Making the Most of our Visual Data

We’re delighted to report that we’ve won a PSC-CUNY Research Award to enable us to create a companion website to our book. The website will allow us to display (and interact with) some of the rich visual data that students produced during our project, much of which would be difficult to represent in print.

We’re currently seeking a Data Visualization Assistant to work with us on this phase of the project. We have time logs, maps, photographs, and drawings from students, and we’d like to build an online space that will showcase the variety of workspaces and academic strategies that students shared with us. More information is available in the full job announcement here:

https://helpwanted.commons.gc.cuny.edu/2013/05/24/data-visualization-research-assistant-needed/

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!

“The Campus Doesn’t have a Refrigerator”

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.