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Sara Thompson

BubCap is the TUAW Best of 2011 iPad accessory | TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog - 1 views

  • These inexpensive little Home button covers (4 for US$5) hide the iPad or iPhone Home button to keep your kids from switching to another app and doing something fun like deleting all of your contacts or calling your boss. Apparently, a lot of parents need and use BubCaps, as they topped the reader voting in our TUAW Best of 2011 iPad accessory category.
Sara Thompson

A Model of Learning Objectives : Revision of Bloom's Taxonomy - 1 views

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    Really great visual cross-section of cognitive process with knowledge dimensions.  Fascinating way to think about learning activities. 
Mark Lindner

Moving Beyond the NetLibrary Legacy, EBSCO Reshapes Its Ebook Platform - The Digital Shift - 1 views

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    Ebooks on EBSCO
Deb Robertson

Kimbel Library Instructional Videos - 1 views

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    Joshua Vossler, Information Literacy/Reference Librarian at Coastal Carolina University, gave an incredibly entertaining and energetic presentation on creating instructional videos. He believes that learning is dependent on focused attention; therefore, the instructional videos we create need to be dynamic and humorous.  Joshua provided a helpful list of best practices for creating instructional videos, such as "Use anything silly or weird, such as a chicken" and "Videos should be no longer than three minutes." I highly recommend that you check out his videos here. He has certainly inspired me to brainstorm ways I can infuse more humor into my own instructional video series.
fleschnerj

OPAC Survey - 1 views

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    There are many more questions and results on this blog. This particular question just seemed worth pointing out. Have you ever suffered from "OPAC envy" when looking at someone else's OPAC?
Mark Lindner

News from the Getty | Getty Research Institute Launches Gateway to the World's Art Libr... - 1 views

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    On Thursday, May 31, 2012 the Getty Research Institute (GRI) will launch the Getty Research Portal, an unprecedented resource that will provide universal access to digitized texts in the field of art and architectural history.  The Getty Research Portal is a free online search gateway that aggregates descriptive metadata of digitized art history texts, with links to fully digitized copies that are free to download. Art historians, curators, students, or anyone who is culturally curious can unearth these valuable sources of research without traveling from place to place to browse the stacks of the world's art libraries. There will be no restrictions to use the Getty Research Portal; all anyone needs is access to the internet.
Sara Thompson

Essay on making student learning the focus of higher education | Inside Higher Ed - 1 views

  • Culture -- in higher education, and in our society -- is at the heart of the matter.
  • We have reduced K-12 schooling to basic skill acquisition that effectively leaves most students underprepared for college-level learning. We have bastardized the bachelor’s degree by allowing it to morph into a ticket to a job (though, today, that ticket often doesn’t get you very far). The academy has adopted an increasingly consumer-based ethic that has produced costly and dangerous effects: the expectations and standards of a rigorous liberal education have been displaced by thinly disguised professional or job training curriculums; teaching and learning have been devalued, deprioritized, and replaced by an emphasis on magazine rankings; and increased enrollment, winning teams, bigger and better facilities, more revenue from sideline businesses, and more research grants have replaced learning as the primary touchstone for decision-making.
  • The current culture -- the shared norms, values, standards, expectations and priorities -- of teaching and learning in the academy is not powerful enough to support true higher learning. As a result, students do not experience the kind of integrated, holistic, developmental, rigorous undergraduate education that must exist as an absolute condition for truly transformative higher learning to occur.
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  • Degrees have become deliverables because we are no longer willing to make students work hard against high standards to earn them.
  • Rethinking higher education means reconstituting institutional culture by rigorously identifying, evaluating and challenging the many damaging accommodations that colleges and universities, individually and collectively, have made (and continue to make) to consumer and competitive pressures over the last several decades. What do we mean by “damaging accommodations?
  • We mean the allocation of increasing proportions of institutional resources to facilities, personnel, programs and activities that do not directly and significantly contribute to the kind of holistic, developmental and transformative learning that defines higher learning.
  • We mean the deplorable practice of building attractive new buildings while offering lackluster first- and second-year courses taught primarily by poorly paid and dispirited contingent faculty.
  • We mean the assumption that retention is just keeping students in school longer, without serious regard for the quality of their learning or their cumulative learning outcomes at graduation.
  • The primary problem is that the current culture of colleges and universities no longer puts learning first -- and in most institutions, that culture perpetuates a fear of doing so. Isolated examples to the contrary exist, but are only the exceptions that prove the rule.
  • In calling for the kind of serious, systemic rethinking that directly and unflinchingly accepts the challenge of improving undergraduate higher education, we are asking for four things; taken together, they demand, and would catalyze, a profound, needed, and overdue cultural change in our colleges and universities.
  • 1. The widespread acceptance and application of a new and better touchstone for decision-making in higher education, linked to a strong framework of essential, core principles. A touchstone is a standard, or criterion, that serves as the basis for judging something; in higher education, that touchstone must be the quality and quantity of learning. A touchstone and a clear conceptual framework link our advocacy for change to a powerful set of ideas, commitments, and principles against which to test current policies, practices, and proposals for reform.
  • 2. A comprehensive re-evaluation of undergraduate education and experience guided by those core principles. This must occur both nationally, as an essential public conversation, and within the walls of institutions of all types, missions, and sizes.
  • 3. The leadership and actual implementation and renewal of undergraduate higher education needs to be led by the academy itself, supported by boards of trustees, higher education professional organizations, and regional accrediting bodies alike. Such rethinking ought to be transparent, informed by public conversation, and enacted through decisions based on the new touchstone, improving the quality and quantity of learning.
  • 4. Learning assessment must become inextricably linked to institutional efficacy. The formative assessment of learning should become an integral part of instruction in courses and other learning experiences of all types, and the summative assessment of learning, at the individual student, course, program, and institution levels should be benchmarked against high, clear, public standards.
  • Cultural problems require cultural solutions, starting with a national conversation about what is wrong, and what is needed, in higher education. The country should reasonably expect higher education to lead this conversation. For real change to occur, discussions about the quality and quantity of learning in higher education and the need for reform must occur at multiple levels, in many places, and over a significant period of time -- most importantly on campuses themselves
  • If enough change occurs in enough places, and if our public expectations remain high and consistent, learning may become the touchstone for decision-making; the quality and quantity of learning -- documented by rigorous assessment -- may become both each institution’s greatest concern and the basis for comparisons between various colleges and universities
  • Richard P. Keeling is principal, and Richard H. Hersh is senior consultant, for Keeling & Associates, a higher education consulting practice. They are authors of the recent book, We’re Losing Our Minds: Rethinking American Higher Education (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), from which this essay is partly excerpted.
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    The core explanation is this: the academy lacks a serious culture of teaching and learning. When students do not learn enough, we must question whether institutions of higher education deliver enough value to justify their costs. Resolving the learning crisis will therefore require fundamental, thoroughgoing changes in our colleges and universities.
Deb Robertson

ACRLog » Convenience and its Discontents: Teaching Web-Scale Discovery in the... - 1 views

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    Providing a unified interface through which patrons can access nearly all of your library's collection has an obvious appeal on all sides. Users get the googley familiarity and convenience of a singular, wide-ranging search box and, according to a recent case study done at Grand Valley State University, the reduced friction patrons face when using library resources correlates to an increase - potentially dramatic - in the frequency with which they access them. If the new tool is like Google, then why does it require instruction?
Sara Thompson

Net Smart: How To Thrive Online - 1 views

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    Interesting visual spin on the various literacies we want our students to learn. I'm hoping to find a video of the author speaking about this before diving into the book. 
Sara Thompson

I Can't Believe You're Throwing Out Books! | Magnificent Nose - 1 views

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    I thought this was a great little perspective from another librarian who has done (and will do) a lot of weeding. 
Mark Lindner

Reading Critically - Interrogating Texts - Harvard Library LibGuides at Harvard Library - 1 views

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    Six Reading Habits to Develop in Your First Year at Harvard
Sara Thompson

Directory of libraries and their ILS choice - 1 views

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    Iowa academic libraries -- Symphony users include Dordt, Drake, and Morningside
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

ProQuest - ProQuest Search Widget - 1 views

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    Embed a ProQuest search widget on a web page
Sara Thompson

WorldCat search box [WorldCat Affiliate Program] - 1 views

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    WorldCat search widgets to embed on websites ... not as tweakable as I remember them being, especially not the 3rd example.  2nd example can be played with, though. 
fleschnerj

Scholastica and DIY Open Access Journals - ProfHacker - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 1 views

shared by fleschnerj on 05 Jul 12 - No Cached
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    With traditional journals suffering from rising costs and increased disinterest in print subscriptions, online open access is looking more appealing than ever. The team behind recently launched Scholastica is offering a new platform for those interested in joining the movement. Scholastica is designed to make setting up and managing an academic journal about as easy as configuring a Facebook group.
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? 
fleschnerj

The story of a faculty learning community for scholarly writing [PDF] - 1 views

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    In May 2010, Appalachian State University's Hubbard Center for Faculty Development sponsored a weeklong writing retreat designed to help faculty become more productive writers in any academic genre. The retreat began with a two-day workshop conducted by Tara Gray, author of Publish and Flourish: Become a Productive Scholar
fleschnerj

Internet Librarian 2011: Developing a Mobile Presence: Mobile Web, Usability, and Devices - 1 views

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    Not exactly relevant, but an interesting read.
fleschnerj

Learning Spaces - 1 views

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    A sample chapter out of the book, Learning Spaces. This chapter focuses on Virginia Tech's Math Emporium.
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