Plagarism & Stern Lectures

So first, my stern lecture about email etiquette has had a bonus effect - two more students have apologized (yes I had a rash of really rude emails), one unnecessarily, all students emailing about their test grades have done so from university accounts and included their full names, and all of the emails of started with a greeting. I didn't provide all that info in my lecture. They figured it out on their own. I took a leaf from here, and framed it as being pre-professionals and acting in a professional matter. It worked. They do KNOW how to behave even if they don't always DO it. Competence vs Performance in action.

I also had my first true honest to goodness plagiarism case that I could prove today. (I have had two other cases of cheating along the lines of having someone write the paper for them that I couldn't prove). I tried to put the fear of God into her. We talked about long term consequences to short term poor choices. Academic probation. Never do it again. I have no idea if I had any effect or not. No tears. No yelling. Not sure. I still have to write a letter for her file because even though we aren't going to pursue it up to the level of the college, I want to document it. Not looking forward to that tomorrow!

RBOC Grading Jail Edition

• So I had two very interesting lunches this week with colleagues that I'll get around to blogging.. hmm over the weekend maybe. I want to process what I think happened at each one.

• My 3rd year review apparently went well. I won't know this for sure until next week either.

• I made an announcement today about professionalism in email because I had two different students flip out in email at me in the last week over VERY MINOR grade issues (along the lines of I don't even know why this was assigned anyway, but the grading was totally unfair and I absolutely can't imagine what you or the TA was thinking etc. etc.), two emails from random addresses with no name, and one that used IM abbreviations so much I couldn't figure out what they meant without googling the abbreviations. So get this, one of the students realized I was refering to her and apologized! Wow!

• I am in grading jail. I gave an exam last wed and promised students to return the exams in labs Thurs & Fri. I have graded 62 of 80 papers. I have to finish by 1:30 tomorrow. I can, but I don't want to.
  

• I can't tell you some of the funniest things from the exams without revealing field. But students are really funny when they don't know the answer and brain dump onto the page. Oh, I can tell one... We illicited things from subjects in our experiment....

• My grade distribution is currently 9 A, 20 B, 9 C, 14 D, 12 F. I expect most of the next 20 will end up in the B/D range from skimming short answer responses. Clearly the test was way freaking hard. Usually the distribution is more like 20 A, 20 B, 15C, misc D/F. If I curve so that the highest student get a perfect score, the distribution is: 19 A, 13 B, 14 C, 8 D, 5 F. Do I curve? For what it's worth the D students really didn't get it, but clearly many of them were almost C students and many of the B students were almost A students.
  

• I provide lots of small participation type grades on which students typically get perfect scores (a for effort and all that). Does that change your answer to curving?
  

Being Programmatic II

So I described my change in my own research direction following my doctoral program here... And I also got involved in student projects that, while ultimately productive and good for my publication rate (and interesting), also dilute my programmatic focus. So, with the grant I submitted unscored, I'm now in a position to really seriously evaluate whether this is a direction I want to continue in now. If the grant had been scored high or funded I would have continued this path because, well, the grant was funded...

so what are my options now?

1) The simple and obvious one is wait for feedback on the grant. Revise and Resubmit. No serious change in focus. Keep plugging away at the role of tagging in knowledge organization both in libraries and elsewhere since that is where my interest lies and what I think is most interesting (particularly the connections between libraries and elsewhere).
Pros: I want to be doing this work. I've already gotten feedback once and am getting feedback again on it. I have pilot data and stimuli created and ready to go for the proposed projects. I just need the funds to carry things out on the proper scale to find results. I should have a submitted publication on tagging within libraries by the time I resubmit the grant. And hopefully solid pilot data on tagging in other contexts as pilot data with a large N.
Cons: It got a very low score the first time and wasn't talked about this time. So either the reviewers think the work has a fatal flaw, or they don't like the theoretical framing, or they think it is overambitious. Not being scored is a big clue that it's time to rethink.

2) Narrow down and only focus on tagging in libraries. I'll have to think hard about how to improve my stimuli and frame my questions here so that it is effective. And it means giving up a piece of the theoretical stuff. It still allows me to set up for later projects with this grant and it still means continuing down this changed direction stuff. I don't know if it's sufficiently different that it restarts the clock on number of submissions I have available. If I narrow so considerably, but get rejected AND it uses up my last submission I'm not sure what I'll do. I think in many ways this depends on what the reviews say - which part they thought was particularly weak and which were most salvageable.
Pros: I will soon have a publication in this area. I have pilot data for a spin off. There are really an infinite number of spin offs available to me. I think it's a theoretically plausible direction. I can make a stronger case for applied relevance. I think it will require an extremely large number of participants to be interesting though and so I'm a bit worried about it as a topic by itself.
Cons: I miss the whole connection with non-library areas. This is the most difficult part of the grant, but it's a longstanding interest. I did a paper on this as part of my comps in my phd program and then let the topic go on the advice of my dissertation direction. It narrows the possible future directions pretty dramatically. Lower risk and lower impact. I'm not sure if I can do this quickly enough to have publications out in sufficient number within this topic so that I am programmatic enough for tenure.

3) Return to my original dewey decimal studies. I'll look more programmatic with just a year or two off doing something else. There is plenty to be studied systematically here. I can keep doing variations on the theme, and I can see a clear line of research to be done here.
Pros: I have a clear track record here. There is an applied need for a more full understanding of how this system of classification works with different library patrons. And the group of patrons I specialize in are particularly understudied. I could put together a grant that would be competitive fairly easily I think.
Cons: I'd be starting the grant from scratch. I don't think I'd get funded on the first try but possibly. Really I'm resisting this because I don't really think this is a plausible direction for organization in the future. And I don't know how to ground the work with my population of patrons within the new framework to make it look like I'm not switching gears.

February Resolutions

So I think as can be seen below I wasn't very good with keeping resolutions this month. I did okay with being in touch with far flung friends and family and with teaching, but I slacked on food and exercise and research. I'm actually going to give myself permission to slack on all fronts in March since I move smack dab in the middle of everything. I think getting packed and keeping teaching going in the process will be sufficient things to to do.

Really, I'm using both my resolutions and moving to procrastinate on the other one so I think it's better to focus. Oh I can't deal with packing because I have to work on this data project. Oh I can't deal with this data project because I should be packing. And on and on and on. So since the move is looming and urgent. And since I clearly can't motivate myself to do it all I'm just going to deal with that one for a month.

Work
Teaching
Assignments Card Catalog class
Rework lectures for Epistomology
Research
Collaborative Project
Stats
Analysis #3
Archival Data Project
Assign data analysis to new ugrad
Pilot Data Project
Schedule all subjects - Feb 20
Stats - Feb 28
Data Interpretation - Mar 15
Conf submission - Mar 31
Writing
Theory Article
- Intro
- Review of Theory
- Applied Perspective Patron1- Feb 29
- Applied Perspective Patron2
- Conclusion
Personal
Id exercise location
Daily prayer
Menus & Groceries wk 1
Menus & Groceries wk 2
Menus & Groceries wk 3
Menus & Groceries wk 4
Dishes wk 1
Dishes wk 2
Dishes wk 3
Dishes wk 4
Relationships
letters to 4 2 people
2 1 lunches
Phone call wk 1
Phone call wk 2
Phone call wk 3
Phone call wk 4

Being Programmatic

So I got some pretty bad news about my grant submission last week. The grant was unscored. That means the reviewers deem it to be in the bottom 50% of the grants that they read. It doesn't get talked about. I just get critiques from the reviewers. But since the reviewers view the grant as unfundable, the critiques may be very short and not fully developed and thus hard to respond to. I get one more shot with this idea for this funding agency. So I have to think carefully about going back in with this submission in order to maximize my chances.

As I talk and think about this I think some history is relevant. I did my dissertation with Big Name Gracious Scholar. It was a fantastic experience. He studies the details of the Dewey Decimal system and dabbles in other approaches to card cataloging. But it's safe to say that most of his research is grounded in traditional approaches to card cataloging. My dissertation focused on similar issues but at a slightly more global level - say organization within the whole library rather than organization within a subject area.

Then I took this job. I industriously published my dissertation data and 1 reanalysis of that data. I started a followup study which took about 18 mos in data collection and the analysis/write up is just finishing up. It has the potential for 2 more re-analyses of the extant data (1-2 publications depending...). In the first semester I did a round of readings with 3 students on nontraditional approaches to cataloging. I'm not talking about selecting just a different flavor of organization, but radically different approaches to the whole problem of knowledge organization and retreival. Say instead of an externally imposed organizational system like the Dewey Decimal system, instead a self-organizing system like tagging and ranking of items by users. Presumably over time and with a large number of users you still end up with subject based groups of books and other items. Ultimately you still have a well organized library, but how you come up with the groupings is radically different. And I learned alot.

Out of that, I started three tangential student projects - one on font styles and readability and one contrasting the Dewey Decimal system (external organization) with user tagging as an organizational method(self-organization) and one examining how people come to learn whatever system is in place grounded in the self-organization approach. The compare and contrast project turned into a dissertation I'm co-advising that is moving very slowly (and not likely to be published before I come up for tenure). The font styles one is under review now and the training study is in the final stages of data collection.

In addition I was exposed extensively in a variety of contexts to self-organizing approaches to solving a related problem - say font selection in publishing or coming up with meaningful book titles. And I started thinking about nontraditional approaches to card cataloging. Most of this exposure wasn't directly through things that apply to card cataloguing though. But some people say that the problem of meaningful book names really isn't that different than the problem of organizing books into meaningful retrievable units. And if that's true than my intellectual community isn't as isolated as it feels right now.

But here's the problem. Technically I'm the card catalog person on faculty. And I currently have 2 publications and 1 under review on the dewey decimal system. But I also have 1 publication on the interface between fonts and the classification in the dewey decimal system. And 1 publication on fonts under review. And potentially 1 publication soon on learning to use tags for both book titles and books. And eventually 1-2 publications contrasting these two approaches. And a grant in, that has just be soundly rejected, looking at tagging both in card cataloging and in other knowledge systems not found in libraries - say in the phone system or something very unrelated.

I'm a bit afraid that I look unprogrammatic right now. I think I can right that by tenure time, but I think I'll have to pick an area and get focused soon....

And this has turned into a terribly long post, so I'll write more about what I think my options might be tomorrow.