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Deb Robertson

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

projectinfolit.org/...11_TechStudy_FullReport1.2.pdf

Project Information Literacy PIL information literacy College Students

shared by Deb Robertson on 24 Feb 12 - No Cached
  • Deb Robertson on 24 Feb 12
     
    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

How to Turn Off Google's Annoying New Personal Search Results - 0 views

lifehacker.com/...ng-new-personal-search-results

google search personalization

shared by fleschnerj on 13 Jan 12 - No Cached
  • fleschnerj on 13 Jan 12
     
    A way to turn off this annoying feature
Mark Lindner

Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum Launches Online Digital Collection of 125,000 Masterpieces | LJ... - 1 views

www.infodocket.com/...-of-125000-masterpieces-online

art museums digital

shared by Mark Lindner on 27 Nov 12 - No Cached
  • Mark Lindner on 27 Nov 12
     
    "The ultra high-resolution images of works, both famous and less well-known, can be freely downloaded, zoomed in on, shared, added to personal 'studios', or manipulated copyright-free. Users can have prints made of entire works of art or details from them. Other suggestions for the use of images include creating material to upholster furniture or wallpaper, or to decorate a car or an iPad cover for example."
Sara Thompson

Bring back the 40-hour work week - Salon.com - 0 views

www.salon.com/...singleton

productivity history business professional management people

shared by Sara Thompson on 25 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • This is what work looks like now. It’s been this way for so long that most American workers don’t realize that for most of the 20th century, the broad consensus among American business leaders was that working people more than 40 hours a week was stupid, wasteful, dangerous and expensive — and the most telling sign of dangerously incompetent management to boot.
  • By 1914, emboldened by a dozen years of in-house research, Henry Ford famously took the radical step of doubling his workers’ pay, and cut shifts in Ford plants from nine hours to eight. The National Association of Manufacturers criticized him bitterly for this — though many of his competitors climbed on board in the next few years when they saw how Ford’s business boomed as a result.
  • One is that increasing a team’s hours in the office by 50 percent (from 40 to 60 hours) does not result in 50 percent more output (as Henry Ford could have told them). Most modern-day managers assume there will be a direct one-to-one correlation between extra hours and extra output, but they’re almost always wrong about this. In fact, the numbers may typically be something closer to 25-30 percent more work in 50 percent more time.
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • By that point, there were a solid five decades of industrial research that proved, beyond a doubt, that if you wanted to keep your workers bright, healthy, productive, safe and efficient over a sustained stretch of time, you kept them to no more than 40 hours a week and eight hours a day.
  • After WWII, as the GI Bill sent more workers into white-collar jobs, employers at first assumed that the limits that applied to industrial workers probably didn’t apply to knowledge workers. Everybody knew that eight hours a day was pretty much the limit for a guy swinging a hammer or a shovel; but those grey-flannel guys are just sitting at desks. We’re paying them more; shouldn’t we be able to ask more of them? The short answer is: no. In fact, research shows that knowledge workers actually have fewer good hours in a day than manual laborers do — on average, about six hours, as opposed to eight. It sounds strange, but if you’re a knowledge worker, the truth of this may become clear if you think about your own typical work day. Odds are good that you probably turn out five or six good, productive hours of hard mental work; and then spend the other two or three hours on the job in meetings, answering e-mail, making phone calls and so on. You can stay longer if your boss asks; but after six hours, all he’s really got left is a butt in a chair. Your brain has already clocked out and gone home.
  • Another is that overtime is only effective over very short sprints. This is because (as Sidney Chapman showed in 1909) daily productivity starts falling off in the second week, and declines rapidly with every successive week as burnout sets in. Without adequate rest, recreation, nutrition and time off to just be, people get dull and stupid. They can’t focus.
  • The Business Roundtable study found that after just eight 60-hour weeks, the fall-off in productivity is so marked that the average team would have actually gotten just as much done and been better off if they’d just stuck to a 40-hour week all along. And at 70- or 80-hour weeks, the fall-off happens even faster: at 80 hours, the break-even point is reached in just three weeks.
  • Wise managers who understand this will a) avoid requiring overtime crunches, because they’re acutely aware of the serious longer-term productivity hit that inevitably follows; b) keep the crunches as short as possible when they are necessary; and c) give their teams a few days off — one to two comp days per overtime week worked is about right — at the end of a hard sprint. This downtime enables them recuperate more quickly and completely. It’s much more productive to have them gone for the next week — and then back on the job, rested and ready to work — than have them at their workstations but too fried to get anything useful done for the next month.
  • The other thing about knowledge workers is that they’re exquisitely sensitive to even minor sleep loss. Research by the US military has shown that losing just one hour of sleep per night for a week will cause a level of cognitive degradation equivalent to a .10 blood alcohol level. Worse: most people who’ve fallen into this state typically have no idea of just how impaired they are. It’s only when you look at the dramatically lower quality of their output that it shows up. Robinson writes: “If they came to work that drunk, we’d fire them — we’d rightly see them as a manifest risk to our enterprise, our data, our capital equipment, us and themselves. But we don’t think twice about making an equivalent level of sleep deprivation a condition of continued employment.”
  • And it hurts the country, too. For every four Americans working a 50-hour week, every week, there’s one American who should have a full-time job, but doesn’t. Our rampant unemployment problem would vanish overnight if we simply worked the way we’re supposed to by law.
  • For these people, work wasn’t just work; it was their life’s passion, and they devoted every waking hour to it, usually to the exclusion of non-work relationships, exercise, sleep, food and sometimes even personal care. The popular stereotype of the geek was born in some real truths about the specific kinds of people who were drawn to tech in those early years.
  • Companies broadened their working hours, so programmers who came in at noon and worked through till midnight could make their own schedules. Dress codes were loosened; personal eccentricities were celebrated. HP famously brought in breakfast every morning so its engineers would remember to eat.
  • There were two problems with this. The first is that this “passion” ideal didn’t recognize that the vast majority of people have legitimate physical, emotional and psychological needs — things like sleep, exercise, relaxation and the maintenance of strong family and social support bonds — that these engineers didn’t have to nearly the same degree. The second was that most managers, lacking windows into their workers’ souls, decided to cut corners and measure passion with one easy-to-chart metric: “willingness to spend your entire life at the office.”
  • The unions — for 150 years, the guardians of the 40-hour week — were falling under a conservative onslaught; and in their place, the new cult of the entrepreneur was ascendant.
  • “working 90 hours a week and loving it!” (an actual T-shirt worn with pride by the original Macintosh team. (Productivity experts estimate that we’d have probably had the Mac a year sooner if they’d worked half as many hours per week instead.)
  • Within 15 years, everything America’s managers used to know about sustaining worker productivity was forgotten. Now, 30 years and a few economic meltdowns on, the cafeterias and child-care centers and gyms are mostly gone, along with the stock options and bonuses that were once held out as the potential reward for the long hours. All that remains of those heady, optimistic days is the mandatory 60-hour work-week. And, unless you’re an hourly worker — still entitled to time and a half by law — the only inducement employers currently offer in exchange for submitting yourself to this abuse is that you get to keep your job.
  • There are now whole industries and entire branches of medicine devoted to handling workplace stress, but the bottom line is that people who have enough time to eat, sleep, play a little, exercise and maintain their relationships don’t have much need of their help. The original short-work movement in 19th-century Britain demanded “eight for work, eight for sleep and eight for what we will.” It’s still a formula that works.
  • Here’s why. By the eighth hour of the day, people’s best work is usually already behind them (typically turned in between hours 2 and 6). In Hour 9, as fatigue sets in, they’re only going to deliver a fraction of their usual capacity. And with every extra hour beyond that, the workers’ productivity level continues to drop, until at around 10 or 12 hours they hit full exhaustion.
  • But the bottom line is: For the good of our bodies, our families, our communities, the profitability of American companies, and the future of the country, this insanity has to stop. Working long days and weeks has been incontrovertibly proven to be the stupidest, most expensive way there is to get work done.
  • Sara Thompson on 25 Mar 12
     
    Just in case we ever need more fodder for hiring...  "But the bottom line is: For the good of our bodies, our families, our communities, the profitability of American companies, and the future of the country, this insanity has to stop. Working long days and weeks has been incontrovertibly proven to be the stupidest, most expensive way there is to get work done."
Mark Lindner

New: "Key Issues for e-Resource Collection Development: A Guide for Libraries... - 0 views

infodocket.com/...e-for-libraries-full-text-free

ColDev librariana libraries IFLA

shared by Mark Lindner on 26 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • Mark Lindner on 26 Mar 12
     
    Electronic resources represent an increasingly important component of the collection- building activities of libraries. "Electronic resources" refer to those materials that require computer access, whether through a personal computer, mainframe, or handheld mobile device. They may either be accessed remotely via the Internet or locally.
Mark Lindner

Glorious Generalist: Simplifying Library Database Interfaces - 2 views

www.gloriousgeneralist.com/...ng-library-database-interfaces

librariana database research search

shared by Mark Lindner on 28 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • Mark Lindner on 28 Mar 12
     
    EBSCO interface tweaking & general thoughts on db interfaces By the way, I know this author personally.
Deb Robertson

How Nik Osborne Plans To Disrupt Class - 0 views

campustechnology.com/...ne-plans-to-disrupt-class.aspx

Etextbooks

shared by Deb Robertson on 23 May 12 - No Cached
  • Deb Robertson on 23 May 12
     
    The institution negotiates a deep discount off the list price of the textbook in order to have access to an e-text edition. In return for the discount, the university guarantees that every single student in the course will buy the e-text, which is charged like a lab fee. This is a definite change from the current textbook model, in which each student is personally responsible for showing up to class armed with the textbook, either in printed or digital form. As schools are discovering, as the prices of printed textbooks rise, so does the number of students who avoid buying the textbook. When we made this arrangement, we were considering, what does the publisher need to have, what does the author need to have, and what does the student need to have? You have to create a model, I think, that works out for all three of those pieces.
Sara Thompson

Lesson Plans - Digital Writing and Research Lab - 0 views

lessonplans.dwrl.utexas.edu

assignments teaching courses instruction instruction-design examples presentations

shared by Sara Thompson on 28 May 12 - No Cached
  • Sara Thompson on 28 May 12
     
    "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

The Learning Black Market - 0 views

tallblog.conted.ox.ac.uk/...the-learning-black-market

info-literacy search training education research students

shared by Sara Thompson on 12 Dec 11 - No Cached
  • 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.
  • Sara Thompson on 12 Dec 11
     
    "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

SearchReSearch: Verbatim mode - Google without interpretation - 0 views

searchresearch1.blogspot.com/...batim-mode-google-without.html

Google search

shared by Mark Lindner on 14 Dec 11 - No Cached
  • Mark Lindner on 14 Dec 11
     
    "What's Verbatim search? It's Google search without any synonymization, spell-correction, personalization or other interpretation. That is, it's just a basic search without any alterations in what you typed into the query box. To be clear, 99% of the time, those alterations actually improve your search results quite a bit. But every so often you really want just what you typed. Verbatim mode is for those situations. "
Sara Thompson

23 Things for Professional Development - 0 views

cpd23.blogspot.com

edtech bcuedtech webtools productivity courses instruction

shared by Sara Thompson on 01 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • Sara Thompson on 01 Oct 11
     
    Possibly of use for student training ... "23 Things is a self-directed course aimed at introducing you to a range of tools that could help your personal and professional development as a librarian, information professional or something else."
Mark Lindner

A New Version of the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL 2.0) « INFOdocket - 0 views

infodocket.com/...e-encyclopedia-of-life-eol-2-0

science

shared by Mark Lindner on 04 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • Mark Lindner on 04 Oct 11
     
    "Providing nearly 700,000 species, 35 million pages of scanned literature and over 600,000 photos of living creatures, the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) has recently launched a new version of its free online system in response to requests from the general public, citizen scientists, educators and professional biologists around the world for a site that was more engaging, accessible and personal."
  • Mark Lindner on 04 Oct 11
     
    May be a great resource for general biological information on species.
Sara Thompson

» Personal Data Monitoring: Gamifying Yourself ACRL Tech Connect - 0 views

acrl.ala.org/techconnect

PIM libraries data organization statistics privacy ideasfile

shared by Sara Thompson on 09 Apr 12 - No Cached
  • Sara Thompson on 09 Apr 12
     
    People want to collect and analyze data about what they do to help them reach their goals. Now that this is so easy we must consider how we can help them.
Sara Thompson

Surveys of Provosts and Presidents - their concerns, the Value report, and po... - 0 views

www.acrl.ala.org/value

surveys edtech education management libraries assessment

shared by Sara Thompson on 18 Apr 12 - No Cached
  • The two reports of interest are: The 2011-12 Inside Higher Ed Survey of College and University Chief Academic Officers http://www.insidehighered.com/download?file=finalCAOsurveyreport.pdf Presidential Perspectives, the 2011 Inside Higher Ed Survey of College and University Presidents http://www.insidehighered.com/sites/default/archive/storage/files/SurveyBooklet.pdf
  • The CAO survey had 1081 participants, while the survey of Presidents had 956 participants.  There is no information that can confirm that both the CAO and President from the same institution were in the majority for the respondents. So, the respondents for each report could be from different institutions.
  • nly one category — library resources and services — did a majority of all presidents (and a bare majority at that: 51 percent) rate the technology investment as “’very effective.’”  You can read the entire article here:  http://www.insidehighered.com/news/survey/president2011
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • One of the contributing factors as expressed in the Value report in terms of  why students choose to leave an institution is the issue that they don’t develop a personal connection with their institution. 
  • Sara Thompson on 18 Apr 12
     
    In March, Inside Higher Ed released an "inaugural" Survey of College & University Chief Academic Officers.  This report was the fourth in a series of surveys of senior academic leaders with the three other reports conducted in 2011 focusing on admissions officers, chief business officers, and presidents.
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

The Future of Personal Information Management, Part 1; William Jones - 0 views

www.morganclaypool.com/...S00411ED1V01Y201203ICR021

wishlist books PIM workflows productivity organization

shared by Sara Thompson on 04 Apr 12 - No Cached
  • Sara Thompson on 04 Apr 12
     
    I would love to get this but cannot find any information about the difference between PDF and PDF Plus, and really don't want a whole new account just for this ebook. Why you so difficult, publishers?
Sara Thompson

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

www.insidehighered.com/...can-you-put-form-question

libraries info-literacy instruction teaching assignments research education

shared by Sara Thompson on 02 Jun 12 - No Cached
  • 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.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • 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.
  • Sara Thompson on 02 Jun 12
     
    "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."
fleschnerj

Make it easy: art in your library - 0 views

theoutreachlibrarian.com/...ake-it-easy-art-in-the-library

shared by fleschnerj on 05 Jul 12 - No Cached
  • fleschnerj on 05 Jul 12
     
    Work smarter not harder. Delegate, delegate, delegate. If you want something done, get a busy person to do it. Wise words for the time-strapped librarian. Know what's even smarter? Not spending a dime to do so. The cash-strapped librarian is challenged to "do more with less"* and still be the modern miracle worker that he/she is.
Sara Thompson

A New Kind of Book› Tabletop Touchscreens: The Next Desktop Publishing Revolu... - 0 views

newkindofbook.com/...-desktop-publishing-revolution

future books interface technology

shared by Sara Thompson on 12 Dec 11 - No Cached
  • This one’s personal, but I wonder how unique I am. My writing method often involves a bunch of writing surfaces
  • Writing for me on a laptop display feels claustrophobic. (I’m talking about the idea-generating and the drafting phase here
Sara Thompson

Reality-based Librarianship for Passionate Librarians at Attempting Elegance - 0 views

www.attemptingelegance.com/?p=1412

management prof-dev presentations advice libraries

shared by Sara Thompson on 09 Dec 11 - No Cached
  • Figure that out. If you can figure that out, you’re advocating for an idea, a goal, and a belief. A passion. If you can’t figure that out, you’re advocating for an outreach technique, a piece of software, this thing, that thing, or the other.
  • professional development is all about challenging legacy processes.
  • Put yourself in the right place at the right time, because you intended to be there, you worked hard to get there, and you made a plan to ensure you stayed there. You can’t just show up in your manager’s office door and say “we should have ebooks” and expect it to happen. You must have a plan. (I would, on behalf of all managers everywhere suggest that if you are the sort of person who shows up and says “we need ebooks” you might consider how that sounds to your audience, and consider how well it’s working for you.) A plan is key. Because I believe that, I’m going to assert that any goal can be project-managed, and I’ll also assert that any goal should be project-managed. Must be.  I’ll say it again: Change doesn’t just happen. Change happens because someone worked hard to put themselves in the right place, at the right time. Work to put yourself in that place, just at that time. Plan for brilliance, agitate for success.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • You want to reach the stars.  But you look around, and you know you can get to the moon; that’s a reasonable goal, and you can see the route to get there. And so you plan for it.  But in your planning process, you realize you can’t just get to the moon; to get there with the resources you have available to you, you have to build with a really ugly rocket. And you hate that rocket. But you need that rocket. It’s what will get you to the moon.So love your rocket. Give it a cool name. Ignore how ugly it is. Always remember that it’s what will get you to the moon, and that getting to the moon is important.
  • There’s great strength in seeing a barrier for what it is, knowing when to stop hitting it, knowing when to ask for help, and knowing when to turn left and go around. Fear of failure, and our tolerance for it, are powerful motivators. If someone is strongly rooted in theirs, you may not be strong enough to move them aside. But you can always move yourself. And one way to start is to ask why someone is blocking you. Ask yourself what you can do about it, aif it’s worth doing, and if you can do it.
  • I hope everyone will consider what you’re giving up if you can’t embody your passion. You’re making a choice, and a sacrifice, if you don’t have room to act on your goals and dreams. You are the only one who can know if that’s the right decision for you, but make the decision consciously.
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