New Year’s Update

It’s been pretty quiet around here lately, but not for lack of work on the project! We’ve been filling practically every spare minute since last summer finishing up coding and analyzing our data gathered from all of the fascinating students and faculty we interviewed.

We’re also delighted to report that we’ve been busily writing up our results and look forward to sharing them. In fact, there’s so much great data that we’re writing a book this time around, rather than just a brief report as we did early on in the project.

We sent out a book proposal before the holidays so we don’t have a publication date just yet. But the book is definitely taking shape, so we thought we’d share our tentative title and table of contents here:

The Scholarly Habits of Urban, Commuter College Students

Chapter 1: Introduction

Section I: The Scholarly Ecosystem of CUNY Students
Chapter 2: Information and Communication Technologies
Chapter 3: On Campus and in the Library
Chapter 4: On the Commute
Chapter 5: At Home
Chapter 6: Fitting it All In

Section II: CUNY Students and Research-Based Assignments
Chapter 7: Faculty Expectations for Student Work
Chapter 8: The Student Research and Writing Process
Chapter 9: Support and Engagement: Keys to Success

Chapter 10: Conclusions

Appendices
a. Methodology and Participants
b. Recommendations for Librarians, Faculty, and Administrators

We’ll post more updates as we have them. Now back to work with us!

Analyzing and Presenting

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.

Fall 2010 Update

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.