Patrick Williams's iSchool Homepage

PhD Student/Asst. Instructor
UT School of Information
jpwms@ischool.utexas.edu

left-pointing location indicator arrow Spring 2006:

Ah, spring semester. This one's a little unconventional, as I'm wrapping up the coursework component of my doctoral studies and prepare to put some distance between me and school and start thinking about dissertation directions. I am truly glad that I continued on as a full time student, though, for this grueling phase, feeling a bit like the world is my oyster, and the shell is just about to start opening.

Two of this semester's classes are really just projects I'm really excited about that pass as classes:

Quinn & Grete's Creating and Managing Digital Media Collections, which involves digitizing and presenting the "lost" 1956-1957 Mike Wallace Interviews from the HRC, has been great so far. Out of sheer luck, I got assigned Dali's interview to work with and it's amazing. Hopefully I'll be able to post a link to the video soon, I'm dying to share it.
Dr. Jarmon's Community Engagement class involves my consulting project with MAIN.org/Telecommunity Resource Center guru Gene Crick and developing a model for community information resource support at public IT access sites in Bastrop. This has been a really exciting project so far, and I'm meeting all sorts of interesting people. Plus, I'm finding the in-context professional development quite comfortable and useful.

My third class, Experimental Design and Statistical Inference, is VERY class-like, but I'm getting a lot more out of it than my other quantitiative research methods courses, now that I'm well acquainted with all the math.

Not as much academic travel this semester as last, but a Spring Break trip to West Texas before SXSW will be a refreshing change of pace. I love getting the week off, but it always makes the whole semester seem so frantic. (If you're interested, the i-Conference, which Sam and I took our big academic trip to last semester, posted pictures of our panel: 1 2 3.)

Sam, Tony, and I got a new i312 colleague this semester, Don, whose high school teaching and library experience is adding all sorts of goodness to what we're doing. We have some interesting guests lined up for our webcasts this session as well. Incidentally, I received a Texas Exes Teaching Award this semester for my i312 work over the last year. It means a lot to me, as it was nominated and selected by my students. In the ceremony, I got to meet the new president of the university.

In somewhat stale news, the group of us who worked on the Wired For Youth Blog project in Austin Public Libraries last semester have started the E-Society Working Group on campus in order to keep busy on that and other projects. I recently set up a blog for the group.

You can keep up with what I'm thinking and doing on my research and reading blog.

You can also follow what I'm following with the following links: