Skip to main content

Home/ BCU Library/ Group items tagged article

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Sara Thompson

Information Technology and Libraries: Vol 31, No 1 (2012) - 1 views

  • Articles Copyright: Regulation Out of Line with our Digital Reality? PDF Abigail J. McDermott 7-20 Library Use of Web-based Research Guides PDF Jimmy Ghaphery, Erin White 21-31 Investigations into Library Web-Scale Discovery Services PDF Jason Vaughan 32-82 Usability Test Results for a Discovery Tool in an Academic Library PDF Jody Condit Fagan, Meris A. Mandernach, Carl S. Nelson, Jonathan R. Paulo, Grover Saunders
  •  
    First open-access e-version issue
Sara Thompson

"I need three peer reviewed articles" or the Freshman research paper | Information Want... - 0 views

  • And every year, I become more and more convinced that having first-year students use peer-reviewed literature in their research is a terrible idea that takes the focus away from what is important for them to learn.
  • Expecting a first-year student to be able to grasp literary criticism and science articles written for other PhD’s seems crazy to me.
  • It becomes more about finding an article that is at least somewhat related to their topic than finding good evidence for their argument.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • I understand perfectly that faculty want their first-year students to find quality resources and they want their students to have an understanding of scholarly communication. But is the best way to do that forcing them to find scholarly articles for a research paper? That requires so many different skills that many of these students don’t have yet: 1. The ability to turn a topic into a search strategy 2. The ability to search in library databases 3. The ability to look at a citation and determine whether it is a scholarly journal or not (or maybe they’ve just checked a box in a database which means that they never need to learn this important skill) 4. The ability to read an abstract and determine whether the article is relevant to their topic 5. The ability to read a scholarly journal article and synthesize information from it 6. The ability to integrate evidence from the scholarly literature into their paper 7. The ability to write effectively
  • Another thing that the focus on requiring students to only find peer-reviewed sources does is that it distances them from research and information literacy.
  • But when the focus is on telling students that the only quality stuff comes from the peer-reviewed literature, we are distancing what students learn in school about information literacy from what they will do in the real world.
  • I also love the idea of giving all students in a class peer-reviewed articles from different disciplines and have them analyze them together. It can not only help them to understand and dissect peer-reviewed literature, but it can also show them the differences in scholarly communication in different disciplines.
Sara Thompson

Flow - A Measure of Student Engagement « User Generated Education - 0 views

  • The characteristics of “Flow” according to Czikszentmihalyi are: Completely involved, focused, concentrating – with this either due to innate curiosity or as the result of training Sense of ecstasy – of being outside everyday reality Great inner clarity – knowing what needs to be done and how well it is going Knowing the activity is doable – that the skills are adequate, and neither anxious or bored Sense of serenity Timeliness – thoroughly focused on present, don’t notice time passing Intrinsic motivation – whatever produces “flow” becomes its own reward
  • (http://austega.com/education/articles/flow.htm)
  • Intellectual challenge was measured by Csikszentmilhalyi’s theory of flow. (Source for the following http://www.cea-ace.ca/education-canada/article/sorting-students-learning)
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • In the past it was often assumed that disengaged students were easy to identify: they were the young people at the back of the class, the ones making their way to shop or special classes, or those lingering down the street well after the bell had rung. Data from What did you do in school today? suggest that disengagement is not – and may never have been – limited to small groups of students or as visible as we once thought. Over half of the students in our sample (n=32,300) – many of whom go to class each day, complete their work on time, and can demonstrate that they are meeting expected learning outcomes – are experiencing low levels of intellectual engagement.
  •  
    "The Canadian Education Association's (CEA) released a report What did you do in school today? - a three-year research and development initiative designed to assess, and mobilize new ideas for enhancing the learning experiences of students. Intellectual challenge was measured by Csikszentmilhalyi's theory of flow."
Sara Thompson

EXTRA ETHER: eBooks Gone in 5 Years? | Jane Friedman - 0 views

  • He co-edited with Brian O’Leary the seminal Book: A Futurist’s Manifesto, which has enough meaningful, thought-provoking essays in it to keep you muttering to yourself from the tiki bar back to the pool for the rest of the summer. Have a look if you haven’t seen its free online version.
  • McGuire points out that both Amazon’s Kindle and Apple’s iPhone arrived in 2007.
  • Publishers are deathly afraid of the Internet. And they have very good reason to be, because the Internet is famous for gobbling up business models and spitting out total chaos.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • It’s a problem because in order to get this similarity with the past, we’ve ended up constraining ebooks and making them look a lot more like print books and a lot less like the Internet.
  • He offers a couple of strong examples of deeply interactive projects. One is the YouVersion interactive Bible site. Another is one he describes as an extensively structured online rendering of the 1912 journal of Robert Scott’s expedition to the South Pole, “a beautiful web experience,” each element of the journey tied to Google Maps.
  • For some time now, Virginia Quarterly Review’s Jane Friedman has been trying to wean readers away from the standard idea of “The Book” as the inevitable goal. Here she is, in a piece from October, asking “What is your killer medium?”: The book is often assumed to be the most authoritative and important medium, but that’s only because we’ve all been led to believe that (through a culture that has created The Myth about the author as authority). It’s a Myth, neither good nor bad. Just a belief system that, increasingly, we’re all moving away from.
  •  
    Hugh McGuire: "The distinction between "the Internet" and "books" is arbitrary, and will disappear in 5 years. Start adjusting now."
Sara Thompson

Catching up with information literacy assessment - 0 views

  •  
    "The goal of this article is to build on the assessment links Jarson provided. Her stated goal was to "guide readers to important resources for understanding information literacy and to provide tools for readers to advocate for information literacy's place in higher education curricula." In addition to the information on resources and tools, Jarson provided links to universities whose assessment tools were available for review on their Web sites. For this article, selected Web sites have been accessed and evaluated further. A handful of additional information resources have been profiled, including new Web sites that offer a variety of assessment tool formats."
Sara Thompson

How to Get the News You Want Without Being Overwhelmed - Alan Jacobs - Technology - The... - 0 views

  • (1) Our story begins with RSS feeds (in my case via Google Reader) and Twitter. Lots of reading material turns up every day through these initial filters. Some of it I can tell immediately I don't need to follow up on, but if I see something that's even potentially interesting I send it to ...
  • (2) Instapaper. What a great gift Instapaper is. The bookmarklet makes it trivially easy to send articles to Instapaper from your browser, and the better Twitter and RSS clients for the iPad and iPhone
  • (3) What I read in Instapaper I pass along to one of three destinations. If I have no further use for an article or post after reading it, I simply trash it. If I decide I'd like to share something in the article with others, I post it to my tumblelog.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • And if I think the article is something I might want to use later, I select a representative quotation from it and then bookmark it, with an appropriate tag, in Pinboard -- which is just as wonderful as Instapaper. Incidentally, I also pay $25 a year to have Pinboard generate a (searchable!) archive of all the pages I have bookmarked, which insures me against link rot.
  • And one more thing: I think filtering strategies need to be taught -- starting in high school, at the latest, and in a very thorough way in colleges. But this is rarely and haphazardly done. Drinking from the firehose is too hard, too disorienting; and yet that's what we allow young people to do. This is a serious mistake. The filtering tools are out there, and they're either free or ridiculously cheap. Let's use them, and teach others to use them.
Sara Thompson

How Users Search the Library from a Single Search Box - 2 views

  •  
    Article from ACRL, due out March 2012 This study examines how users search a large public university library using a prominent, single search box on the library website. The article examines two semesters of real-world data, totaling nearly 1.4 million transactions...
Sara Thompson

ALA Library Fact Sheet 21 - Automating Libraries and Virtual Reference: A Selected Anno... - 0 views

  •  
    Lots of links to reports and articles about library software including ILS vendors. Great resources!
Mark Lindner

The Gypsy Librarian: Article Note: On Progressive LGBTQ Reference - 0 views

  •  
    Perhaps of interest as we ramp up our LibGuides, with the caveat we must be very careful.
fleschnerj

Using Cloud Services for Library IT Infrastructure - 0 views

  •  
    Cloud computing comes in several different forms and this article documents how service, platform, and infrastructure forms of cloud computing have been used to serve library needs. Following an overview of these uses the article discusses the experience of one library in migrating IT infrastructure to a cloud environment and concludes with a model for assessing cloud computing.
Sara Thompson

Information Literacy and the FYE « info-fetishist - 0 views

  •  
    Information Literacy and the First-Year Experience ... big collection of links to reports, articles, and books about this big topic.
Sara Thompson

This is a news website article about a scientific finding | Martin Robbins | Science | ... - 0 views

  •  
    I'm keeping this as an example for class presentations.  I don't know what it's an example of, but some day I will need this. I just know it. Found it again recently from a twitter thread.
Deb Robertson

Best practices for integrating e-books in academic libraries | The Search Principle: vi... - 1 views

  •  
    This posting offers links and references to several other articles on this topic.
  •  
    Still trying to solve this puzzle
fleschnerj

The iPad goes back to school - 1 views

  •  
    Good article showing what others are doing with iPads
Sara Thompson

The Learning Black Market - 0 views

  • In simple terms students personal use of the internet is generally very effective for their education but they are nervous that their practices are not valid and don’t reveal them to their tutors.
  • The learning black market exists largely in the Personal area of the map. Our data from the Transitional education-stage (Late stage secondary school + first year undergraduate) is indicating that learning activity in this area has two main elements
  • I suspect that Facebook IM is used extensively for homework as it’s convenient and immediate. It’s also private and a very low risk way of collaborating with a fellow student.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • The debate should be around how we evolve educational processes to take advantage of or to account for these new forms.  We cannot continue to teach the literacies that have been the mainstay of the educational system in their current form because the web smashes traditional paths to understanding.
  • A search on Google to help complete an assignment commonly returns a Wikipedia article. As we know Wikipedia articles are pitched at an ideal level and length to get a handle on a new subject which is something our Transitional students have to do a lot. The problem is that most of the students in the Transitional education stage we have spoken to in the US and the UK have been told not to use Wikipedia and so keep this practice a secret.
  • This is generating the learning black market in which is it all too easy to simulate understanding for coursework and formal assessments. Worse still, it is a market in which genuine learning can take place but is not being recognised because resources and practices are not seen as valid and therefore do not become visible to the formal education system.
  • I think what you are describing here is more accurately a grey (or parallel) market “the trade of a commodity through distribution channels which, while legal, are unofficial, unauthorized, or unintended by the original manufacturer”.
  • I chose the name ‘Learning Black Market’ because of the way in which I think current approaches are pushing students learning practices ‘underground’ (as Jo’s experience would indicate). It’s the clandestine aspect of the phrase that I’m interested in. The ‘goods and services’ are not in themselves illegal but they are being treated that way by students.
  •  
    "The messages or lack of messages from educational institutions on these practices is generating a learning black market which masks the sheer scale of these new modes of engagement."
Mark Lindner

LSE produces new Twitter guide for academics - 10 - 2011 - News archive - News - News a... - 0 views

  •  
    How can Twitter, which limits users to 140 characters per tweet, have any relevance to universities and academia, where journal articles are between 3,000-8,000 words long? Can anything of academic value ever be said in just 140 characters?
Sara Thompson

New interactive teaching techniques | Harvard Magazine Mar-Apr 2012 - 0 views

  • The epiphany came via an article in the American Journal of Physics by Arizona State professor David Hestenes. He had devised a very simple test, couched in everyday language, to check students’ understanding of one of the most fundamental concepts of physics—force—and had administered it to thousands of undergraduates in the southwestern United States. Astonishingly, the test showed that their introductory courses had taught them “next to nothing,”
  • “They had a bag of tricks, formulas to apply. But that was solving problems by rote. They floundered on the simple word problems, which demanded a real understanding of the concepts behind the formulas.”
  • More important, a fellow student is more likely to reach them than Professor Mazur—and this is the crux of the method. You’re a student and you’ve only recently learned this, so you still know where you got hung up, because it’s not that long ago that you were hung up on that very same thing. Whereas Professor Mazur got hung up on this point when he was 17, and he no longer remembers how difficult it was back then. He has lost the ability to understand what a beginning learner faces.”
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • Reviewing the test of conceptual understanding, Mazur twice tried to explain one of its questions to the class, but the students remained obstinately confused. “Then I did something I had never done in my teaching career,” he recalls. “I said, ‘Why don’t you discuss it with each other?’” Immediately, the lecture hall was abuzz as 150 students started talking to each other in one-on-one conversations about the puzzling question. “It was complete chaos,” says Mazur. “But within three minutes, they had figured it out. That was very surprising to me—I had just spent 10 minutes trying to explain this. But the class said, ‘OK, We’ve got it, let’s move on.’
  • Interactive pedagogy, for example, turns passive, note-taking students into active, de facto teachers who explain their ideas to each other and contend for their points of view.
  • Interactive learning triples students’ gains in knowledge as measured by the kinds of conceptual tests that had once deflated Mazur’s spirits, and by many other assessments as well.
  • Peer-instructed students who’ve actively argued for and explained their understanding of scientific concepts hold onto their knowledge longer.
  • This innovative style of learning grew into “peer instruction” or “interactive learning,”
  • “Now, think of how you became good at it,” he says next. Audience members, supplied with wireless clickers, can choose from several alternatives: trial and error, apprenticeship, lectures, family and friends, practicing. Data from thousands of subjects make “two things stand out,” Mazur says. “The first is that there is a huge spike at practicing—around 60 percent of the people select ‘practicing.’” The other thing is that for many audiences, which often number in the hundreds, “there is absolutely zero percent for lectures. Nobody cites lectures.”
  • The active-learning approach challenges lecturers to re-evaluate what they can accomplish during class that offers the greatest value for students. Mazur cites a quip to the effect that lectures are a way of transferring the instructor’s lecture notes to students’ notebooks without passing through the brains of either.
  • So I began to ask my students to read my lecture notes before class, and then tell me what questions they have [ordinarily, using the course’s website], and when we meet, we discuss those questions.”
  • Students find a neighbor with a different answer and make a case for their own response. Each tries to convince the other. During the ensuing chaos, Mazur circulates through the room, eavesdropping on the conversations. He listens especially to incorrect reasoning, so “I can re-sensitize myself to the difficulties beginning learners face.” After two or three minutes, the students vote again, and typically the percentage of correct answers dramatically improves. Then the cycle repeats.
  • ‘We’ve never done a problem of this kind.’ I tell them, ‘If you had done a problem of this kind, then by definition, this would not be a problem.’ We have to train people to tackle situations they have not encountered before.
  • “It’s not easy. You get a lot of student resistance,” he continues. “You should see some of the vitriolic e-mails I get. The generic complaint is that they have to do all the learning themselves. Rather than lecturing, I’m making them prepare themselves for class—and in class, rather than telling them things, I’m asking them questions. They’d much rather sit there and listen and take notes.
  • In addition to student resistance, there is architectural resistance. “Most classrooms—more like 99.9 percent—on campus are auditoriums,”
Sara Thompson

IDEO: Big Innovation Lives Right on the Edge of Ridiculous Ideas :: Articles :: The 99 ... - 0 views

  •  
    "Most people think that the opposite of play is work (especially in the corporate world) but the opposite is boredom or even depression."
fleschnerj

Bridging the Gap: Understanding the Differing Research Expectations of First-Year Stude... - 0 views

  •  
    Objective: This study sought to better understand the research expectations of first-year students upon beginning university study, and how these expectations differed from those of their professors. Most academic librarians observe that the research expectations of these two groups differ considerably and being able to articulate where these differences are greatest may help us provided more focused instruction, and allow us to work more effectively with professors and student support services. Methods: 317 first-year undergraduate students and 75 professors at Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax, NS were surveyed to determine what they each expected of first-year student research. Students were surveyed on the first day of term so as to best understand their research expectations as they transitioned from high school to university. Results: The gulf between student and professor research expectations was found to be considerable, especially in areas such as time required for reading and research, and the resources necessary to do research. While students rated their preparedness for university as high, they also had high expectations related to their ability to use non-academic sources. Not unexpectedly, the majority of professors believed that students are not prepared to do university-level research, they do not take enough responsibility for their own learning, they should use more academic research sources, and read twice as much as students believe they should. Conclusions: By better understanding differing research expectations, students can be guided very early in their studies about appropriate academic research practices, and librarians and professors can provide students with improved research instruction. Strategies for working with students, professors and the university community are discussed.
1 - 20 of 45 Next › Last »
Showing 20 items per page