As a graduating student, you are to construct a portfolio. Your portfolio should include 5-7 double-spaced pages (Does not include title page, table of content, and bibliography). The primary audience for your portfolio is your 490 professor. Below is the direction.
1) Title page and Annotated Table of Contents.
The title page should include your name, major, email address and date of submission. The Table of Contents should communicate careful and logical organization and enable readers to find materials easily.
2) List of all courses you have taken/are currently taking.
This should be organized in the following manner:
Area I: UWM Distribution Requirements — General Education
Area II: BSIR Core Courses
Area III: BSIR Cross-functional Electives
Area IV: General Electives, including Cognate Areas of Study
3) You as a learner
Using specific details and with reference to a variety of texts and experiences, you are to examine your educational experience as a college student and to create a meaningful statement of your learning. In particular you are asked to discuss how your learning is integrative and to discuss work in your concentration.
In this section you need to address these questions:
(1) how have you developed as a learner/thinker;
(2) What have you learned in BSIR major; and
(3) how has your experience been integrative (Integrative: What connections or contrasts have you found among and between ideas and experiences in your learning communities, courses, and experiential learning, etc.?)
4) Discuss competencies pertinent to your BSIR major and/or experience
You are to select 4 competencies that are especially important to you. Define each competency and explain how the competency is relevant to your major or experience. You may want to discuss some of the specific skills and abilities that make up each competency.
5) Future directions
This section should include the following components:
(1) a statement of approximately 2 paragraphs explaining your degree program in integrative studies.
(2) Your updated resume, carefully written and designed, accompanied by a brief statement explaining the target audience for which you have shaped this particular version of your resume.
(3) Statement of career and personal goals as you see them currently.
(4) Future learning in a competency area. Questions you might consider:
((A) What are some of your learning goals, short-term and longer-term?
((B) What are your current goals for graduate school or career?
((C) What are some personal goals (for example, goals connected to travel or to competencies such as effective citizenship, global perspective or valuing)?
6) Bibliography
In your essays, you will need to refer specifically to sources such as books, journal articles, lecture notes, etc. Please be sure to cite these in appropriate format.
To understand the Information Resources program at the UWM School of Information Science one must first understand the ‘word’ meta in both it’s broadest and narrowest senses.
UWM School of Library and Information Science Home
BSIR at UWM SOIS Home
A participant in the BSIR program is expected to have a relatively good expertise with many WinXP productivity and collaboration programs, and often various methods of online access from the classroom to resources, or to class resources from home, were required competancies.
To make good use of the BSIR program one will understand that in our evolving information economy, meta-knowledge, about how to find organize, and use, data, to obtain information that can foster more and better knowledge, is a powerful engine of productivity. Using such meta-knowledge to multiply such meta-knowledge by organizing, improving, and sharing it, leverages multiple strong levers of positive socioeconomic and technologia methodology trends to increase the positive feedback among them. The potential of these factors to encourage, and depend upon, more horizontal decision making, and sharing of infomation, resources, and tasks, increases the power of the positive feedback already working to strengthen all these trends and tie them tighter together to cement a more positive sustainable future.
These are some of many possible examples of important meta-knowledge embedded in my BSIR program.
There is a focus on finding, evaluating, and increasing the value of information resources, especially through organizing, sharing, and automation of, information resources. Another focus to pursue these same aims is meta-data, the methodology of the technology of tagging and markup, a core set of skills for organizing and structuring electronic information resources. The things that most attracted me at first were the focus on research, the use, and administration of, libraries, an interdisciplinary approach to web technologies, and the encouragement for customization of one’s curriculum.
One of the main lessons I take from my studies in BSIR at UWM, is about culture. About how different cultural concepts of what define success, competance, and function, what is means and end, and how vertical an expectation of hierarchy one has, create deep divisions among organizational structures and create barriers to production and sharing of the technical means. These are much harder to bridge today than traditional cultural divisions based on language, nation, race, creed, or configuration. In other words, languges divide Daimler/Chrystler much less than the cultural gap between speakers of managerial, sales, and engineering terminologies.
One must train in all fields to counter this, there must be information workers, knowledge workers, and cultural workers, who are working on cohesion, unifiing or diverging fields of seeking, understanding, and acting. I seem destined to try to accomplish all three approaches to the most meta of understandings and skills. This was the perfect degree for today’s renascence being. Especially so for myself, as i am convinced that better sharing our heritage of information, knowledge, habit, and other such important cultural toolage, is the pathway to a sane sustainable future.
