UOW academic joins elite group with Docent award
5 Dec 2007 | Bernie Goldie
Associate Professor Rodney Clarke can likely lay claim to be the most qualified information systems academic in the Southern Hemisphere following his award of a Docent from Karlstad University in Sweden.
Professor Clarke, of UOW’s School of Management and Marketing, has been awarded the Docent in Information Systems “without any hesitation or doubt”. The Docent is a ‘higher doctorate’ or post-doctoral award consisting of four academic productions.
He is certainly one of only a handful of scholars outside of Scandinavia to have received this prestigious award. And in all likelihood, Professor Clarke has become the most qualified information systems academic in the Southern Hemisphere.
The first two productions of the Docent require the candidate to publish high quality academic publications forming a body of work judged to be the equivalent of at least two PhDs. The first Docent production must extend the applicant’s original PhD by the equivalent of a PhD in order to demonstrate research depth.
Professor Clarke extended his original dissertation on the evolution of information systems in work places into an entirely new type of systems analysis by replacing traditional information theory with communication theory. The significance of this work is that the development, use and management of systems can now be described and understood by looking at systems as patterns of communication within organisations.
The second Docent production must also be the equivalent of a PhD but in an entirely different field demonstrating the breadth of the candidate’s research activity. Professor Clarke’s second area was in the semantics of hypermedia.
His work involved demonstrating how various language resources that we use when speaking and writing are reorganised and ‘disturbed’ when we use web sites and other forms of multimedia as a communication medium. This work holds the potential for the creation of new web development practices, as well as entirely new classes of Internet-based services and technologies.
Professor Clarke also submitted additional work judged to be the equivalent of half a PhD in the area of decision-making, viewing this activity as a social meaning–making process.
The third Docent production concerns contributions made by the candidate to the discipline, and the esteem and impact with which these activities are true contributions to the international academic community. The fourth and final production concerns contributions made to the pedagogic aspects of the field, including PhD supervision training, supervising, examining, and ‘seeing to completion’ PhD candidates; undertaking senior administration tasks related to teaching and learning, and involvement in international cooperation projects.
Professor Clarke’s professional and pedagogic activities within information systems are well known in Scandinavia and Europe and he easily exceeded expectations in these areas.
Media please note: A high-resolution image of Associate Professor Rodney Clarke is available by emailling Bernie Goldie at bgoldie@uow.edu.au
Further information: Contact Associate Professor Rodney Clarke on (02) 4221 5818.
|
