Mary Anne Kennan
AUTHOR: Chris Sheedy DATE: 06.09.07 ISSUE 1, 2007
The accidental academic
Few researchers are better placed to study the effects of technological change upon methods of communication than Mary Anne Kennan, the John Metcalfe PhD Scholarship winner who is currently undertaking a doctorate with the School of Information Systems Technology and Management.
Having worked through a Bachelor of Arts by the time she was 19, Mary Anne completed a graduate diploma in librarianship and worked in academic libraries around Australia and overseas.
| Mary Anne Kennan says the John Metcalfe PhD Scholarship has given her freedom to conduct research on IT and scholarly communication. |
Early in her career, Mary Anne was a vital contact for business information as she microfilmed annual reports and ran detailed company information searches, but with the arrival of the internet she witnessed an enormous change in how people sourced information, though not necessarily in the way they shared it.
Her PhD topic in IT and scholarly communication aims to understand the effects of changes in information technology, particularly the internet and open access, on scholarly communication.
"I started out wondering why people stuck with journals and things like that when they could put their work up on the internet and share it. Technology could change things dramatically but in fact it hasn't, so I'm interested in why," she explains.
Change has been a constant in her life. As the daughter of a human geographer, she attended 13 schools around the world. The experience did much for her people skills, less so for her linear learning, particularly in topics like maths.
However, Mary Anne re-discovered her love of learning when she returned to studies in 2001 to earn her Masters of Business & Technology at UNSW and continued on to her PhD. "I love the process and the academic environment … I'm really invigorated by being around people interested in new ideas," she says.
"The scholarship has given me great freedom to extract myself from the workforce and throw myself into research. It has probably cut five years off the time it would have taken to complete my PhD."