Surveying Universities: A Modest Proposal

Apologies to anyone looking for biting Swiftian satire, but this genuinely is a modest proposal - though on the subject of surveying universities rather than on the merits of babies as a food source.

The background
I am drawing near to the end of a project to look at the information behaviour of students at various stages of education; beginning with Key Stage 3 (11 to 14 year olds), and going all the way up to postgraduates.

A key part of the project involved surveying universities in the Midlands and the North of England.  Between us, my colleague (Mary Crowder) and I approached 12 universities with a view to asking them to circulate our survey amongst students and staff.  Responses to our request varied.  All too often however, we got one of two answers.
1) We were told that there was nobody in particular responsible for posting surveys and that we could try Computing Services, Students' Union, Marketing, Student Administration, or various local equivalents; or
2) They already had numerous questionnaires generated by their own staff and students and were concerned that people would get survey fatigue. 

In the end, we got responses from students and staff at five universities.  As an inducement, we offered to enter respondents into a prize draw, with the opportunity to win a £50 Amazon voucher.  At each university, two vouchers were offered to students, and one to lecturers.  The project therefore paid £750 in prizes.  Since the response rate at one university was very low, some students and staff had an extremely high chance of winning.

The modest proposal
I presume that we are not alone in wishing to learn about the views of university staff and students across the UK.  We are also not the only project to offer the inducement of a prize draw.  I suggest therefore, that UK research councils with an interest in educational research should consider setting up a central site on which RCUK-funded researchers can post surveys.  Completion of a survey would qualify a student to enter a draw with prizes provided from Research Council funds.  To enter the site, it would be necessary to log on with an .ac.uk email address.

So far (according to the blogger statistics) this blog has been viewed 3000 times by readers in 16 countries.  If anyone has knowledge of such a scheme within their country, or can suggest ways to elicit opinions of students and staff across Higher Education, I would very much appreciate receiving their comments on this subject.

"Not unfriendly, just unsociable" - Making the iSchool more sociable

Last month's discussion took place, appropriately, during Christmas party season.  At the request of Professor Phil Levy (the iSchool's Head of Department), we discussed the question: "What types of activities should we be organising to help make the iSchool a more sociable place for research students/staff, and to reap the benefits of that for our research?"


Doyle (2000) notes that "Survey after survey shows that employees value having a friendly working atmosphere...The Harvard Business Review reports that Sears found that a 5 per cent rise in staff satisfaction leads to a 0.5 rise [sic] in productivity."

As evidence of the fact that people value work for reasons other than income, Doyle cites an article from the Guardian (2000), which reported the case of Mr Fullerton-Ballantyne, who won £1.89 million in the National Lottery.  He initially quit work, but then returned to buy the company that had employed him so that he could carry on working there.  Presumably he missed his colleagues.  Certainly that was the case for Nicky Cusack, who in 2011, returned to her job in Asda after winning £2.49 million. 


Not only are sociable workplaces more desirable and possibly more productive, there is also the fact that, despite all the advances in information technology, much exchange of information still takes place face to face; and if people work in a setting where face never meets face, it has negative effects on the exchange of information and ideas.

When Professor Levy's question was put to the assembled researchers however, their initial response was to ask "Do we want to be more sociable?"  Some voiced the concern that, in an effort to encourage sociability, events might be organized which would lead to embarrassing gatherings, where people stood talking to their usual associates, while looking around covertly, trying not to catch the eyes of people to whom they thought they should be speaking.

The iSchool, it was felt, is a reasonably friendly place - just not a sociable one.  When forced into social situations, we don't always know what to say to each other.  What was needed, people thought, were activities appropriate to the aims and objectives of the iSchool, but which provided scope for social interaction.

An example of such an activity was given by some of the newer PhD students.  They had enjoyed their induction, and had created an email list enabling them to maintain contact with others from their cohort.  Some of the more established PhD students expressed regret that they had not been given similar treatment when they first arrived at the iSchool.

A second example discussed had been provided earlier in the day by Alex Schauer.  At lunch time he gave a seminar about the findings of his PhD project to date.  At the end he announced that, to mark the festive season, he had brought a stollen.  People gathered round the cake.  Some stayed and chatted; others grabbed a piece and departed.  Ana Guedes Rosa recalled that, according to a marketing course she had once attended, people linger longer if there are drinks available.  "Ah!" exclaimed the gathering, "Give us wine and we'll socialize!".  Ana countered by noting that hot drinks are better because hotter drinks lead to longer lingering.

Applying analysis and synthesis to the discussion therefore, it becomes clear that an answer to the question:
"What types of activities should we be organising to help make the iSchool a more sociable place?" is
"Ones in which mulled wine is served".

Doyle, J., 2000.  New community or new slavery.  The Industrial Society
Rucci, A. J., Kirn, S.P., Quinn, R.T.  (1998), “The Employee-Customer-Profit Chain atSears,” Harvard Business Review, 76 (January-February), 82-97
Spence, R., 2000.  "How would you handle being rich?"  Guardian, 03/06/2000

Journalism as an Information Study (by Scott Eldridge II, Journalism Studies)

As a brief means of introduction, my name is Scott, I'm a PhD student in the Journalism Studies department, and if you're wondering what I'm doing here, a student of ink-stained wretches and hacks set adrift in the unfamiliar Information School blog, I won't begrudge you that curiosity. If the curiosity extends to 'What does a journalism studies PhD do?', you are not alone. This blog posts comes as a follow-up to some initial conversations between our respective departments, much of which revolve around 'what is it exactly you do in journalism studies?'.

And it's a fair point.

Most people seem to know what 'journalism' is, or at least they seem to have a picture in their head of something vaguely 'journalistic'. And, as with all great things, journalism was a far easier thing to define in the ever-nostalgic simpler times when we knew that something in a newspaper or a radio broadcast or early years of the BBC was 'journalism'. On the heels of those simpler times are the turgid waters in which researchers in the Journalism Studies Department now swim, times where it can't be said that journalism is so readily defined. Increasingly as researchers we stare for long hours out over the landscape trying to clear that confusion ourselves.

But in that shift and change between knowing journalism and perhaps what can be called wondering journalism, we in Journalism Studies find ourselves confronting an expanded range of just what it is we research and study and teach. It is a time when muddied waters also hold a great deal of opportunity for clarity. 

For journalism researchers and academics, this has meant attempting to understand a whole world of information and data that has enriched the research that journalism academics do, and can do, on the one hand, and enriched the ways journalism is performed, on the other. Huge challenges have also emerged contrasting information access with information understanding, and addressing sourcing data in journalism, as well as understanding how information changes news dissemination. It goes beyond just creating a 'how-to' for journalists in the Internet era towards sating an academic curiosity to understand the potentials and pitfalls of more-readily available information and data and forums, and harnessing that for the development of better journalism (however we eventually define it).

In the end, it is all about information. And in the end, as titled above, journalism is largely an information study. And, to that point, journalism studies is a study of information flows and sources and patterns of use.

Overwhelmingly the changes of the past 20 years have meant tangling with what the technologies of the 'information age' are doing to journalism not only in terms of how news is gathered, but how its shared, and who gets to say what and with what authority. Speaking from my own research, and its focus on attempting to understand WikiLeaks and its effects on journalism, there is research going on in journalism studies that would not exist without the changes to how we understand and access information over the past decades. Beyond purely technological changes (though not discounting them) journalism studies is constantly contending with ways to approach and adopt better data management and analysis, understandings of information flows that extend far beyond the typical purview of journalists and the texts they're raised and trained on. The same could be said for my colleagues who are researching Internet censorship, news media in online environments including social networks as news outlets and those who are trying to suss out how mobile technologies fit into analyses of news media online. 

In many ways, the rise of the information society (with due acknowledgment to Castells) has brought about more obvious overlaps between what we once thought of as the provenance of information studies, and what we once considered the realm of journalism studies. I see it as a burden of riches, the torrent of information we have in front of us now washing over levees that used to acutely define journalism studies. Overflows that touch on both our schools of interest.

There is a lot to be learned between those of us who spend their days in Journalism Studies, and our neighbors across the road in the iSchool. These areas extend beyond what it is we each do in our particular offices, but ultimately it involves understanding that we're both looking at information, and hope to better understand how best to use it, evidence it, share it, retrieve it, and draw it from its darker confines into the light of day.

To draw this missive to a close, over the course of the coming weeks and months and hopefully years, it will be exciting to see where and how this shared study of information  can lead to a better understanding of the ways we communicate information to the world. 

After all journalism is in many ways an information study.

Samples of convenience and feedback forms

It was nice to learn in last month's discussion of Amazon's Mechanical Turk.  It seems that it's old knowledge amongst the programmers in the department, but its existence was news to me.  Research ethics is always a good topic around which to generate heated discussion, and Mark succeeded - though his ethical dilemma (as expressed in his blog entry) was not one that others in the group shared.  The discussion did however, take a (to me) more interesting angle when it switched to the influence of samples of convenience on research outcomes.

One of Mark's concerns was that participants were being paid significantly below the minimum wage.  Given that responses were being elicited from around the world however, the question was asked: "Minimum wage for where?"  In some parts of the world, the return for effort was (by the local standards) excellent.  These parts of the world were, indeed, highly represented in the results.

Given the extent to which IR research findings have been based on western (usually English speaking) volunteers, studies such as Mark's may help to redress the balance and produce more robust findings.

I found myself guilty of drawing inappropriate conclusions based on an unrepresentative sample earlier this week, when I looked through some student evaluation forms.  I collected the forms in after a seminar.  It was the second of two that I had taken, and I was pleased to read on a number of the forms that the respondents enjoyed the seminars and felt that there should be more of them.  What I failed to consider was that most of the students failed to turn up.  The absent students had not completed forms, so the feedback reflected only the view of the minority.

Knowledge Management in UK eGovernment Practices (by Ana Guedes Rosa)

My name is Ana and I’m from Portugal. Last year, I completed an MSc in Information Management in Sheffield University’s iSchool, and during my dissertation project I discovered some gaps regarding the knowledge and nature of Knowledge Management (KM) practices in eGovernment projects.

I recently began PhD research aimed at identifying and conceptualizing knowledge sharing efforts across organisational boundaries (mostly departmental), in the management processes necessary to develop innovative eGovernment applications at a local level.  By the end, I hope to be able to develop case studies, which identify good practice.  These can hopefully provide an interpretation of knowledge phenomena that can help to support future eGovernment projects in UK councils. (I don’t have a matured research question yet! But good things come with time, right?)

The study will take place in British municipalities that are in the initial stages of developing benchmark eGovernment applications (this being the common ground for my case study approach). The choice of UK municipalities was simple! The UK is a pioneering country in local level eGovernment, due to the 2005 pledge (ODPM, 2003). However, in a recent eGovernment benchmark exercise from the European Commission (Capgemini, 2009), the country was placed only 7th in terms of the availability and sophistication of its electronic services, and user take-up did not reach the 50% mark.

The literature argues that results are due to organisational challenges, which in turn derive from the socially constructed nature of Public Administration (PA) knowledge and its encompassing conflicts. These include, amongst others, conflicts between services’ priorities and cultures (these set PA apart from the Volunteer Sector, as was discussed in the session). There are some case studies already published that consider KM in the PA, but they reflect mostly on governance and technical issues.

Having recognised this opportunity for relevant empirical research I am now seeking to collaborate with a varied sample of municipalities, and to engage on qualitative data collection by using: structured observation, official documentary material and, at a later stage, interviews. Because of the challenges involved in working with municipalities, which need to account for issues such as time, hierarchical decision-making, public interest and privacy protection, I will keep in mind some tips suggested during the meeting. Then, after the data analysis stage, I will come again and talk a bit more.

Research Ethics (by Mark Hall)

Research ethics is a topic that is like a midnight curry. You are very likely to see it again. The University and the individual departments have forms and procedures in place to ensure that at least there is a paper trail of what (un)ethical research was planned and then performed. What falls by the way-side are the gray areas where the research might be formally ethical, but where in the practical execution the ethicality becomes unclear. An example: financially rewarding participants for taking part in an experiment is a long-established technique and has actually been shown to produce more representative results. With the advent of work-sourcing sites such as Amazon Mechanical Turk, you can now place money in a pot with them, source large numbers of participants and the financial reward processing is handled by Amazon. So far, so good, the ethics committee will be happy. However, the average amount of money paid to participants is usually significantly below the minimum wage. Is that still ethical?

Electrocution and PhD supervision

In last month's discussion, Nigel Ford asked what the role of the PhD supervisor is.  The answer (as is usually the case) was "It depends".   It depends on the student, the subject and the project.  Most of the group's responses are summed up in the abstract that Sheila posted on this blog last month (Thanks Sheila!).  Arguably, one of the roles of a PhD student is, under the guidance of her/his supervisor, to become an expert.  That, however, raises the question of what an expert is.

As might be expected given its title, Carolyn Marvin's 1988 book "When Old Technologies Were New" considers the impact of, and response to, some of the technologies introduced during the Victorian era.  She draws on several articles from newspapers and magazines of the period.  One of her excerpts (from London Illustrated News, 10/07/1897) has a bearing on our July discussion on the invention of the fact.  The author of the article, which is about the "unskeptical presentation of the 'facts' of science", notes that "No work of information has given me the pleasure I derive from these weekly additions to knowledge.  Sometimes they surprise as well as delight me, for example: 'Kissing originated in England.'"

The book's first chapter is called "Inventing the Expert". Just as is the case with facts, it is surprising at first to think that experts were invented.  Arguably, expertise is something that evolved as cultures developed from hunter-gatherer societies to agricultural ones.  However, someone with expertise is not necessarily an expert.

Until the 19th century, well-educated people could understand the principals of most available technologies, and could assess for themselves the competence of a specialist in that technology.  Using a passage from Electrical Review of 22/10/1887, Marvin illustrates how things began to go horribly wrong:  "Then there is the youth who has read as much as he could understand of an elementary textbook...This youth is the genius of the family...He must be an electrical engineer.  Taking advantage of the sudden demand for men with electrical knowledge, he manages to get a situation, being ready with his set phrases, in which volts, ohms and amperes are plentifully besprinkled.  We next find him in charge of a dynamo, and shortly after read the account of his death caused by shunting some of the current into his own body."

Professionals bodies had, for centuries, played a part in assessing the expertise of novices; but often this was to ensure that the profession retained its secrets.  As technologies became harder to grasp, secrecy for its own sake became less necessary.  Instead, the assessment (in the form of a professional qualification) helped to assure employers who did not understand the technology, that the possessor of the qualification was considered competent by people who did understand the technology.  In other words, experts became people whose pronouncements replaced the need for understanding.