Overview
Ruth V. Small, Laura J. & L. Douglas Meredith Professor and Director of the iSchool's nationally ranked school media program, received a doctorate in instructional design, development, and evaluation and has been on the faculty of the iSchool since 1989. She also directs the Preparing Librarians for Urban Schools (PLUS) program, a distance learning program for library service in high need urban schools. The PLUS program has served several urban areas in New York State, including New York City, Binghamton, Rochester, and Syracuse.
Ruth’s research is in the application of motivation theories and models to information contexts. Ruth has received two national research awards, the 2001 Carroll Preston Baber Research Award from the American Library Association and the 1997 Highsmith Research Award from the American Association of School Librarians. Her current research focuses on the motivational influences on and information resource needs of innovators. Ruth also serves as the first director of Syracuse University’s
Center for Digital Literacy, an interdisciplinary, collaborative research and development center partnering the School of Information Studies, School of Education, and S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications. The mission of CDL is to explore the need for and acquisition of traditional, information, technology, and media literacies and to develop tools to foster these literacies in a variety of contexts.
Ruth has received three awards for her teaching including the School of Information Studies Professor of the Year in 1996, Teacher of the Year from the Syracuse University Alumni Association and, in 2006, the prestigious Meredith Professorship for Teaching Excellence, the first such recipient from the iSchool. Before coming to the iSchool, "Dr. Ruth" (as her students affectionately call her) worked as a college administrator, high school principal, librarian, teacher, and instructional design and evaluation consultant. Ruth is president of SMALL Packages, a consulting business specializing in motivational design.
Research Interests
Ruth's research focuses on the motivational aspects of information design and use. Ruth has studied motivation in a wide variety of contexts including multimedia software, the World Wide Web, information systems, telecommuting, and information literacy instruction. Her work in the latter area earned her the 2001 Carroll Preston Baber Research Award from the American Library Association and the 1997 Highsmith Research Award from the American Association of School Librarians.
Ruth has published more than 100 books, chapters, articles and papers, including four books with co-author Marilyn Arnone, two of which are on Web evaluation for elementary and secondary educators entitled "Motivation Mining: Teaching Evaluation Skills to Find Web Treasures" (1999, Linworth Publishing). Other books include "Turning Kids On to Research" (Libraries Unlimited, 2000) and "Make a PACT for Success: Designing Effective Information Presentations" (Scarecrow Press, 2002). In addition, she co-authored Learning-in-Community: Reflections on Practice (Kluwer, 2003) with Murali Venkatesh and Janet Marsden. Her latest book, "Designing Digital Literacy Programs with IM-PACT" (Neal-Schumann) integrates motivational theories and concepts into all aspects of the instructional design process.
Ruth has served on the Editorial Boards of School Library Media Research, School Libraries Worldwide and the Journal of Global Information Management. She has been principal investigator or co-PI on funded projects totaling over $3 million such as S.O.S. for Information Literacy (IMLS), Reinventing Urban School Librarians (John Ben Snow Foundation), and Coming into the Classroom from the Outside: Childhood Contexts and Dispositions to Learning (NSF) and Preparing Librarians for Urban Schools (PLUS) (IMLS).
Teaching Interests
Most of the courses Ruth teaches are related to the design and presentation of information. She has created several new courses at the iSchool, including IST 662: Instructional Strategies & Techniques for Information Professionals, IST 611: Collaborative Technology Projects in Educational Organizations, IST 617: Motivational Aspects of Information Use, and IST 504: Integrating Motivation and Information Literacy. She also has developed an online academic component to the school media internships (which she supervises) and a doctoral seminar entitled "Motivation, Information Systems, and Organizations."
Ruth founded and directed the iSchool's Summer Institute on Leadership & Change from 1991 to 1996 and from 1993 to 1996 the School's distance learning master's degree program in library and information science, the first web-based, limited residency program in library science in the U.S. She was voted the iSchool's 1996 Professor of the Year by the graduate students of the School and in 2004 Teacher of the Year by the Syracuse University Alumni Association. In 2006 Ruth was named a Syracuse University Meredith Professor for Teaching Excellence.
In 1999, she was named Faculty Technology Associate for Syracuse University's Faculty Academic Computing Support Services, participating in presenting more than 25 workshops to faculty from colleges and universities throughout central New York. She presented her workshop on Motivating Students to the Teaching Assistants Orientation Program for seven years. Ruth has consulted and conducted workshops on motivation and evaluation for dozens of organizations and at professional conferences throughout the country and in South America and Asia.
Professional Interests
Ruth has led dozens of research and evaluation projects. She has evaluated a wide range of educational programs, from the Department of Library Science at the University of Sao Paulo (Brazil) to the Connecting Schools and Libraries Project of the Dewitt Wallace-Readers Digest Fund and from management training programs at Miller Brewing Company to Pappyland, the award-winning, nationally-broadcast children's educational television program.
Ruth has been an instructional design consultant to a variety of organizations, including Motorola, Central New York Regional Transportation Association, Tompkins County Community College, Renaissance Learning Systems, the National Technical Institute for the Deaf at RIT, and Bausch & Lomb. She was a research consultant to the International Institute for Management Development in Lausanne, Switzerland.
Personal Interests
I enjoy gardening, movies, theater, and collecting.