Relevance: Undergraduate Student Interest

If your department is like many most it offers an introductory no-prerequisites course. It’s the course to recruit (or select out) department minors & majors. It may even be a “core” course required for all students in your “school.” Can you picture students who take that course?

Next, think of a research paper you’re working on. Given 20 minutes in front of that undergraduate course audience could you contextualize, describe, and facilitate a compelling discussion of your research?

If you answered “yes,” congratulations! Well done. If you answered “no,” is it because (a) your research is still too fuzzy, (b) the topic is too arcane or (c) your work make a strong theory contribution in a sub-discipline with little practical relevance?

It’s a fair response that undergraduate student interest may be an irrelevant objective anyway. Nonetheless, it seems to me answers (a) and (b) don’t bode well for publishable research. Answer (c) looks like a juicy rationalization. So perhaps it is a question worth considering.

What do you think?

Job Search Resources

We’ll all (hopefully!) end up on the job market eventually. When you do, here are some web resources you may find of interest. First, to locate job openings…

• For Information Systems jobs make sure to check out the AIS Placement Service.
• OCIS maintains a list job openings here (including Communications Dept. jobs).

Next, to learn more about specific schools…

• Some schools maintain detailed profiles at the Chronicle of Higher Education website.
• Curious who the Academy of Management members are at a school? Search the AOM member database. Search hints: institution names are entered multiple ways so try searching by state, too. You can use the “Division” option to see members in a single division (like OCIS).
• The Association of Information Systems also maintains a faculty directory. You additional information about a faculty member there that they don’t post on their university website.

Finally, if you’re curious about what salaries are like see the AIS Salary Offer Database or the AAUP Faculty Salary Survey.

Does anyone else have a favorite website or other resource they’ve found particularly useful in their job search? For anyone already on the market, have you found the AIS Placement service helpful?

R&R: rest & relaxation… or ‘riting & research

Happy Thanksgiving Break!

However you spend the long weekend, resting & relaxing with families and friends, or catching up on writing and research in an end-of-the-semester push, best wishes to you for an enjoyable extended weekend.

Anyone else had a moment like this? Here’s hoping they’re few and far between!

New Feature: Email Subscriptions

Do you enjoy reading this site yet forget to check for new posts? Or do you find the every-few-days posting schedule hard to follow?

We’ve got just the solution for you. Now you can subscribe to this blog via email. Any day there’s new posts you’ll receive them via email (maximum one email per day). Pretty cool, eh?

These are a few of my favorite things

When you get a new PC are what programs do you install to get going? Are there tools you find yourself really missing when you use an unfamiliar computer?

Here’s my list of most helpful Windows utilities.  What makes your list?

[Apologies in advance to the Mac users out there for the lack of inclusiveness of this post; then again, no doubt our Mac friends will tell us half or more these are already built into their operating system. ]

A new field of science: the Science of the Web

Have you ever wondered how new scientific fields are formed? I always figured it was a slow, drawn-out process (for example, as James Howison noted in this helpful comment, the field of Information Science has a clear heritage from Library Science).

I never would have believed it, but it turns out that if you are famous enough you can even announce the start of a new field of science with a press release!

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Southampton in England recently announced they would jointly start a new branch of science: the science of the Web. Key players: Tim Berners-Lee at M.I.T.;  Wendy Hall, who directs Southampton’s School of Electronics and Computer Science; Nigel Shadbolt, professor of artificial intelligence at Southampton; Daniel Weitzner, principal research scientist at M.I.T.’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. In case you missed their announcement (all emphasis mine):