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Mark Lindner

Glorious Generalist: Simplifying Library Database Interfaces - 2 views

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    EBSCO interface tweaking & general thoughts on db interfaces By the way, I know this author personally.
Sara Thompson

Wolfram|Alpha Analyzes Shakespeare's Plays - 0 views

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    "We thought it would be interesting to see what sorts of computational insights Wolfram|Alpha could provide, so we uploaded the complete catalog of Shakespeare's plays into our database. This allows our users to examine Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, Othello, and the rest of the Bard's plays in an entirely new way."
Sara Thompson

Lesson Plans - Digital Writing and Research Lab - 0 views

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    "The DWRL is pleased to share our library of innovative technology-based lesson plans and classroom assignments created by DWRL Instructors. Our new online database features a wide assortment of lesson plans and assignments employing a number of technologies. The lesson plans address a broad spectrum of pedagogical activities-from initial brainstorming to electronic peer review, from interactive visual rhetoric lessons to collaborative multi-media online publications; the site also features lesson plans suitable for time spans as short as a single class and as lengthy as semester-long projects. Also, be sure to visit the DWRL's Blogging Pedagogy site which features an ongoing series of weekly interviews with individual instructors about their technology-based assignments, allowing for a more in-depth and personal look at our featured lesson plans."
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.
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  • 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.
Mark Lindner

SearchReSearch: What is AND about, really? - 0 views

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    One question I hear quite a bit is this: Don't we have to teach the basics of Boolean search to our students? The answer, from a Google perspective is this: We teach Boolean searching only for using traditional database systems.
Sara Thompson

A Post-LMS World (EDUCAUSE Review) | EDUCAUSE - 1 views

  • According to Babson Survey Research Group, 65 percent of all reporting higher education institutions said that online learning was a critical part of their long-term strategy, and over 6.1 million students took at least one online course during the fall 2010 term—an increase of 560,000 students over the previous year.
  • A post-LMS world does not suggest that the LMS is obsolete but, rather, that the practice of evaluating learning outcomes through a traditional LMS as the sole means for knowledge acquisition is obsolete. The original design of the LMS was transactional and largely administrative in nature, hence the “M” in “LMS.” The function of the traditional LMS is to simplify how learning is scheduled, deployed, and tracked as a means to organize curricula and manage learning materials.
  • LMS 3.0 design focuses on four essential applications: learning grids; e-learning intelligence; content clouds; and open architecture.
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  • Effective LMS 3.0 learning grids create and inspire greater user independence and self-governance to facilitate effective content-creation capacities and new crowd-sourced intellectual property through the personalization of a vast array of information sources. LMS 3.0, properly designed, creates reliable content that facilitates learning through organized interaction and communications processes that include the widest-possible spectrum of points of view.
  • LMS 3.0 information architecture plays an increasingly important role as the gravitational pull for core strategies in assessment, engagement, retention, and outcomes.
  • Tracking learning events is crucial, but ultimately faculty are interested in the kind of learning that yields positive behavioral changes reflected in outcomes and a mastery level leading to a seamless transition to the workforce.
  • LMS 3.0 design expands functionality to include open, flexible digital repositories with components that add context through outcomes measurement, social curation, reporting, analytics, and extensive sharing capabilities.
  • Higher education is increasingly embracing a more open future, and next-generation LMS design needs to commit to an open ideology.
  • Moving from LMS 1.0 environments that do not offer long-standing, established community contributor models—from the perspective of both source code and open content—to a truly open environment will be a critical success benchmark for the post-LMS era.
  • Effective e-learning design, as a lowest common denominator, will embrace nimble, interoperable, modular infrastructure in ways that make learning contemporary, relevant, and engaging.
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    An interesting opinion piece on the future of the LMS.  Try reading this and replacing "LMS" with "library database" ... what would that look like? 
Deb Robertson

Balancing Act: How College Students Manage Technology While in the Library during Crun... - 0 views

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    Our major findings are as follows: 1. During one of the busiest times of the academic year, the students we interviewed were mainly using different IT devices to stay in touch with their friends while they were in the campus library. In the hour before we interviewed them, 81% of the students in our sample had checked for new messages (e.g., email, Facebook, IMs, texts). 2. At the same time, many of the same respondents who said they had checked for messages had also prepared assignments for submission (60%), studied and reviewed materials for class (52%), and satisfied personal curiosity with a computer search (e.g., sports score, news, gossip) (45%). 3. Despite the pressing need to complete assignments at crunch time, few respondents reported having used the full range of library resources and/or services during the previous hour. Many more respondents said they had used library equipment (39%) such as computers and printers than anything else, including scholarly research databases (11%), library books (9%), face-to-face reference (5%), and/or online reference (2%). 4. Overall, we found most respondents (85%) could be classified as "light" technology users. These were students who used "only" one or two IT devices primarily in support of coursework and, to a lesser extent, communication. The most frequent combination (40%) of devices being used was a cell phone (including smart phones) with a personally owned laptop computer while they were in the library. In stark contrast, only 8% of the sample could be classified as "heavy" technology users. 5. For over half the sample, a personally owned laptop (58%) was the primary-most essential-device in use at the time of the interview. A smaller percentage of respondents (35%) were using a library desktop computer. 6. More than any other combination of applications, respondents had both a Web browser and a word processing program open at the same time (47%) while they were in the library. 7. Despi
fleschnerj

Google-Trained Minds Can't Deal with Terrible Research Database UI - 0 views

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    Comments are the best p Students of all ages can have a good deal of trouble doing research online. (And not just students, we'll admit, if we're honest.) The obvious answer to this problem is to train people to do better searches. But the most obvious answer may not be the best one.
Deb Robertson

The newsonomics of the Next Issue magazine future » Nieman Journalism Lab - 1 views

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    In the hurly-burly of digital content innovation and monetization, it's hard to figure out what things are, so we try to find apt comparisons. With the new Next Issue digital newsstand, let's think Netflix or Pandora or Spotify as the closest cousins. Next Issue, the offspring of five prosperous parents (Time Inc., Conde Nast, Hearst, Meredith, and News Corp.), launched last night what I think will be a model-changing product for publishers.
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    One way to read: Sign up once - and the new site is offering relatively generous 30-day trials - and you have but one navigation to learn. While the full content from each of the magazines is present, with added video, Next Issue says customers need only learn one way of getting around. If it's an intuitive design, that's a huge plus, as news- and feature-hungry readers find ourselves forced to learn the navigation nuances of each of our favorite apps.
Sara Thompson

Embedded Librarianship in the LMS Survey Results - 1 views

Some interesting comments from a listserv message... ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Burke, John J. <burkejj@muohio.edu> Date: Thu, Mar 15, 2012 at 9:03 AM Subject: [...

instruction LMS libraries info-literacy

started by Sara Thompson on 19 Mar 12 no follow-up yet
Sara Thompson

Can You Put that in the Form of a Question? | Inside Higher Ed - 0 views

  • One of their assignments is to interview a researcher in their field. This year, since the students had a nice mix of majors from across the curriculum, we used reports from the interviews as an opportunity to analyze on how research traditions vary from one discipline to another and how these experts’ processes differ from those of non-experts.
  • One thing that many students remarked on as they reported on their interviews: the activities that define research are enormously varied from one discipline to another. The process a researcher goes through to examine the historical context in which Shakespeare wrote one of his history plays is a world apart from what a researcher does to develop a new vaccine or what an ethnographer does when studying an isolated culture in Brazil.
  • The scientists all had co-authors; the social scientists were a mix of solo and collaborative projects, and the humanists all performed solo acts. And yet, it became clear that all of them were working within an ongoing conversation. None of them was doing work that didn’t draw on and respond to the work of others.
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  • Every interview subject conducted some sort of a literature review as part of any research project
  • Every researcher described some strategies for keeping up with new developments in their area of expertise, all of which involved some scanning of new publications and some personal contact with individuals exploring the same territory.
  • For most, presenting research at conferences was a common part of bringing their research to completion. For all, writing up results for publication was an important final step, and they seemed acutely aware of the pecking order for publication venues in their field.
  • (In contrast, undergraduates mostly encounter articles within databases, called up by key words, not as artifacts within a particular journal which carries clout.)
  • One thing the students all gained through these interviews was an appreciation that research is not a matter of finding answers in other people’s publications. Every scholar interviewed described how they had asked a question that nobody had asked before, a question they couldn’t answer themselves until they had completed the research. It struck me that so much of what undergraduates experience as “research” is very nearly the opposite, a process of uncovering answers others have already arrived at.
  • I’m also thinking about what these interviews said collectively about how real research is conducted. It makes me a little crazy when students abandon a truly interesting question because they can’t find sources to quote that provide the answer, or when they change their topic based on what they can find easily. Or (shudder) when they say they've written their paper, but need help finding five sources to cite. Clearly, they are not learning how to do research; they aren't even learning what research is.  What I would really, really like is to figure out how to give every student the experience of not worrying so much about getting the right answers, but learning how to ask a really good question. The kind they won't find answered in the library.
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    "I teach a course in the spring called Information Fluency... It's an upper division undergraduate course pitched to students who are planning to go to graduate school, giving them a chance to learn more about the way the literature of their field works as well as generally how to use library and internet tools for research."
Sara Thompson

Index labels and examples of expert search in WorldCat - 0 views

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    Index labels and examples of expert search in WorldCat; short code commands for things like title, series, isbn and many others
Sara Thompson

Nobody cares about the library: How digital technology makes the library invisible (and... - 1 views

  • Yet, while it is certainly true that digital technology has made libraries and librarians invisible to scholars in some ways, it is also true, that in some areas, digital technology has made librarians increasingly visible, increasingly important.
  • The invisible library
  • Let me offer three instances where the library should strive for invisibility, three examples of “good” invisibility:
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  • Search:
  • APIs and 3rd party mashups:
  • Social media:
  • The visible library
  • Focus on special collections
  • Start supporting data-driven research
  • Start supporting new modes of scholarly communication—financially, technically, and institutionally.
  • Here I’d suggest tools and training for database creation, social network analysis, and simple text mining.
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    Skip the first bit about the Chuck clip - not important and too long. Scroll forward to the part starting with "The Invisible Library" -- excellent food for thought about the roles we play. 
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