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!

Slides and notes

I’ve just uploaded the slides and notes from our recent presentation at Hunter College’s ACERT Teaching Tuesdays. Many thanks again to all who came to talk with us, it was a great discussion! I’ve also added slides, notes, and our paper from our conference travels last fall: MobilityShifts and the American Anthropological Association meetings. All are available on the Results & Findings page.

“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.

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.

Off to Philadelphia

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.

Preliminary Report: 2009-2010 Fieldwork

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)

More Preliminary Results

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.

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.