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fleschnerj

U.S. House Introduces SKILLS Act - 0 views

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    Defines an "effective school library program" to be staffed by a state-certified school librarian, have up-to-date materials including technology, teaches digital literacy skills, and finally, has regular collaboration between other education professionals over curriculum. Replaces Improving Literacy Through School Libraries with Improving Literacy and College and Career Readiness Through Effective School Library Programs which would award competitive grants to underserved local schools and school districts to develop an effective school library program. Allows school librarians access to professional development funds under Title II of ESEA.
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

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

  • 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.
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  • 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.
Sara Thompson

Pedagogy and Space: Empirical Research on New Learning Environments (EDUCAUSE Quarterly) | EDUCAUSE - 0 views

  • In the new technology-enhanced learning spaces at the University of Minnesota, students outperformed final grade expectations relative to their ACT scores. When instructors adapted their pedagogical approach to the new space by intentionally incorporating more ACTive, student-centered teaching techniques, student learning improved. Students and faculty had positive perceptions of the new learning environments but also had to adjust to the unusual classrooms.
fleschnerj

ACRLog » Stop Making Sense (Scholarly Publishing Edition) - 0 views

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    The Research Works Act will prohibit federal agencies from unauthorized free public dissemination of journal articles that report on research which, to some degree, has been federally-funded but is produced and published by private sector publishers receiving no such funding. It would also prevent non-government authors from being required to agree to such free distribution of these works. Additionally, it would preempt federal agencies' planned funding, development and back-office administration of their own electronic repositories for such works, which would duplicate existing copyright-protected systems and unfairly compete with established university, society and commercial publishers.
Deb Robertson

Balancing Act: How College Students Manage Technology While in the Library during Crunch Time - 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
Sara Thompson

Findings: How We Will Read: Laura Miller and Maud Newton - 0 views

  • Welcome to the second installment of “How We Will Read,” a series exploring the future of reading from the perspectives of publishers, writers, and intellectuals. This week, we talked to Laura Miller and Maud Newton, founders of The Chimerist, a new blog dedicated to exploring the imaginative potential of the iPad.
  • There’s some sort of disgrace to being a reader, or a viewer, or just absorbing some work of culture — it’s this lesser activity, by that rationale. I really disagree with that. I feel like reading and looking at art and all of these things are creative acts in their own way. The experience of a piece of culture being appreciated takes two people.
  • But it is a special kind of canvas. It is a device that enables you to focus on one thing at a time, and I know some people have a real issue with that, that you can’t open another window inside what you’re doing, but I actually find that really refreshing. Even as someone who loves the internet. When I turn to my iPad, I’m looking for a different kind of distraction-free experience, for whatever I’m working on at the time.
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  • LM: Everything that Maud said. I wrote a piece about enhanced fiction e-books for Salon a couple of weeks ago, and I have one on nonfiction coming up any day now. I have been thinking about the whole narrative issue. I think there is a huge difference between fiction and nonfiction
  • MN: The pleasure of surrender, in fiction, is the exact opposite of interactivity. It’s this sinking in to the pleasure of the story
  • LM: I wrote a piece years before the iPad ever existed, actually, on hypertext fiction for the New York Times Book Review.
  • There’s an app called Once Magazine that’s mostly photograph-based. It is an iPad-specific magazine that reports on various happenings around the world. It’s a very interesting product, and I’ve been really impressed with all the issues so far.
  • MN: I’ve been playing around this app called Meanwhile, which is based on a graphic novel by Jason Shiga produced in 2009 as a really complicated choose-your-own-adventure book, evidently. I became aware of it through my friend Chris Baker, who’s an editor at WIRED. I’ve been playing around with that and enjoying it. The cartoonist is also a mathematician, so there are a lot of complex and frustrating story loops that you can get caught in.
  • I do think this speaks to what Laura was saying about the tension between trying to solve something and trying to experience it.
  • And, the thing about Chopsticks is that some of it is inherent to the iPad’s touchscreen technology, but it could have been a website or something. A lot of things you see on the iPad are different kinds of web art that’s been ported into this new format. And you absorb it in a different way because you’re holding it in your hand, and you’re touching it.
  • And then I became really interested in the size of some of these devices. Somebody in the London Review of Books made the observation that the old cuneiform tablets that the Babylonians and other ancient cultures used were actually about the same size as the iPhone. [Peter Campbell, “At the British Museum.”] So I’m interested in this different way of experiencing story and technology.
  • We’re both a little odd in that we don’t necessarily fetishize the object. I read so voraciously and indiscriminately as a child that my mother was constantly buying books at yard sales and the goodwill, and whatever. And a lot of times they were falling apart — literally. I would just hope the spine wouldn’t completely come off by the end of it. So I have a somewhat utilitarian approach to the object itself, even though I appreciate a beautiful book — and I can of course be swayed to pick up a book because of the way it looks. But I don’t really care what it looks like, once I’m reading it, if I like it.
fleschnerj

Library of Congress asks: how should we let you break DRM? - 0 views

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    For the fifth time since the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) was passed in 1998, the Library of Congress is preparing to grant limited rights to crack DRM locks on digital content. Not that it matters much; despite an increased willingness at the Library to grant such permission, the Actual tools most people need to bypass DRM remain forbidden.
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