This is the final reflection paper I wrote for my "Seminar: Information
Use and Users" class. Here, I talked about things that had happened throughout my semester, and referenced my discussion board posts.
Reflection Paper
I love that you're an information magnet for others who find you approachable. It can be frustrating when you want to help by answering a question but language is an issue. But it does raise an interesting question- why aren't they able to pick out locals (this is usually done because of hearing people speaking so you know which language they use). - Dr. H. (HIB discussion board)
Something that I
have learned as an information magnet here in Ukraine is that I am an
information magnet. :) In the US, people would often stop me and ask me
questions, especially in the School of Education Building, or just walking on UNCG’s
campus. They tended to be visitors to campus, and were, often, male. Here, most
of the people who approach me are women, and as a young woman by myself, I tend
to appear both approachable and not a threat. When my parents were here, we
went to L’viv. On the train platform (waiting for the train to Kyiv), Mom and I
were approached multiple times by young women, who all asked us about the
trains. A large part of our three-months of intensive language, cultural, and
technical study programme is integration. We have to appear, at first glance,
as Ukrainians. And, when I’m by myself, I’m not speaking to anyone, which means
they don’t hear me speak English or fractured Russian.
I have to be
approachable – I represent both the Peace Corps and the United States. So,
basically, if I’m standing on the platform waiting for a train, I have to have
my approachable face on and I can’t be listening to headphones. That's because
our Safety and Security Manager tells us that that seriously lowers our
awareness of our surroundings.
I’m an automatic
information magnet: I'm dressed like a Ukrainian, I have my approachable face
on, and I'm not wearing headphones. :)
NL: I was so interested in her comments regarding "dress" for work / school, etc.
Everything here in Ukraine is so similar
and yet so different from back in NC. Who takes their shoes off and leaves them
with their coat in a clock room? Anyone? I have to leave a pair professional
work shoes in the cloak room. This is because shoes which have been worn
outside are considered dirty. No one ever wears shoes inside an apartment or a
house. Ever. No one takes off their shoes at a business, though, so the fact
that we leave our shoes in a cloak room is unusual. My director just wants the
school to be clean – he said something about the carpets getting dirty.
And what is
appropriate for work here is interesting. I have several colleagues who wear
above-the-knee dresses/skirts and knee-high high-heeled boots, with tights. To
their jobs teaching middle- and high-schoolers. Ballet flats are, while not
inappropriate, not usually work by adults. Kitten heels and pumps are hard to
find, even. Stilettos are the norm. I remember shopping for slacks last time I
was here (before the evacuation), and the differences between professional
dress slacks for teachers here in Ukraine vs. in the US was shocking – I have
worn skinny jeans looser than those dress slacks! But, that being said, most of
what I see women wearing professionally here should be acceptable in the US.
Sigmund Freud (Case 7.3)
Dr. Freud
theorized that humans do (or do not do) something because of the effect on
them, specifically if it has a pleasurable/not pleasurable outcome. People are
more likely to do something if there is a pleasurable outcome, and, conversely,
less likely to do something is the outcome will not be pleasurable. What
someone considers pleasurable/not pleasurable depends on their view of pleasurable/not
pleasurable, of course.
People are
willing to do something not pleasurable if the result is worth it. For
instance, I am willing to take a 13-hour overnight train to Ternopil, if the
results are me being able to hang out with my new friends. I am willing to take
the two hour bus to Kirovograd, just to get a latte and a quiche slice at the
new bakery. Sometimes, the result is worth the unpleasantness.
Principle of least effort (Case 7.4.1)
Just last
weekend, I wanted to watch a movie. Netflix made a suggestion for me, but I had
never heard of it. What did I do? I Googled it. I found its IMBD page, and
looked through the summary and taglines. After watching the movie, I wanted to
know who a couple of actors were, and where I’d seen them before. I Googled the
movie again, and went to its Wikipedia page, where I found what I was looking
for. I didn’t try to find the studio webpage. I didn’t look for a review of the
film. I wanted a brief overview, one that would answer the question of “do I
want to see this movie?” I didn’t want a peer-reviewed journal article about
Sarah Michelle Geller and her movies. I just wanted to know if the movie would
be worth the hour and a half run time. I didn’t look at the Netflix reviews, as
Netflix reviews are almost always half “I love this movie! How can you not have
seen it?!” and half “I had to turn this movie off it was so awful,” which makes
it rather hard to decide if something is worth watching. Perhaps this is the
cost-benefit analysis (Case 7.4.1) – while it would be faster/easier (less
effort) to simply look at the Netflix reviews, I know that they won’t have the
information that I want, so it’s not worth looking at them.
“You see, but you do not observe. The distinction is clear.” – Sherlock Holmes
(Doyle, Sir A. C.; A Scandal in Bohemia).
This section (Case
8.1.1) immediately made me think of this quote.[1]A
few weeks ago, I was in the city of Ternopil, and I got to meet some more PCVs.
On my way back through Ternopil, I got spend some more time with two of them.
One wears gold claddagh ring on her left ring finger, heart facing in towards
her heart. This makes it a wedding ring. I saw the ring and the placement, and though I further knew that she had spent time in Ireland, but didn’t put that
information together. I saw, but did not observe.
8 assumptions
Assumption Number One:
There are three
types of men:
Those who
believe what they read,
Those who
believe what they’re told,
And those who just
have to pee on the electric fence themselves.
I got
to tell this joke to my PCV friends at the National Olympiad. We were talking
about how people make assumptions. One of my friends worked on a sheep farm for
a while, and saw a sheep leaning up against an electrified fence. Given that
the sheep was exhibiting no signs of distress, she assumed the fence had been
turned "off," and rested her hand against it. Fence was not exactly “off" -- Fence
was “on.” This led to us making mental notes to always assume the electric
fence is “on,” and me making this joke. On of my male friends nodded, and said,
“yeah, basically.” I think I know which category he would fit into…
The difference between information “needs” and “wants” (Case 4.1.1)
Every time I
think about the difference between information “wants” and information “needs,”
I’m reminded of this novel I was reading recently, in which there was a old-fashioned
wedding contract between the parties seeking matrimony.[2]
There was a monetary provision (a stipend) for “needs” mentioned in the
contract, but there was a clause in that section about the differences between
“needs” and “wants.” The protagonist thought that clause was opening a large
can of worms – as what one party thought a “need,” the other person might
declare a “want,” and not supply it. Pretty high-level stuff for an
eighteen-year-old high school drop-out…
Something that I
learned is the difficulty in determining “needs” vs. “wants” in information
seekers. Part of the problem is that what I personally think is an information
“want” someone else thinks is an information “need.” And vise-versa. Did I
“need” to know how to open a jar of pickles with a spoon? No, but I did want a
pickle with my dinner. When the new incoming groups ask questions in the
Facebook groups, the questions are all tinged with need. They all need to know
the answers to these questions, so they can buy appropriate things or pack
appropriate things.
Do you ever experience info overload?
All the time. I see everything. I hear everything. I had to
learn to filter, to shield, what I see and hear, or I would have gone nuts.
However, this means that I am better at filtering out junk information – as
I’ve been doing it my entire life.
Baker: Information Blunting vs. Information Monitoring
Baker was the
one who worked with Street-Level prostitutes, and asked them questions. I’m not
sure when she was working with them, but I wonder if it was during the AIDS
epidemic. That probably would have changed her results, as most people will
“blunt” information about diseases such as AIDS, as there is no way they can get
infected. Even if they are in a high-risk group.
I remember
talking to my dental hygienist a few years ago. She’s a wonderful woman from
New Jersey, and she has very funny story about ending up in the town where my
grandparents live by accident. One time, I asked her how she got into the field
of dental hygiene, and she said it partly the result of the AIDS epidemic. They
paid hygienists more, as they didn’t know how the virus spread, just that it
did. She also mentioned that this was really before hygienists started wearing
gloves regularly. She was one of the ones who didn’t get infected. But, she was
probably blunting the information about this new and dangerous virus. The money
was very good, and she was a single mother at the time.
I “blunt” information
about Ukrainian politics. I’ve noticed that some of my fellow evacuees also do
this. I think that we blunt this information because it stresses us out, and it
stresses us out as we’ve already been evacuated over Ukrainian politics. Therefore,
I don’t really want to know about what President Petro Poroshenko’s approval
ratings are, or if anyone is calling for a vote of no confidence in Prime
Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk (who is resigning this week). I specifically ignore
any information about Russian President Vladymyr Putin, as he wouldn’t have to
do much for the Peace Corps to be forced to evacuate all the PCVs. Again.
I learned a new
expression, and a way to describe behavior that I had noticed earlier. Like a
lot of people, I have a Tumblr blog. Every few months, a Tumblr blog in one of
the Fandoms I’m in gets deleted. For the same thing: copyright infringement/violation.
It’s always the same reason, and it’s usually the same fandom. I had previously
seen members of this fandom raging against someone getting deleted, as well as
clearly ignoring why they were getting deleted. They were getting deleted for
posting images/video/audio/etc that are under copyright, and those who were
deleted said that once they created a new blog. Yet the fandom keeps posting
these materials. As people point out, if Tumblr removes all of the copyrighted
materials from Tumblr there won’t be any Tumblr! But, that doesn’t mean that
you should post copyrighted materials to Tumblr. What I didn’t know was what to
call the behaviors I was seeing. Turns out it’s called “blunting” and it’s when
you ignore information on a topic. These Tumblr bloggers are a perfect example
of blunting behavior, as at least four of them have been deleted in the last
year alone, all for the same thing: posting materials which are under
copyright. And all of them are in the same fandom...
Reducing Uncertainty (Case 4.2.2)
Most questions
come from an acknowledgement of an information gap. A person realizes that they
have one, and wants to know how to fix that information gap. So, they ask
questions. On the Facebook groups, most of the information gaps come from not
having lived in Ukraine. “Would purple skinny jeans be work appropriate?” would
not be a rather normal question in the US. Unless the person worked somewhere
where that would be appropriate (such with small children). While they may be
appropriate at a youth centre here in Ukraine, those purple skinny jeans would
not be appropriate here at my school. I don’t need to ask, as there is no
uncertainty to reduce.
HIB
It is rather
rare that I see a question asked in the Peace Corps Facebook group and wonder
“huh why did you ask that?” All of the questions seem rather self-explanatory,
with the person asking the question needing to know the answer in order to
finish buying things and packing things.
At my school,
various teachers can take a form or a student, whenever they want. The teacher
who wants the student/students comes to the teacher who is teaching the said
student/students and asks to take them. When the Dance and Choreography
Instructor asks for the sixth form, I know what the sixth formers are going to
do. When the Physics and Maths teacher takes the star eleventh form physics
student who is competing in various National Physics Competitions, I know that
they are working on her paper. When one of the assistant principles takes an
entire form, I’m not so sure what she wants them for.
Unknown information gaps
In one of the
Facebook groups, someone posted that they needed help with something in
particular – they had been asked to run an English club, but had no experience
with adult learners. I offered them my “Survival English: English for the
non-English-Speaking Traveler” guide, and they happily accepted. Once I posted
it, I got several people posting that they were covering travel English in their
classes or clubs the next week, and that they were happy to have this guide.
This happens fairly regularly. Perhaps the person didn’t realize that they
didn’t have any materials for the club. Perhaps they thought they had
materials, but didn’t. Perhaps they were planning to create the materials over
the weekend. Who knows.
This has happened
more than once. Someone commented about St. Patrick’s Day. I mentioned that I
had PowerPoint on that, and asked if they wanted it. They said yes, so I went
back through the presentation and made sure all of the “notes” (I have a lot of random Irish trivia memorized) were in the
notes section, and posted it. Several other people commented that they had
hoped to do a St. Patrick’s Day something, but didn’t have any materials. Or
they had forgotten when St. Patrick’s Day was (really easy, as Ukraine doesn’t
celebrate it), but wanted to give a presentation anyway. Or perhaps this is
serendipity – my posting of what they needed when they needed it (Case 5.2.1).
Conclusion
I have learned a
lot about information seeking behaviors. What I have learned the most is what
to call those information seeking behaviors. I have seen blunting in action all
the time, with people either refusing to accept information or believing that the
information doesn’t affect them. I didn’t know it was called “blunting.” I know
people who are constantly looking for information on certain topics, and who
are happy to talk about that information to anyone. I didn’t know they were
considered information monitors. I learned all about the terminology and the
models behind why people do what they do. I learned the difference between
information “wants” and information “needs.” While I already knew the
difference between “wanting” something and “needing” something, this makes it
easier to see in the context of information seeking. I learned the models
behind several types of decision making, and about how the way that people come
across information can change how they make their decisions (if they even make
the decision). I got to look at at least eleven different models of information
seeking. I learned how the Scientific Method can be applied to information
seeking behaviors. I learned how different types of people look for information
differently – such as how an engineer and a humanities scholar might look for
the same information in different ways. I learned a lot of things that help put
what I already knew, what I had already observed, in context. I think that this
will make me a more aware and therefore better information seeker in the
future.
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