ISI 5101 - description, goals, outcomes

Course Description

This course covers quantitative and qualitative research and relevant descriptive and inferential statistics for the investigation of both practical and theoretical problems in the information professions, critically assessing published research, including its data gathering and data analysis procedures.

This course outline has been adapted with permission from a similar course offered by Dr. Lisa Given, School of Library and Information Studies, University of Alberta.

Course Goal

Upon completion of this course, students will have a thorough grounding in the principles, problems, methods and techniques of research methods in the social sciences with particular emphasis on problems and situations relevant to the library and information studies. Students will be capable of initiating their own research projects.

ALA Competencies

1. The fundamentals of quantitative and qualitative research methods
2. The central research findings and research literature of the field
3. The principles and methods used to assess the actual and potential value of new research.

Course Outcomes

Upon completion of the course students will be able to:

· Describe the purposes, concepts and principles of research in library and information studies;
· Develop research questions about the theory and practice of library and information studies;
· Compare and select methods for answering research questions;
· Demonstrate an understanding of the research process;
· Evaluate research literature in library and information studies.

privacy statement

This blog is intended for the exclusive use of current students enrolled in my courses at ESI-SIS, uOttawa. The only personal information that could be available here might be first names or identities of students in posting comments. At the end of the semester, the blog will be cleared of specific information - comments, notes, etc. - relevant to these individual courses and new passwords will be set.

If you have any privacy concerns about any information which is posted here, please contact me directly.

on teaching and learning ... to be free

In an older article by Carl Rogers (yes that Carl Rogers, psychologist), he characterizes his "hope for education" which consists of "learning to be free." Here is an excerpt from the concluding paragraph and it expresses in a few lines how I plan to approach my own teaching and learning at ESI-SIS. In spite of the therapeutic overtones, I hope you can appreciate the core message:

Nevertheless, it is my personal conviction [and mine also] that individual rigidity and constricted learning are the surest roads to world catastrophe. It seems clear that if we prefer to develop flexible, adaptive, creative individuals, we have a beginning knowledge as to how this may be done. We know how to establish, in an educational situation, the conditions and the psychological climate which initiate a process of learning to be free.

Reference: Rogers, Carl (1963). Learning to be free. Pastoral Psychology, 14:1, February, 7-12. Available through uOttawa Library - E-journals