environments where there are women role models. But it is very difficult to hire women faculty in many STEM fields - particularly engineering fields - because of the relatively low number of women PhD graduates in some fields. A quote from NSF:

"By broad S&E field, women earned relatively high percentages of the doctoral degrees in psychology (67 percent), the biological sciences (43 percent), and the social sciences (42 percent); they earned lower percentages of the doctoral degrees in the physical sciences (23 percent), mathematics and computer science (22 percent), and engineering (15 percent)..." 

See: http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/nsf03312/c5/c5s2.htm

eScience and eResearch

The "killer app" over the next ten years in the information professions is going to be eResearch and its close cousin eScience. Scientific research (and other kinds of research as well) suffer from powerful information management, organization, and retrieval problems. Who has the tools and know-how to sort out these problems?

Digital Learning in the California Classroom

Public schools in California just received $36 million in federal grants to increase the amount of innovative educational technology used in K-12 classrooms. Big textbook publishers are getting in on the act by marketing their texts on digital platforms such as the iPad. What will the districts do to assess whether these new technologies actually improve student learning?

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/opinionshop/detail?entry_id=78369

Policymakers want more technology in classrooms

In a recent summit by the Foundation for Excellence in Education, policymakers wanted more information technology integrated into the K-12 classroom.

http://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/2010/12/03/executives-policymakers-want-more-technology-in-classrooms.html

But does more technology help children learn, without relevant training and support for teachers?

Check out the Facebook page for Information Nation

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Information-Nation/156918864340771

SIGCSE Conference 2011

Information Nation I've gotten an invitation to showcase some of our research at SIGCSE 2011, the ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education. Has anybody been to this conference and knows what it is like?

http://www.sigcse.org/sigcse2011/

Cool Article: What Attracts Women to the IT Field? The First Process of Occupational Socialization

This is a research study by some of the authors of the book Information Nation...

http://aisel.aisnet.org/amcis2005/305/

This research study focuses on the attraction process of occupational socialization to the information technology field of female students in order to understand women’s experiences and initial perceptions of the IT occupation. This study gathered empirical evidence from current female students in IT-related majors based on a qualitative approach and the use of focus groups as the elicitation technique. The findings of this study, we believe, can help in improving and customizing recruitment strategies for female students that would emphasize the most attractive features of the IT occupation as perceived by women.