Fall Semester Update.

So I am still* alive and kicking. I had planned on keeping this blog updated with posts about library school, however this semester has been my busiest yet and I have not had the time to post as much as I would have preferred. I'll try and post more frequently next semester. This semester I am taking:

LIS 621: Introduction to Information Services
LIS 645: Public Libraries
LIS 646: Academic Libraries

Throughout the course of my first year in the program, I gradually adjusted to the larger amount of weekly readings, made great strides in my writing abilities, and I feel as though the quality of my work greatly improved and was more on par with a graduate level. And just when I was thinking I had graduate school down pat, this semester comes along and knocks me flat. Seriously. I was not expecting the number of projects and assignments this semester. Overall there is a combined total of thirteen assignments in all three courses, six in one class, five in another, and two in the other. As if things were not stressful enough between staying on top of all of the weekly readings and discussion assignments, many of the additional class assignments are due within a day of one another!

Melodramatic stressing aside, I have managed to do relatively well so far this semester. I was trucking right along, joyfully anticipating the start of winter break in five weeks, when I got a not so great grade on an assignment. FYI, 'not so great grade' is not my perfectionist way of saying an A- or a B+ instead of an A+. I'm not THAT much of an annoying, overachiever to be quibbling over an A- /B+ and an A+ in such a challenging class.

Let me be clear, I am not disputing the grading of the assignment or anything like that. I am more concerned that the grade is an indication that I am woefully unprepared for a post-MLIS career since it is so far off from my normal grades. Not that it takes much to send me into an insecurity spiral of DOOM, but when most of my grades are A+ and then I get a drastically different grade, it is unnerving and makes me wonder if I have what it takes/belong in the library and information science field. 

This is what my pity party typically looks like.

However, after I allowed myself a ten minute pity party (complete with cute animal pictures), I went back to work studying the class readings for the upcoming week. Because as much as I sometimes want to spend my time bemoaning one grade, and I do think that concern is appropriate, I cannot allow it to make me lose focus on everything else. I am one semester and five weeks away from graduating with my master's in library and information science. I still have five additional assignments, four or five (depending on the class) discussion assignments, and a final exam until I can relax during the holiday break. I also have to keep in mind that I have done remarkably well (in my, admittedly biased, opinion) for a student who had a four year break between college and graduate school, and who has absolutely zero** library experience. Regardless, I cannot expect to ace every assignment nor know everything LIS related upon graduation. I just need to have faith that my education will provide me the foundation to be successful in a library/information science career and that on-the-job experiences will fill in the remaining gaps.

That's enough angsty school reflections for me, back to work!

*Knock on wood, because the semester isn't over yet!
**Unless you want to count the summer I spent shelving books as a volunteer at my local public library in middle school.

P.S. - These are my go-to cute GIFs for when life gets you down:

 

GIF Source: Buzzfeed, where else?

Year End Review

Welcome to my year end review AKA The blog in which I sing the praises of my calendar.

So this semester ended a lot better than the last one and as you may have guessed, I attribute this to my calendar. Last semester at the midterm I was sitting pretty with straight A's. In fact, I had straight A's for about 75% of the fall semester, however, when it was all over with I ended up with 2 B's and one A.

Now, bear in mind I graduated college in 2009, so I have been out of the game a bit and it took some time to acclimate to the work load. Side note about the workload: (Not that I'm trying to scare anyone off) Between my three classes each semester I had to read at least a couple hundred pages+ each week. This was in addition to keeping up with (or attempting to anyway) the latest news in the library and information science (LIS) biz. Do you have to keep up with the scholarly journals and news articles? No, but it really is necessary so that you can see how your textbook readings apply to real world library issues, plus it makes discussion boards more interesting if you can cite other non-class readings to back up your opinion or give examples.

Anyway, back to the grade situation. This semester I received straight A's in all three of my classes. So what did I do differently? My first semester, I focused on my weekly assignments but I didn't leave myself enough time to work on the various papers and assignments, or else I would spend too much time on the research aspect of the assignment. This led to a ton of all nighters and general anxiety on my behalf. The lack of assignments in grad school is a double edged sword. Yes, you have less to do, but that means each grade is that much more important. For most of my classes, I received grades for weekly discussion board participation (ranging anywhere from 2 to 4 required posts/week), 2-4 papers (or projects) per class, along with a midterm and final. Well this semester, I was determined to get straight A's and not be super stressed out. Enter: The calendar. As soon as I got my syllabuses, I wrote out my reading assignments and my semester assignments. I worked on completing the weekly reading & participation activities during the first part of the week, and that allowed me to spend the remainder of the week working ahead on assignments due in the near future. The other big thing for me was going to the library to actually write my papers and other projects. For some reason, sitting at my computer at home I am much more likely to procrastinate, but at the library I have an easier time of staying on task.  Plus, being able to look at my monthly calendar and see what is due and when, let me know of multiple assignments with the same due date and helped me plan my time accordingly.

I don't mean to lecture about calendars and staying focused, I just want to share what study habits have worked best for me in the hopes that they help others. So if you have any questions about pursuing a master's in library and information science, either in general or specific to UK's program, feel free to ask me here in the comments or on twitter (@whitnage). =)

Folksonomy

Right, so I had trouble remembering to constantly update my reference manager at CiteULike. This is mainly because knowing what articles we had to read already, I found and downloaded all of them at the beginning of the semester. If I had downloaded them on a weekly basis then I might have used it more, but I'm still skeptical of it. I also saved the articles to my Google Scholar library, maybe if there was some sort of plugin to my browser I would be more likely to use it?

I did tag all of the articles I read in my blog posts here and for the articles that I have in my CiteULike reference manager I followed much of the same process. I tagged the last name of the author(s), knowledge management, and then whatever came to mind for that particular article. So for the articles talking about Web 2.0 and KM, then I would (obviously) tag Web 2.0. This system seems viable, but the problem is it would work better if I had many articles like Professor Burns does in his library. In a large library, tagging everything as KM would allow me to pull up all those and then look at the tags of those KM articles to further clarify which article I am looking for. However, since my library was relatively small then it seemed kind of silly to tag everything as knowledge management when all of my articles are KM related. Of course, if I do get into the habit of using CuL or another reference manager, then as my library grows the more relevant and needed my tagging system will be!

Here is a link to my tags on CiteULike.

Knowledge Management Systems, Social Media, & Organizational Learning

So I have finally come to the last blog post regarding our reading list! I have to admit at the beginning of the semester I was worried that I wouldn’t be disciplined enough to keep up with the class, but I made it! As for this blog, I still have to post about the folksonomy so I will probably do that next week. Also, I still plan on using this blog for posting about school and other library related tasks, so feel free to check back from time to time after we complete this class. 

So for my final readings I read Alavi and Leidner’s article, Knowledge management and knowledge management systems: conceptual foundations and research issues. Then I read Knowledge and knowledge management in the social media age by Hemsley and Mason. Finally, I read the Huber article about Organizational learning. 

The first article by Alavi and Leidner discusses how many of the knowledge management processes (classification, etc.) have been around for most of history and how only in recent years have researchers really begun considering knowledge as an important tool for organizations. Alavi and Leidner go on to discuss how knowledge management systems are developed and implemented by examining important research issues in the field. This was relatively straightforward stuff, but it was pretty interesting overall given what I have already read this semester. 

The next article I read was one that many of you have already covered in your blogs, the Hemsley and Mason article. This article reminded me of the Nahapiet and Ghoshal article that I read last week. Mainly because Hemsley and Mason seemed to agree that social media facilitates knowledge creation, which is not a far cry from what Nahapiet & Ghoshal said, which was that social capital helps create intellectual capital. One of the neat things about this article is that the authors put forth the idea of a “knowledge ecosystem,” which the authors propose is the result of the collaboration and innovation that come from social media tools like blogs, wikis, and microblogging. Another interesting part of this article is how they begin, which is by dissecting how something “goes viral” and the outcome of such an event. As a fan of Twitter and YouTube, I really enjoyed this article and it would probably rank high on my list of favorite KM readings this semester. 

The final article I read was by Huber and it discusses organizational learning through a review of related literature. From this, Huber finds that organizational learning, like Blackler found about knowledge, is too broad to be assessed normally. Therefore, Huber broke organizational learning down into four categories: knowledge acquisition, information interpretation, organizational memory (which Anne discusses on her blog here, and information distribution. Interestingly enough, one of the things that Huber found in this article was that among scholars who research organizational learning, there is very little “cumulative work.” Huber hypothesizes that this is because researchers have difficulty finding one another and that even when they do, few agree with one another. Of course, this article was written in 1991, so it is much easier for researchers to find one another today, thanks to technology!  

 Sources

Alavi, M., & Leidner, D. E. (2001). Review: Knowledge management and knowledge management systems: Conceptual foundations and research issues. MIS quarterly, 107-136.

Hemsley, J., & Mason, R. M. (2013). Knowledge and knowledge management in the social media age. Journal of Organizational Computing and Electronic Commerce, 23(1-2), 138-167.

Huber, G. P. (1991). Organizational learning: The contributing processes and the literatures. Organization science, 2(1), 88-115.

Knowledge, Social Capital, & Information Society

This week continues my quest to assemble the most random assortment of articles together in a blog post. For this posting, I start with Blackler’s article, Knowledge, knowledge work and organizations: an overview and interpretation. Followed closely by Nahapiet and Ghoshal’s article, Social capital, intellectual capital, and the organizational advantage. I finish it off with Rule and Besen’s article, The once and future information society. 

In the first article I read, Blackler brings up the age old question that vexes all information professionals: What is knowledge? He goes through the various definitions that other researchers use, but in the end Blackler concludes that most are too confining to actually define knowledge. In the second portion of the article, Blackler discusses how it is more accurate to refer to knowledge as “knowing,” and that researchers should focus on the systems people learn from, so that it can be replicated for future knowledge creation. It seems to be a recurring theme in many of my classes that professors pose the “What is knowledge?” question for various discussions, and it was definitely one that I struggled with so I really liked what Blackler said about knowledge being difficult to define and I would agree that “knowing” is a more accurate phrasing of the term. 

The next article I read was Nahapiet and Ghoshal’s article in which they propose that social capital helps create intellectual capital. Basically what I believe they’re saying here is that if there is a good, informal environment in an organization where employees can interact, then the social capital they develop will eventually spillover into intellectual capital. For instance, sharing tips about how to do a task more efficiently, etc. Which makes sense then, when later on Nahapiet & Ghoshal argue that organizations are better at developing this setting, precisely because of their size it gives them more opportunities to develop those settings. 

The final article I read this week was by Rule and Besen. Their article was basically a survey of information society models and it was long and meandering and definitely not my favorite article this semester. When I read the abstract and saw the Enlightenment period mentioned, I figured I’d love this article. However, not so. Maybe I just read this article wrong, but from what I gather Rule & Besen basically decided to take it upon themselves to prove that KM is basically BS. Basically they claim that because there is no empirical evidence for many of the KM theories, that they are just fads associated with the current times, whether they be in the Enlightenment period or the present day. While I agree that there are a lack of empirical studies in the KM field, it is also an extremely young field. Moreover, the field is ever evolving based on the formats used and with the explosion of technology in the past twenty years, it has been undeniably difficult for KM scholars to undertake such studies when the communication/information formats that people use are constantly evolving.

Did anyone else get this feel about the Rule & Besen article, or was it just me?

 

Sources

Blackler, F. (1995). Knowledge, knowledge work and organizations: an overview and interpretation. Organization studies, 16(6), 1021-1046.

Nahapiet, J., & Ghoshal, S. (1998). Social capital, intellectual capital, and the organizational advantage. Academy of management review, 23(2), 242-266.

Rule, J. B., & Besen, Y. (2008). The once and future information society. Theory and society, 37(4), 317-342.