weLEAD Online Magazine

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Copyright 2003 ă weLEAD, Inc.

 

 

 

Faculty-Student Research and Publishing

 

 

By Howard Baker

 

An important mission confronting educators is that of challenging students to do scholarly research and publishing.  Faculty-student collaboration is an important aspect of this endeavor.  Recently this author attended the multidisciplinary Enterprise 2003 Hawaiian International Faculty Student Conference in Honolulu, Hawaii (http://ooiconference.com) and presented a paper titled Leadership Research and Publishing in Information Systems, Security, Health Care, Management, and Education.

 

Students, faculty, and professionals from Australia, Canada, China, Mexico, New Zealand, South Africa, Taiwan, Thailand, and the United States presented papers at the Enterprise 2003 Conference.

 

Dr. Howard Baker (left), Dr. (Joe) Olu Omolayole (center), and Dr. Gregory Schaper (right) at the 2003 conference.

 

The Olu Olu Institute Consortium for Teaching, Research, Learning and Development (ooiCTRLD), a global professional academic organization, holds the conference each year.  Dr. (Joe) Olu Omolayole is the founder of the organization.  Dr. Omolayole holds MS and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from UCLA and an MBA from Cal State University, Sacramento, California.  Dr. Gregory Schaper, Hawaii Pacific University, is the new Chair and host of the upcoming 2004 conference.

 

The purpose of the ooiCTRLD organization is to:

1.            Mentor students, faculty and others in research in all disciplines.

2.            Create a forum where students, faculty and others throughout the world can meet on the same level playing field to share their research experiences and be rewarded for mentored research with others.

3.            Help make papers publishable.

4.            Create academic quality publications (abstracts, refereed proceedings, refereed journals, etc.) where research papers can be published.

 

Dr. John Schweitzer, CEO of Links WW, was the keynote speaker at the 2003 conference.

 Membership in the organization is open to individuals throughout the world who are interested in the mission and purpose of the organization. There is no membership fee.  The 2004 conference will be held Wednesday, May 19, 2004 through Wednesday, May 26, 2004.  All papers should be submitted to the 2004 conference before the deadline, which is tentatively in December.  This author has been invited as the 2004 conference keynote speaker.

 

This author’s 2003 paper described the exciting new student mentoring service provided through the www.weleadinlearning.org web site, and how the web site has been created to support interdisciplinary research, writing, and faculty-student collaboration.  The paper was presented under the Transactions of Computer Information Systems track.

 

The weLEAD In Learning web site hosts the E-Journal of Organizational Learning and Leadership, which contains a college student’s section as well as a professional section.  Articles in the E-Journal address any organizational learning or leadership topic, such as organizational culture, the five learning disciplines, leadership skills (such as listening skills), knowledge management, and the use of technology by learning leaders.  At present about a dozen university students are working with this author on research and the writing of scholarly papers.

 

At the time weLEAD Incorporated was created, the board of directors envisioned the possibility of a second publication, in the form of a scholarly E-journal, to complement the weLEAD E-Magazine.

 

In December 2001, the author of this article was asked to begin a project to develop a web site that focused on learning organizations and leadership, and to address this publishing need.  A team of scholars was assembled to form the editorial board and the first issue of the E-Journal was published last October.  The E-Journal is published twice a year, in the fall and spring.  In the first nine months the web site has received over 4,000 visits.

 

The weLead In Learning web site encourages the interaction of faculty and business professionals with college and university students.  It also provides helpful resources to facilitate student research and publishing.  The weLEAD In Learning web site is not intended to be a traditional “information only” web site or just an E-journal web site. It is an attempt to combine a web-based E-journal with other scholarly resources—all dedicated to organizational learning and leadership research and publishing.

 

The web site provides an ever-expanding bibliographic database of books related to leadership and organizational learning.  This database is updated monthly.  The database is in hypertext, but can also be downloaded in EndNote format.  Writers with access to EndNote software can download citation information directly into the EndNote program from the bibliography section of the web site.  Using EndNote with a word processor such as Microsoft Word, the bibliography will appear automatically in the paper as the writer inserts citations in the manuscript.

 

The bibliography section of the web site also contains book review hyperlinks.  The weLEAD web site at http://www.leadingtoday.org/ contains book reviews.  New book reviews are added to the weLEAD website each month and are identified by a “NEW” tag.  A researcher can simply click on a “weLEAD Book Review” hyperlink next to an entry in the weLEAD In Learning bibliography database (http://www.weleadinlearning.org/database.htm) and the corresponding book review on the weLEAD web site will appear.

 

A final resource currently provided by the web site is a list of hyperlinks to other web sites of interest to those researching organizational learning and leadership topics.  These links are validated and updated monthly.

 

According to Peter Senge, “Learning is at once deeply personal and inherently social; it connects us not just to knowledge in the abstract, but to each other (Senge, 2000).  A primary goal of the weLEAD In Learning website is to encourage interaction between faculty and college students to facilitate research and writing on leadership topics.  The vision for the web site has been to achieve synergy by integrating diverse elements into a single site, and build a learning community where faculty, professionals, and college and university students can connect and interact.

 

The mission statement for the weLEAD In Learning web site is:

 

“Our mission is to help current and future leaders around the world better understand the concepts of servant-leadership and learning organizations, and to assist them in promoting personal learning and a learning culture within their organizations.”

 

Faculty-student collaboration is an important aspect of this endeavor (Baker, 2003).  Helping students learn about learning organizations and leadership involves helping them discover how best to learn.  This is “learning about learning.”  The concept upon which the web site was built is that learning is personal and unique to each student.  One of the goals of the web site is to help students become the learning leaders that will change organizational cultures into learning cultures.  To this end weLEAD In Learning has established a telementoring service.

 

Telementoring is a way to pair learners (mentees) with distant faculty and professional learning leaders (telementors) using electronic mail, instant messaging, written correspondence, video conferencing, and telephone.  This author is the coordinator of this mentoring service.  If you are currently a university or college student, or recent college graduate interested in learning more about learning organizations, knowledge creation, knowledge management, stewardship, or servant-leadership, examine the mentoring page of the weLEAD In Learning website at http://www.weleadinlearning.org/mentoringservice.htm.

 

Baker, J. H. (2003). An E-journal That Facilitates Faculty-Student Collaboration, The Turkish On-Line Journal of Distance Education, 4(1). http://tojde.anadolu.edu.tr/tojde9/index.htm

 

Senge, P. (2000). Schools That Learn. Doubleday, New York, New York 10036.

 

Comments to:  hbaker@leadingtoday.org

  

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About the author:

Howard Baker is Assistant Professor of Computer Information Systems at the University of Louisiana at Monroe.  He holds a B.S. in Management from Samford University (Birmingham, AL), a Master of Accounting (MAcc) from the University of Southern California, and a Ph.D. in Information Systems from the University of Texas at Arlington.  He is also a Certified Internal Auditor (CIA).  Before entering his teaching career he worked for a Fortune 100 company as a project leader, two large financial institutions as head of information systems auditing, and as an information systems consultant in Europe and Australia.  Dr. Baker has been a Franklin Covey 7 Habits of Highly Effective People certified facilitator since 1994, and has served the University of Texas at Tyler as their facilitator since 1997.  He is also an adjunct professor in the Master of Public Administration program at the University of Texas at Tyler.  His areas of research include knowledge management, data security, learning organizations, and leadership.  He is a regular contributor to the weLEAD E-magazine (http://www.leadingtoday.org/) and is the Editor of the E-Journal of Organizational Learning and Leadership (http://www.weleadinlearning.org).  His personal web site on mentoring is at http://www.learningleader.com/.