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fleschnerj

Why your website stinks - 2 views

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    All too true.
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

InformationFluencyTransliteracyResearchTools | Scoop.it - 2 views

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    PP slides from a lecture given by Dr. Jane Secker at the University of Sheffield iSchool on March 1st, 2012.
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    This presentation offers some interesting graphics and new ways to define what I am trying to figure out we are trying to accomplish with our instructional opportunities and classroom collaborations.
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

Developing a Library Copyright Policy | EIFL - 1 views

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    Could be useful if/when we decide to have a copyright policy
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.
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.
Sara Thompson

Information Technology and Libraries: Vol 31, No 1 (2012) - 1 views

  • Articles Copyright: Regulation Out of Line with our Digital Reality? PDF Abigail J. McDermott 7-20 Library Use of Web-based Research Guides PDF Jimmy Ghaphery, Erin White 21-31 Investigations into Library Web-Scale Discovery Services PDF Jason Vaughan 32-82 Usability Test Results for a Discovery Tool in an Academic Library PDF Jody Condit Fagan, Meris A. Mandernach, Carl S. Nelson, Jonathan R. Paulo, Grover Saunders
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    First open-access e-version issue
fleschnerj

How to get kids to think critically | Bad Astronomy | Discover Magazine - 2 views

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    A wonderfully-done and highly engaging series of short videos teaching kids the basics of critical thinking.
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.
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  • 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.
Mark Lindner

At Last: Our Publicly Accessible Portal to Search, Browse, and Read ECCO-TCP ... - 1 views

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    I'm delighted to report that this is no longer the case: the University of Michigan-based implementation of the ECCO-TCP texts can now be fully explored by the general public: http://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/ecco/.
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.
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)
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

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

  • 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.”
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  • 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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