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fleschnerj

At Play in the Academic Library - 1 views

theoutreachlibrarian.com/...atplay

play academic libraries

shared by fleschnerj on 04 Oct 12 - No Cached
  • fleschnerj on 04 Oct 12
     
    Of the many experiences students expect to have in an academic library, play probably never comes to mind. Seeing a coffee shop within the library probably feels familiar, as do comfortable chairs, and of course they expect librarians, study rooms, and books, and Wii…wait, what?!
Sara Thompson

Take Online Modules - For Teachers (Library of Congress) - 1 views

www.loc.gov/...selfdirected

training instruction education copyright research

shared by Sara Thompson on 11 Nov 11 - Cached
  • Sara Thompson on 11 Nov 11
     
    One-hour professional development modules for educators to teach themselves about copyright and primary sources of various kinds.
  • Deb Robertson on 11 Nov 11
     
    Thank you, I have been keeping this site in another folder for consideration with our new "lib guides" on our new web site. Now we will know where they are when we need them.
fleschnerj

Watch | Everything Is a Remix - 0 views

www.everythingisaremix.info/watch-the-series

Copyright remix legal

shared by fleschnerj on 22 Feb 12 - No Cached
  • fleschnerj on 22 Feb 12
     
    An ambitious four-part documentary on the history and cultural significance of sampling and collaborative creation. The latest installment covers the three basic elements of creativity and explores how innovations emerge.
Mark Lindner

http://gpo.gov/pdfs/news-media/press/12news17.pdf - 0 views

gpo.gov/...12news17.pdf

Congress apps government_docs

shared by Mark Lindner on 21 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • Mark Lindner on 21 Mar 12
     
    GPO ENHANCES FEATURES OF CONGRESSIONAL MEMBER GUIDE APP
fleschnerj

Characteristics of Programs of Information Literacy that Illustrate Best Practices: A G... - 0 views

www.ala.org/...characteristics_rev_.pdf

libraries information literacy program

shared by fleschnerj on 21 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • fleschnerj on 21 Mar 12
     
    A draft version of an ACRL Document. It speaks of characteristics of successful information literacy programs.
Sara Thompson

Unbundling Higher Education | From the Bell Tower - 0 views

lj.libraryjournal.com/...-education-from-the-bell-tower

libraries education online-learning future

shared by Sara Thompson on 23 Feb 12 - No Cached
  • You can still buy albums, but what Jobs and Apple did was completely unbundle how music is sold. We now buy just those songs we prefer from individual artists, and create our own playlists. Now apply that idea to higher education.
  • but for the most part only a single institution can provide the whole bundle. This makes a great deal of sense for accreditation purposes. If your university is accredited, then every course and degree earned from it has the seal of approval. Now a new group of providers are bringing courses to the market, and their goal is to do to higher education what Apple did to music.
  • What they all have in common is unbundling. None offers degrees, and even if they did there’s no accreditation to back them up. In time that barrier will likely be eradicated. Recall that for-profit online universities once faced challenges obtaining accreditation in many states, but it is a thing of the past. Their growth was unstoppable, and in time states and accrediting agencies has to capitulate.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Khan Academy is equally well known, and an Inside Higher Ed news report shares some of the founder’s views about how his open learning website could provide competency-based credentialing as opposed to traditional accreditation.
  • Then there are some new entries into the open course market, such as Udacity, Coursera, Good Semester and Udemy.  These newer competitors are starting off with just a few courses, mostly free, but they give the impression that as many different providers become available a strikingly different model of higher education – alt-HE – could emerge.
  • An unbundled system of higher education might require academic librarians to think more entrepreneurially about how they operate.
  • The growing popularity of unbundled higher education also demonstrates there is a huge global audience for these courses; citizens around the world are seeking higher education that is unavailable or too costly in their own community. The forward-thinking traditional universities are looking at how they can capitalize on that market.
  • Sara Thompson on 23 Feb 12
     
    Steven Bell looks at trends in unaccredited education (OER, for-profit) and postulates on what it might mean for academic libraries. 
fleschnerj

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

ejournals.library.ualberta.ca/...17172

libraries first year freshmen

shared by fleschnerj on 24 Sep 12 - No Cached
  • fleschnerj on 24 Sep 12
     
    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.
Sara Thompson

AAC&U VALUE Rubrics - 0 views

www.slideshare.net/...aacu-value-rubrics

info-literacy libraries assessment

shared by Sara Thompson on 12 Jul 12 - No Cached
  • Sara Thompson on 12 Jul 12
     
    presentation from Lauren Pressley on AAC&U's value rubrics, including information literacy
Mark Lindner

ENGL 395: Latin@Bodies on the (Poetry) Line [session 2] | Pegasus Librarian - 0 views

pegasuslibrarian.com/...the-poetry-line-session-2.html

Pegasus bibliography infoLit have_read

shared by Mark Lindner on 17 Jul 12 - No Cached
  • This has usually never occurred undergrads. I encourage students to look at bibliographies as they would look at conversational clumps at a party — seeing who is talking to whom, then seeing what they’re saying and how they interact with each other, then joining a conversation and adding to it while referring back to the people whose points you’re expanding on or countering.
fleschnerj

Microsoft announces new version of Office - 0 views

news.cnet.com/...nnounces-new-version-of-office

Microsoft Office

shared by fleschnerj on 16 Jul 12 - No Cached
  • fleschnerj on 16 Jul 12
     
    Available today, the new suite is considered by CEO Steve Ballmer "the most ambitious version of Office we've ever done." Microsoft has pulled back the curtains on the latest version of its Office suite. At a press conference today, CEO Steve Ballmer announced the new version, noting that a preview edition of the cloud-based Office 365 edition will be available for people to try out today.
fleschnerj

ProQuest is taking over the Statistical Abstract of the U.S - 2013 forward. - 0 views

www.proquest.com/...20120322.shtml

ProQuest SAOUS

shared by fleschnerj on 22 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • fleschnerj on 22 Mar 12
     
    ANN ARBOR, Mich., March 22, 2012 - ProQuest will rescue one of researchers' most valued reference tools when it takes on publication of the Statistical Abstract of the United States beginning with the 2013 edition. The move ensures continuation of this premier guide to an extraordinary array of statistics, which has been published since 1878.
Sara Thompson

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

janefriedman.com/...a-ether-ebooks-gone-in-5-years

ebooks publishing videos ted future

shared by Sara Thompson on 13 Jul 12 - No Cached
  • 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.
  • Sara Thompson on 13 Jul 12
     
    Hugh McGuire: "The distinction between "the Internet" and "books" is arbitrary, and will disappear in 5 years. Start adjusting now."
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.
fleschnerj

Apps change everything at library - 0 views

winnetka.suntimes.com/...nge-everything-at-library.html

libraries IOS Apps

shared by fleschnerj on 07 Sep 12 - No Cached
  • fleschnerj on 07 Sep 12
     
    A few months ago the Winnetka-Northfield Library launched their mobile application for the iPod, iPad and iPhone, along with an Android device app available at winnetka.boopsie.com.
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

How Turning My To-Dos into a Story Boosted My Memory and Solved My Procrastination Problem - 0 views

lifehacker.com/...ved-my-procrastination-problem

productivity storytelling organization GTD todo lifehacker ideasfile

shared by Sara Thompson on 01 Apr 12 - No Cached
  • Sara Thompson on 01 Apr 12
     
    This sounds like something that would easily take me half an hour the first several times.  Intriguing, but .... I don't know.
Sara Thompson

Microsoft launches no holds barred anti-Google campaign [video] - 0 views

www.bgr.com/...red-anti-google-campaign-video

cloud google funny videos software

shared by Sara Thompson on 22 Feb 12 - No Cached
  • Sara Thompson on 22 Feb 12
     
    "Googlighting Stranger" ... to the tune of the theme song from the old Moonlighting TV show.  Love that. Also love that Microsoft feels this threatened. 
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

British Library - Press and Policy Centre - Free access to 65,000 19th century books fo... - 0 views

pressandpolicy.bl.uk/...ry-books-for-HE-users-57f.aspx

books digital 19thC

shared by Mark Lindner on 20 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • Mark Lindner on 20 Mar 12
     
    Free access to 65,000 19th century books for HE users [maybe only in the UK]
Sara Thompson

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

harvardmagazine.com/...twilight-of-the-lecture

teaching learning education online-learning bcushare future

shared by Sara Thompson on 23 Feb 12 - No Cached
  • 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.’
  • This innovative style of learning grew into “peer instruction” or “interactive learning,”
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • “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,”
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