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fleschnerj

Could Many Universities Follow Borders Bookstores Into Oblivion? - 0 views

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    I actually disagree with a few of their arguments, but thought it was worth a share.
fleschnerj

Helicopter Librarian: Expect the Unexpected - 0 views

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    The main difference between great librarians and Helicopter Librarians is that the former are focused on providing excellent service whereas the Helicopter Librarians are committed to building radically great relationships that students are comfortable with, similar to their relationships with their Helicopter Parents.
fleschnerj

Publishers Will Appeal E-Reserves Decision That Favored Georgia State U. - 0 views

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    The publisher plaintiffs who accused Georgia State University of copyright infringement in a lawsuit over course e-reserves aren't happy with the outcome of that case. On Monday they said they would appeal a federal judge's decision, handed down in May, that was largely a win for the defendants.
fleschnerj

On ethical reference service (or, "Fishmongers? In my library?") - 0 views

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    There's an old saying: give a man a fish, and he'll eat for a day; teach him how to fish and he'll die from mercury poisoning because you can't survive on nothing but fish. Or something like that. I never was any good at proverbs.
Deb Robertson

The Higher Education Compliance Alliance - 0 views

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    The Higher Education Compliance Alliance was created to provide the higher education community with a centralized repository of information and resources for compliance with federal laws and regulations.
Sara Thompson

10 Amazing Uses for Wolfram Alpha - How-To Geek - 0 views

  • Enter two terms with a vs in between them and you’ll get a comparison. For example, you could compare websites to see the differences in traffic between them.
  • Enter a type of food and Wolfram Alpha will provide you with its nutrition information. You don’t have to stop at one — enter multiple types of food and Wolfram Alpha will compare them for you.
  • Ask where you are and Wolfram will use your IP address to track you down. You can also enter an IP address into the box and Wolfram will track that IP address down and tell you where it is.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Wolfram Alpha can come up with a random password and estimate how long it will take to crack. You can even tweak the rules used to generate the password.
  • Have you been drinking? Wolfram Alpha can estimate whether you can legally drive home. Ask it if you’re drunk and you’ll get a form asking for more information.
  • Enter a name and you can see how common it is, complete with a graph showing you how popular the name has been over time. Enter multiple names and Wolfram will compare how common they are.
  • Type body mass index and Wolfram will present you with another form. After you provide your weight and height, Wolfram Alpha will calculate your BMI and tell you whether you’re within the normal range.
  • Want to find words that begin with a certain letter, end with a certain combination of letters — or both? Just ask Wolfram Alpha in plain English.
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.
fleschnerj

Walking away from the American Chemical Society - 0 views

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    tl;dr: SUNY Potsdam will not be subscribing to an American Chemical Society online journal package for 2013. We will instead be using a combination of the Royal Society of Chemistry content, ACS single title subscriptions, the ACS backfile, and ScienceDirect from Elsevier** to meet our chemical information needs. We're doing this because the ACS pricing model is unsustainable for our institution and we were unable to find common ground with the sales team from the ACS. Instead, we explored other options and exercised them. You could do the same if you find yourself in a position similar to ours as ACS standardizes their pricing, and maybe together we can make enough choices to make our voices heard in meaningful ways.
fleschnerj

From the Frying Pan Into the Fire (and Back Again): Adventures in Subject-Based, Credit... - 0 views

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    Here's a fun one about a credit instruction class.
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

Behind an Online Giant's Accreditation Bid Is a Small Brick-and-Mortar Campus - Governm... - 0 views

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    And now for your daily dose of scary...
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
Sara Thompson

Canvas: Syllabus for Introduction to Research - 0 views

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    A short class on using library services, with just one assignment and a quiz; lots of information in the syllabus. (example using Canvas from Instructure)
Mark Lindner

Pathways To Best Practice guides | m-libraries - 0 views

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    "We've recently launched a new feature on the blog - the Pathways to Best Practice guides. This series of documents brings together the resources we've been collecting during the project as well as examples of initiatives and the lessons learned which should help you if you are thinking of implementing something similar."
Deb Robertson

How Google Impacts The Way Students Think | TeachThought - 0 views

  • Google creates the illusion of accessibility
  • Google naturally suggests “answers” as stopping points
  • Being linear, Google obscures the interdependence of information
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    When your formative years are spent working your fingers through apps and iPads, smartphones and YouTube, the digital world and its habits can bend and shape not just how you access information, but how you conceptualize it entirely.
Sara Thompson

Information Literacy: A Neglected Core Competency (EDUCAUSE Quarterly) | EDUCAUSE - 0 views

  • The findings are troubling. College students think of information seeking as a rote process and tend to use the same small set of information resources no matter what question they have: The primary sources they use for course work are course readings and Google. They rely on professors to be "research coaches" for identifying additional sources. They use Google and Wikipedia for research about everyday life topics. They tend not to use library services that require interacting with librarians.
  • The Association of American Colleges and Universities identified information literacy as one of the essential learning outcomes that prepare students for 21st century challenges.2 The"2010 Horizon Report," a collaboration between the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative and the New Media Consortium, indicated that the need for training in the related digital media literacy is a critical challenge in education for the next five years. The Council for Independent Colleges offers annual workshops for chief academic officers, librarians, and faculty on integrating information literacy at their campuses.3
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    Researchers at the Information School at the University of Washington released an important and thought-provoking report in late 2009: "Lessons Learned: How College Students Seek Information in the Digital Age."1 The study confirms and expands on the results of other reports. Its particular value is the size of the population studied, the diversity of institutions represented, and the use of both a survey and follow-up interviews for data collection.
Mark Lindner

New iOS App Uses Audio Recognition to Provide 3rd-Party Info About Claims Made in TV Ad... - 0 views

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    "Simply launch the SuperPAC app and then simply hold your iPhone/iPad/iPod up to your television while a presidential television advertisement is airing. The user then receives, "objective, third-party information." Think Shazam or SoundHound but instead of info about songs/recording artists your presented with info about the presidential campaign ad your viewing."
fleschnerj

Evernote For Education: Citelighter Teams Up With Cengage To Take The Pain Out Of Onlin... - 0 views

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    When it comes to researching for papers, homework assignments, etc., students primarily turn to the Web for information despite its inherent academic dangers. Naturally, with the diversity of content out there, keeping track of pertinent links and bibliographical data is difficult when jumping from source to source. Citelighter launched in the fall of 2011 to address this problem by creating an academic research platform that helps students save, organize and automatically cite both online and offline content. An Evernote for Education.
Sara Thompson

NCSU Libraries Mobile Scavenger Hunt: RIS: NCSU Libraries - 0 views

  • The NCSU Libraries Mobile Scavenger Hunt is designed to allow maximum mobility of student teams as they explore the library, while the librarians hosting the hunt keep score in real time from a central location. Each team is supplied with a clue sheet with 15 questions about the library and its services, a map of the library, and an iPod Touch for entering clue answers. Students are given a brief introduction to the activity and its rules, as well as basic instruction in use of the iPod and relevant apps, before being sent off to answer their clues. Teams are allowed 25 minutes to explore the libraries and answer the questions before returning to the starting location to review correct answers, learn which team won, and receive prizes.
  • The teams' iPod Touches are equipped with the Evernote multimedia note-taking application, which the teams use to submit text- and photo-based answers to the clues. Each team's Evernote account is shared with a master account monitored by the librarians running the show; through the Evernote web or iPad app, librarians can see each team's notes in real-time as they are created. Scorekeeping is performed using a Google Spreadsheet, which is configured with the expected answers for each question. As teams submit their notes, the librarians are able to mark which questions were answered correctly by modifying the corresponding spreadsheet cells. Scores are tabulated automatically based on which questions are marked correct.
  • NCSU Libraries Mobile Scavenger Hunt: information for instructors4 Complete implementation documentation (pdf)5 Sample introduction slide show (pdf)6 Sample scavenger hunt questions (pdf)7 Scoring sheet template (Google spreadsheet)
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    "The NCSU Libraries Mobile Scavenger Hunt is an interactive, technology-rich way to introduce students to the library. Developed in response to student and instructor feedback collected in 2010-2011, it leverages the motivating power of situated learning and the fun of team game dynamics to orient students to the Libraries' spaces, promote the use of emerging technologies, and foster confidence in using the Libraries' collections. The activity is run using iPod Touches and several free apps and online tools. Students answer Scavenger Hunt questions using Evernote, a free app for multimedia note-taking, which is installed on the iPod Touches distributed to the Scavenger Hunt teams. Librarians are able to monitor students' answers in real time as they are entered into Evernote, keeping score on a Google Docs spreadsheet."
Sara Thompson

The Future of the Book Is the Stream - Megan Garber - Technology - The Atlantic - 0 views

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    Would I subscribe to my books instead of outright purchasing them? We subscribe to Pandora, but we consume that music in a wholly different, almost mindless way. Books require a much more deliberate investment of time, no matter how easy it might be to get them. I'm not sure it's really the same model as the author here implies.
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