The Seeds of Research

Allison Druin, Associate Dean for Research, iSchool

I had an hour the other day with a doctoral student in our program who reminded me why I love research.  Clay (Eliezer) Templeton told me this incredible story of how he built an Adroid App for his synagogue’s Rabbi and a few weeks later he found himself being interviewed by CNN. It was an app to help people prepare for Passover, which had little to do with his doctoral research.  And he happened to mention that while he had some programming experience, he hadn’t programmed an app until he just decided one day to help out.  The funny thing is now that Clay’s gotten a taste of mobile application programming, he’s found out he really likes it!  So I asked him, how he thought he could use this new-found-fun to add to his research?  And then we started brainstorming about perhaps building an app that collects data or one that gets users more involved in the topic he cared about.  After an hour, it was clear that the seeds of research were sown.
 

This well-spent hour reminded me that you just never know where you will find inspiration for your research.  When starting a Ph.D. program, the one thing we do know is that doctoral students can never be sure what will inspire, excite, or interest them.  When those seeds start to sprout it’s in the most amazing times and places!

Sometimes the seeds of research are sown for faculty when we get the chance to work with talented people outside of the university.  This happened to two of our Assistant Professors, Paul Jaeger, and Mega Subramaniam and iSchool doctoral student, Lesley Langa.  They came upon the chance to work with Pino Monaco from the Smithsonian Center for Education and Museum Studies and Beth Ziebarth from the Smithsonian Institution Accessibility Program (SIAP).  Together they were just informed a few weeks ago that they received a “Seed Grant” to begin to explore some very exciting research.  Below they explain these research seeds:

Mega M Subramaniam, Paul T. Jaeger, and Lesley Langa:

We just found out that we have received a prestigious seed grant jointly funded by the Smithsonian Institution and the University of Maryland to support our project “The Museum Experience of Children with Autism and Their Families: Improving Access through Web and Electronic Resources.”  This project is one of the first concrete efforts to explore the integration of the web and other electronic resources as a means to promote greater inclusion of persons with disabilities in museums. This project will identify the ways in which the use of the web and other electronic resources by students with autism from Ivymount School in Rockville, MD and their families can help to make museums more inclusive and enhance the museum experience for persons with disabilities. In examining the museum experiences of the children with autism and their families, the study will focus on the roles of the various web and electronic resources and physical resources in the experience of the museum visit and the effect of the accessibility resources on the attitudes of the children and their families toward museum visits.  

This project builds on a wide range of ongoing research at the Information Policy and Access Center (iPAC)  in the iSchool. A core part of the work at iPAC is finding ways to increase inclusion of disadvantaged, underserved, and underrepresented populations in information and information technology. This project will build on our previous research on access for persons with disabilities, much of which is detailed in the book Disability and the Internet: Confronting a Digital Divide by Paul T. Jaeger that will be published in October by Lynne Reiner Publishers.   

We are very excited about this study, as the findings will contribute to: increasing accessibility of museums to people with disabilities; illuminating the importance of the web and electronic resources in expanding a museum’s audience; and expanding research into the role of family learning with special needs children in museums.