Phylogeography and population genomics of the American black bear (ursus americanus)

The American black bear (Ursus americanus) is one of the eight living species of Ursidae, and the only one to have speciated in North America (1.8 - 1.2 Mya). This dissertation investigates the contemporary population structure of American black bears across their range; and specifically asks how a translocation of bears affected the population genetics of individuals in the Central Interior Highlands. Black bear mitochondrial lineages began forming within the last 170 kya, whereas the eastern and western nuclear genomes diverged 67 kya. A third nuclear lineage was discovered in contemporary Alaska, which diverged from the eastern lineage 31 kya. These three lineages harbor nine genetic clusters, and potentially more in unsampled portions of the range. These nine clusters may represent evolutionary significant units for the species; however, more work would be needed before proposing taxonomic revisions. The regional population genetics of the Central Interior Highlands (Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Missouri, USA) showed that the majority of genetic diversity in contemporary populations of the Ozark and Ouachita Mountains was introduced from Minnesota, USA and Manitoba, Canada during a translocation of bears from 1958 - 1968. Analyses also indicated that the contemporary Ozark and Ouachita populations were genetically differentiated. Additionally, bears that form a low diversity genetic cluster in Missouri were highly similar to bears from the Ozarks in genomic analyses, indicating a small founding population dispersed northwards following the reintroduction. Finally, I analyzed the accuracy and precision with which the natal location of a black bear may be identified using different inference methods and dataset compositions. While samples were estimated within 201 km of their sample site and with high precision, there was a low correlation between the state or province of sampling and that estimated. These results suggest caution when using genetic data for natal inference problems in cases for trade of wildlife products

Information, Development and Social Change Programs in Information Schools

The objective of this report from School of Information masters students is to explore opportunity spaces for dynamic research networks and agendas focused on information, development, and social change. Research networks will include faculty, master's and doctoral students across information schools who will generate new paradigms for meeting social challenges through information science, new design methods for community inquiry, and evaluation methods to measure the effectiveness of these initiatives in affecting social change through mechanisms such as efficiency of resource utilization. Development in the context of this report refers to economic, social, and infrastructure capacity building initiatives in both emerging and developed economies.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/91307/1/2009-McLauglinPuckett-ISI_Report_Final.dochttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/91307/2/2009-McLauglinPuckett-ISI_Report_Final.pd

The Emotions, Emotional Labor, and Identities of Korean Teachers of English

Despite being an emotionally charged profession, there is a paucity of research on the roles of emotions and emotional labor in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (Khong & Saito, 2014; Kocabas¸-Gedik & Hart, 2021; Schutz & Lee, 2014; Zembylas & Schutz, 2009). Furthermore, these concepts and their link to identity formation in nonnative English-speaking teachers (NNEST) have rarely been investigated in local contexts (Song, 2018; Zhang & Zhu, 2008). In order to help fill this gap in literature, this exploratory qualitative study was conducted in Korea with three NNESTs of English employed in private after-school academies. Semi-structured interviews elicited narratives from the participants. The findings suggested that institutional, systematic, and cultural power structures influenced the emotions, emotional labor, and identities of the participants. The emotions felt by participants were heavily instrumented by their institutions when they felt the need to conform to their institution\u27s image of a teacher, when they were forced to engage in duties they believed were distanced from education, and when their professionality was questioned. Emotional labor was found to be a necessary skill for participants as they had to suppress and conjure certain emotions both inside and outside the classroom. Their use of emotional labor was found to be critical to their job satisfaction as it assisted the participants in aligning themselves as professionals. Moreover, EFL teachers may merge or divide their professional and personal identities in reference to these power structures to protect, strengthen, or develop their identities. Further research is needed in local contexts, particularly those in private for-profit institutions in ultra-capitalist societies to examine the power structures involved and their influence on teacher emotions, emotional labor, and identity

Diffusing Organizational Change through Service Design and Iterative Assessment

This presentation was presented by Emily Puckett Rodgers and Rachel Vacek on December 6, 2018 at the Library Assessment Conference in Houston, TX.At the University of Michigan Library, dozens of librarians and staff are engaged in a series of activities to reimagine the ways our organization designs and implements our services. Between 2016 and 2017, we collaborated with brightspot strategy to develop a service philosophy, framework, and principles to help us begin the process to transform our physical and digital spaces to better represent our expertise, collections, and tools, and to meet the evolving needs of our academic community today and tomorrow. As we look to transform our spaces to serve the needs of our research community, we are taking care to ensure that whatever form our buildings and web presence take, will follow the function and intent of our services. Our efforts in this work are collaborative and distributed in nature, diffusing the shift in design and evaluation across the organization. With it, we aim to facilitate organizational change that puts our users at the center of service design and delivery. It also fundamentally recognizes that our departments play a role in supporting the academic needs of our faculty, students, and staff at the University of Michigan. This work is structured by established approaches in design thinking and user-centered design. Multiple teams of librarians and staff are applying this approach to redesign services. Topics include consultation, digital scholarship, staff innovation, citation management, and developing a persona-based toolkit that any staff across our organization may use in efforts to design new or make improvements to existing services. While each team is using the same overall approach to its service design work, the application and outcomes are unique to each domain. Within four design cycles, each team engages in a retrospective to review the process, the impact of the work, and consider its potential effects on our organizational structures. Additionally, the service design efforts support our organization’s adoption of an assessment-driven mindset through embedding evaluation into our processes. Once the service design phase is complete, each team will generate a series of pilots or prototypes to test aspects of their designs in the context of our organization. In the Summer and Fall of 2018, teams will implement those pilots and prototypes, testing their ability to scale effectively or meet our programmatic and mission-based goals yielding a series of small-scale, but impactful activities or processes that will further diffuse the design-thinking approach throughout our organization. Each of these sets of activities will be assessed before moving onto future stages of the work. We will also evaluate how they help us enact our service philosophy, framework, and principles in the practice of our everyday work. Ultimately this work will yield a culture shift within our organization enabling us to embrace a user-centered, service-based approach to how we develop services, and how we expect to collaborate and connect with colleagues within our library and academic community. It will also enable us to embed assessment practices into various facets of our work, from the beginning stages of design through its testing and into implementation at scale.Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/146754/1/Diffusing Organizational Change through Service Design and Iterative Assessment.pdfDescription of Diffusing Organizational Change through Service Design and Iterative Assessment.pdf : PDF of Presentatio

Fostering Organizational Change through Service and Space Design Strategy

This was presented at the Coalition of Networked Information Fall Membership Meeting in Washington DC, on Tuesday, December 12, 2017.In Spring 2017, the University of Michigan Library completed an engagement with brightspot strategy, consultants who worked with our academic user community and staff to design a service framework and space strategy to guide our organization's work into the future. This holistic framework and philosophy have the potential to transform our large organization's approach to designing and delivering aligned and impactful user experiences. A Service Design Task Force was formed to take this strategy and begin to design pilots and prototypes for new and evolved services and spaces, with a particular focus on enhancing the library's ability to partner around consultation, digital scholarship, and designing for emergence. The three members of the Task Force represent expertise in learning and teaching services, user experience, space design, discovery services, and web technologies. Our goal in this work is to transform our organization's capacity to design, deliver, and iterate high quality virtual and physical services in 21st-century learning and research environments within the library through user and staff engagement, rapid prototyping, and design thinking. In our presentation, the Task Force members will share current and future strategies for engaging the organization in this work, including tools and formats for design and discussion that have supported our work with the library community. We'll also discuss next steps for piloting and prototyping new service ideas in existing library spaces in order to inform future space transformations.https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/139883/5/CNI Fall 2017 Slides.pdf-1Description of CNI Fall 2017 Slides.pdf : Presentation Slide

Reframing and Reimagining the Value of Service

Book Editors: Veronica Arellano Douglas and Joanna GadsbyPeer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/163770/1/Reframing and Reimagining-the- Value-of-Service.pdfDescription of Reframing and Reimagining-the- Value-of-Service.pdf : Pre-print of the book chapterSEL

Transforming an Organization through Service and Space Design Strategy

This presentation was given at the Designing for Digital conference in Austin, TX, on Wednesday, March 7, 2018.Learn how one library is engaging with its user community to implement a service framework to transform its organizational capacity to design, deliver, and iterate high quality virtual and physical services in 21st century learning and research environments. This framework, through pilots and prototypes, informs future space transformations and will help create aligned and impactful user experiences. Presenters will share strategies and UX tools for engaging an organization in this type of work.Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/142413/1/d4d_sdtf_final.pdfDescription of d4d_sdtf_final.pdf : Presentation slide