Sean Burns, PhD, Home Page

Burns, C. Sean

Sean Burns, PhD

Basic Gist

Welcome to my personal website. I am an Associate Professor at the University of Kentucky's College of Communication and Information, within the School of Information Science. I teach in the library science graduate program and the information, communication, technology undergraduate and graduate programs. My research topics broadly cover areas in scholarly communication, information science, and academic libraries. See below for more details.

Research

Current Projects

Project 1: A study of tacit knowledge and open science. My thesis is that tacit knowing, Michael Polanyi's idea that we can know more than we can tell, challenges the idea that an open science can be fully open. If true, this has ramifications for what we can learn from science done more openly and for what can be replicated based on a more open science. See What documents cannod do: Revisiting Polanyi and the tacit knowledge dilemma, which describes this thesis in more detail.

Project 2: A study on ungrading. Ungrading is the idea that we can place less emphasis on grades by placing more emphasis on other forms of feedback. I practice ungrading in different ways, which is determined whether the course is a graduate or undergraduate course, and whether the course is discussion or project based. Two colleagues of mine are investigating two of my courses, both graduate, but one discussion based and the other project based. This is an ongoing research project.

Project 3: A citation analysis of journal articles with specific title characteristics. More details later.

Project 4: A study on open educational resources (OER). More details later.

Research Themes

My CV can be found on my research page. The research page lists the themes of my publications. These themes encompass bias in peer review, health information retrieval, reference librarianship, misinformation, tacit knowledge in conjunction with open science, the historical development of library automation, and electronic resources.

Plain Text Social Science

I enjoy a Plain Text Way To Do Plain Text Social Science. I used the plain text research approach to write a paper for an upcoming conference. It was fun to write, even though the paper was rejected (2022-05-24), and I describe the process on The Text. See the output: Ungrade to Learn.

Teaching

Undergraduate

I developed and regularly teach the following three undergraduate courses in my School's information, communication, and technology (ICT) program.

ICT 201: Personal Knowledge Management: Undergraduate course on managing personal information and knowledge work flows. Lectures and other materials for this course are on GitHub: Personal Knowledge Management.
ICT 418: Linux Systems Administration: Undergraduate course covering systems administration using the Ubuntu Linux distribution. Topics include Bash scripting, managing users, installing, securing, and managing services such as MySQL, and more. Lectures and demo scripts for this course are on GitHub: Linux Systems Administration.
ICT 420: Semantic Web Development: Undergraduate course focused on HTML5, CSS3, JSON-LD, and Git as well as usability and accessibility. Main software tools: text editor, Git. Demo and other material for this course are on GitHub: Semantic Web Development.

Graduate

I developed and regularly teach the following two graduate courses in my School's library science (LIS) and information, communication, and technology (ICT) programs.

LIS 617: Electronic Resource Management: Graduate course on managing electronic resources for libraries. Topics covered include the technologies and systems involved, legal issues such as managing copyright, contract negotiation, and more. Lectures and other material for this course are on GitHub: Electronic Resource Management.
LIS 690: Systems Librarianship: Graduate course on systems librarianship. Students learn to use the Linux command line, evaluate system logs, create a basic integrated library system from scratch, and install and administer several software programs including WordPress, Omeka, and Koha ILS. This is currently a special topics course, but it will eventually be added as an elective. Lectures and other materials for this course are on GitHub: Systems Librarianship.

Past Courses

I developed but am no longer actively teaching the following course:

LIS/ICT 658: Knowledge Management: Graduate course on organizational knowledge management with some emphasis on disaster and risk management and communication.