SCUPS restores doctoral programs, but...

I challenged myself to continue the quest of obtaining the scholarly contributions by CCU doctoral graduates. My method was simple. From the list that I have gathered last year, I randomly picked some names and investigated the scholarly activities that the selected parties have accomplished via the use of the "google test." Granted, Tony Pina et al are correct, some of the sites are broken. However, this is what I have found:


1. Carol Vollmer Pope: Some scholarly publication??

http://www.bus.wisc.edu/ciber/events/2003/Innovations%20Workshop.pdf

http://www.uwm.edu/Dept/Business/alumni/outlook/fall2001/pope.html


2. Frank G. Bingham, Jr: The second link showed his scholarly publication

http://www.bryant.edu/facultyprofile/bingham_frank.htm

http://business.clemson.edu/JMTP/Webpage/Vol%2010/Volume%2010%20No%203.htm#75


3. Deanna Sutton---This site show the many scholarly articles that she has published. She also co-published a biology book

http://www.doctorfungus.org/aboutdrf/Deanna_Sutton.htm

http://biologybooks.net/search_Deanna_A._Sutton/searchBy_Author.html (published book)


4. Paula Hogart; Bio and Publication

http://www.conted.utulsa.edu/staff/paula.asp

http://www.asc41.com/www/2000/abscp006.htm


5. Stephen J. Hoogerbrugge; Contributor to a published book

http://www.argosyu.edu/campusdetail.asp?page=campuses&campusarea=ocfaculty&campusName='&id=26

http://www.baywood.com/books/tableofcontents.asp?id=0-89503-213-9


6. Gerald Ramey: Professor; Fulbright Scholar--National grant

http://www.lcsc.edu/business/Staff/GerryR.htm

http://www.lcsc.edu/collegeinfo/nr/nr-Ramey01.htm


Hey, I still and continue to believe in the "google test"....Thanks to Bill Dayson for showing us the power of the google.

Thank you all.

 

I think that Googling is a tremendous way to get a feeling for what schools are all about.

Consider the CA-approved National Test Pilot School. See some Google results previously posted (here).

We learn about a contract for NTPS to deliver a course for NASA, where NASA says that no other responsible source can provide what they need. We learn about the Society of Flight Test Engineers holding classes at NTPS. We learn about RAAF, Canadian Forces, Danish and Korean air force officers training at NTPS. We see the school's director heading up a review team for a new supersonic jet. We see that the US government once threatened to close the school as a security risk. We read about industry awards that its faculty have won. We find a class at the US Naval Academy studying a procedure invented at NTPS. We see a field trip from Embry Riddle vising them.

I think that stuff all speaks to this school's credibility and about its value. In fact, it probably says more than the mere fact of accreditation would.

Another example was Henrik's Knightsbridge University. (Here's) some comparative Googling involving astronomy departments.

A Google search for the phrase 'Knightsbridge University' plus the word 'astronomy' generated a total of seven hits. Six of these were Knightsbridge pages (putting the university in England, Scotland and Denmark), plus one listing by a London amateur astronomer's club.

A Google search for the phrase 'San Francisco State University' plus the word 'astronomy' generated thousands of hits. Just the few I looked at showed the program being taken seriously by the American Astronomical Society, the National Science Foundation, Scientific American, Raytheon, Harvard, NASA, the National Optical Astronomy Observatories, the European Southern Observatory and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, among others.

That's to say nothing of the content of the hits. These can be positively exciting from an academic point of view. Check (this) out.

I don't think that anyone could seriously deny that this kind of information tells us something about a program's value, or lack of it.

I do have some caveats.

I think that Googling works better if it's done qualitatively as opposed to quantitatively. It's a way of drawing a picture, not a numerical measurement.

What matters isn't so much the number of hits as the nature of the hits. The exception to that is when the number of hits is very low. The fact that there are few hits indicates that nobody before you has found anything worth talking about. That in turn suggests that maybe there's nothing there worth talking about. But the point isn't so much the volume of the talk as it is who is talking and what they are saying.

So just Googling the name of a school isn't very informative, especially if the school is a big name. I'm sure that countless people have found occasion to mention the University of Florida on a webpage. Most of that is just noise. The point isn't just to count your lottery tickets, it's to locate the winners.

You can cut through the noise by doing more targeted searches. Look at academic fields and specific research subjects. Look for hits using the word 'research', 'presentation' or 'publication'. Try restricting your search to .edu or .gov or even .mil pages and see what that does. If you find the names of some research units within a university, try Googling them. Try initials and contractions.

It's kind of an art, I think, and interpreting it is as much aesthetics as it is algorithm.

 

A web profile, a web footprint I think are two other descriptions that you've given that also seem to express it well. I was very much struck by the difference of the general impression given by the two searches that I did, UFN and CCU. Now I'm wondering if perhaps some of this difference might be due to the distance learning aspect producing a different type of profile/impression/web footprint. I'll test out this theory by doing some similar searches on accredited institutions that specialize in distance learning.

 

I agree with this general idea as I consider Google to be the best all purpose search engine around (although I'll take this opportunity to pump Teoma as a close second. It made me think, however, maybe there are search engines that are more specialized and because of their specialization they might be better at searching out specific sorts of information. So, off to Google I went and typed in, "academic search engines" (without the quotation marks). Lo and behold, there seem to be a collection of academic search engines. Perhaps one of these might prove to be better at uncovering the sort of information that is in contention here. If not then I'd say that Bill's "Google test" has proven itself to be the best rough screen of information of this sort.
Jack

 

I had thought (based on some exchanges between Dennis Ruhl and someone else) that CCU doctorates didn't do dissertations, perhaps it was just in one specific discipline?

I've always assumed that the threads like this seem to gravitate towards CCU because we seem to have a fair number of CCU students and CCU alumni that visit DegreeInfo?

 

Ph.D. psychology students at CCU have to do a traditional dissertation and
defend it in person before their committee. The Psy.D. students (since it is considered a professional and not research degree) are not required to do a dissertation but are required to complete literature based research and final comps.