Many thanks to our colleagues at Hunter College Libraries for inviting us to present today at the Hunter College Library Faculty Teaching & Research Forum. It was great to have the opportunity to share some of our the data from our student and faculty interviews at Hunter and to discuss our results. Thanks to all who came to the program!
I’ve just uploaded our slides under Results & Findings.
The new semester finds us busier than ever with the Undergraduate Scholarly Habits Ethnography Project. We’ve finished collecting data at an additional 4 colleges: Borough of Manhattan Community College, Bronx Community College, City College, and Hunter College. This brings us to a total of 30 student and 10 faculty interviews at each of 6 colleges — that’s a lot of data! Our incredible research assistants have done the lion’s share of transcribing these interviews over the summer, and we are immersed in coding and beginning to analyze our data, both textual as well as photos, maps, and drawings by students.
We’ve plans to emerge from our analytical cocoon a few times this fall and have two conference presentations scheduled. If you’re heading to either of these feel free to swing by and say hello.
Mobility Shifts: An International Future of Learning Summit, The New School, NYC
We’re presenting on Saturday, October 15 @ 1:30pm in a session entitled Progressive Digital Pedagogy: Remix, Collaboration, Crowdsourcing. Our short talk will focus on the integration of mobile technologies into the academic lives of CUNY students.
American Anthropological Association Annual Meetings, Montreal
We’re part of a session called Library Ethnography: Negotiating Information’s Legacy and Revolutions, which begins at 8:00am on Friday, November 18. Our paper discusses how CUNY students navigate and create their own significant spaces, and the effects on their engagement with their college experience.
We’ve written a short humorous essay about our travels (and travails) across CUNY doing research for this project over the past two years. It’s called Hitchhiker’s Guide to the CUNYverse, and it’s just been published in the Spring 2011 issue of LACUNY News (the publication of the Library Association of CUNY).
This Thursday, March 31, we’ll be presenting some of our results in a poster session at the ACRL 2011 National Conference in Philadelphia. We’ve collaborated with Andrew Asher and Susan Miller, the lead anthropologists from the ERIAL Project in Illinois, on this poster, and it’s been great to explore common themes across all of our data.
If you’re heading to the conference, stop by the Exhibit Hall between 9:15-10:15am and say hi. And if not, take a peek at our poster and handout right here — we’ve PDFed and uploaded them to our Preliminary Results page.
We’ve finished putting together a preliminary report of the data we gathered last year at our 2009-2010 research sites (City Tech and Brooklyn College). This report presents an initial description and analysis of the data organized by interview type and by broad theme. We’re continuing to interview students and faculty this year, and plan to undertake a more detailed analysis and examination of patterns in student scholarly habits once we’ve completed data collection.
Download: The Scholarly Habits of Undergraduates at CUNY: Preliminary Report (PDF)
This Friday December 10th we’ll be presenting some of the preliminary results from data collection at Brooklyn College and City Tech at the ACRL/NY Symposium at Baruch College. Looking forward to seeing our colleagues from CUNY and beyond! We’ll add a PDF of the poster to our Preliminary Results page soon.
We’ve finished collecting data at City Tech and Brooklyn College, and are busily compiling a preliminary report that we’ll share soon. We’ve also started this year’s data collection at our research sites for 2010-2011 — Bronx Community College and City College — and look forward to another round of student and faculty interviews.
This project uses ethnographic methods to examine student approaches to research at New York City College of Technology (City Tech) and Brooklyn College during the 2009-2010 academic year. Ethnographic techniques such as interviews, questionnaires, photo surveys, and mapping diaries will be employed at both colleges to gather qualitative data from faculty and students. To our knowledge, there have as yet been no studies on colleges similar to City Tech and Brooklyn College: diverse, urban, public, commuter colleges in a large university system. Our project fills a gap in the research on student scholarly habits, and has broad utility to many stakeholders in the academic community.
Guiding questions for this study include:
Principal Investigators:
Maura A. Smale
Assistant Professor, Information Literacy Librarian
New York City College of Technology, CUNY
Mariana Regalado
Associate Professor, Associate Librarian for Information Services
Brooklyn College, CUNY
This work is supported (in part) by grants from The City University of New York PSC-CUNY Research Award Program.
Environment: Reclaim Dev
Branch: 2.5.x
