"Field Notes" is an occasional Connect column covering practical and philosophical issues facing admissions and registrar professionals. The columns are authored by various AACRAO members. If you have an idea for a column and would like to contribute, please send an email to the editor at connect@aacrao.org.
By Amy E. Harth, MH, Academic Catalog Coordinator, DeVry University
In many ways, education is the business of providing information. Registrars and admissions officers, in particular, are responsible for handling information.
As my university has made changes in our information and communication practices, I've been reflecting on communication.
How do we inform ourselves and others in our institutions? How do we inform students, alumni, parents and other stakeholders? These are important questions that records management professionals engage with daily both consciously and unconsciously.
Improved processes lead to unintended positive side effects
DeVry University recently released a new, one-stop shop for academic policies and supporting documents for staff. When we made the change, we focused on the benefits to users who would be able to more conveniently obtain the latest materials needed to help students.
The unintended side effect that has been a real boon to me and others who create this information has been how this one-stop shop has helped us store this information and better manage the resources we create. A better process of informing others has led to a better process for storing and managing information.
Similarly, another department at my university introduced a newsletter that collected important updates from a variety of departments. I really appreciated receiving this newsletter as it reduced my need to actively seek information from individuals and hunt for news on various internal sites. This department recently went one step further to improve this newsletter by collecting news from more departments. There are sometimes drawbacks to this approach. The document they send is now a bit longer. This can be off-putting to some people. Yet it is much easier for me to quickly review a 20 page document than it is to try to keep up with multiple emails, meetings, and phone calls. One of the great things about receiving such information is that I now have access to information I didn't even know existed.
Information engagement styles
These recent changes have prompted me to think about three different styles of engagement with information.
- Information Seeking
- Information Absorbing
- Information Parsing
These three styles are not mutually exclusive nor are any of them better or worse. We all use them all the time, but it helps to be aware of how we’re handling information.
Information Seeking. Sometimes we need to actively seek information: there is something we don't know, and we need to find out.
Information Absorbing. Sometimes we are given information and we realize that it is important and thus we absorb it. We can also identify it as important and decide that we need to store it for future reference. Thus, we absorb it into our documentation systems rather than our memories.
Information Parsing. Sometimes we receive information and we realize that some of it is irrelevant to our needs. Thus, we parse or filter out what we don't need. This is a skill that is often underdeveloped. We can't know everything, so we need to build our skills of discernment. In order to do this we need to make choices as to what to retain and what to discard.
The best information management systems and the best informers, like the examples outlined above, give us the tools to parse. They allow us to know how and where to find something without having to retain a lot of information. This kind of knowledge is power.
Join the dialogue
How do you view information? How do you inform others? To join the conversation, respond on Facebook, Twitter, or send us an email.