librarianship
jdupuis | July 14, 2010Usually every day brings one or two interesting things at InsideHigherEd, but today is a bonanza.
The Ed Tech Sonic Boom
Today, we are able to leverage a set of well-developed and stable technologies to build in pedagogically advanced active learning methods into a wide variety of courses and modes of instructional delivery. To be a great teacher it is no longer a prerequisite to be a dynamic and gifted lecturer. Rather, faculty can partner with learning designers, librarians, and teaching specialists to create dynamic, student-centered courses that allow students interact and create with…
jdupuis | July 12, 2010For now, at least.
My natural inclinations about this whole mess are probably closest in nature to either Chad Orzel's or Jason Rosenhouse's, so reading them will probably give you a pretty close idea of where I stand. Bora, not surprisingly, has collected a lot of the reaction.
I also really like what Christie Wilcox has to say:
Let me make it clear, though - I don't blame anyone for leaving. I don't hold it against them. While I may not have had the same visceral reaction they did, I also haven't been here that long. I haven't dealt with this kind of mismanagement and gotten fed up about…
jdupuis | July 7, 2010So, PepsiCo has started up a new blog here on ScienceBlogs called Food Frontiers.
From the profile:
PepsiCo's R&D Leadership Team discusses the science behind the food industry's role in addressing global public health challenges. This is an extension of PepsiCo's own Food Frontiers blog.
This blog is sponsored by PepisCo. All editorial content is written by PepsiCo's scientists or scientists invited by PepsiCo and/or ScienceBlogs. All posts carry a byline above the fold indicating the scientist's affiliation and conflicts of interest.
From the introductory post:
On behalf of the team…
jdupuis | June 24, 2010First of all, the conference program is here. All the paper versions of the presentations will eventually be deposited in Queen's IR, QSpace, but don't seem to be there yet. I posted about my presentation here: Using a Blog to Engage Students in Literature Search Skills Sessions.
Now, If there can be said to be a theme to a conference which has no official theme, then the CEEA conference's theme was nicely summed up by a question from the audience during one of the sessions:
"How do you teach humbleness?"
Again and again it came up -- the challenge of teaching young, confident and…
jdupuis | June 3, 2010A cautionary tale from Cory Doctorow in his most recent Locus column, Persistence Pays Parasites.
My friend Katherine Myronuk once told me, "All complex ecosystems have parasites." She was talking about spam and malware (these days they're often the same thing) and other undesirable critters on the net. It's one of the smartest things anyone's ever said to me about the net - and about the world. If there's a niche, a parasite will fill it. There's a reason the cells of the organisms that live in your body outnumber your own by 100 to one. And every complex system has unfilled niches. The only…
jdupuis | May 27, 2010As I mentioned the other day, the most recent issue of ISTL is full of very fine articles.
The one that really caught my eye is the Viewpoints article Are A & I Services in a Death Spiral? by Valerie Tucci. It echoes a lot of the themes that I first wrote about way back in December 2006 -- that the traditional A&I services will have a lot of problems competing with services such as Google Scholar which are free to the user.
Here's some of what Tucci has to say:
Given all the changes what will the future bring for these services and how will it affect libraries, librarians, and users…
jdupuis | May 25, 2010Another terrific issue. I'm going to list everything but the book & database reviews & reports so as not to clutter the post too much.
Five Voices, Two Perspectives: Integrating Student Librarians into a Science and Engineering Library by Eugene Barsky, Aleteia Greenwood, Samantha Sinanan, Lindsay Tripp, and Lindsay Willson, University of British Columbia
Collection Assessment in Response to Changing Curricula: An Analysis of the Biotechnology Resources at the University of Colorado at Boulder by Gabrielle Wiersma, University of Colorado at Boulder
Browsing of E-Journals by…
jdupuis | May 13, 2010By some strange coincidence given yesterday's post, this post on Raising your internal profile as an academic liaison librarian by Emma Woods came across my Twitter feed this morning.
As part of a task and ï¬nish group on internal marketing of academic liaison librarians at the University of Westminster, I posted a message to a couple of JISCmail lists to see what other librarians do in this respect. As ever, I was delighted by the number of responses I received and the amount of interest there is on this topic.
In the current ï¬nancial climate where every penny counts, raising our internal…
jdupuis | May 12, 2010Or is that the inherent insularity of academic culture in general?
Joshua Kim has some great observations (in context of a review of This Book is Overdue) (Amazon) about the great chasm of misunderstanding between the culture of the academic library and the broader academic culture.
As academia shifts and changes, as budgets squeeze, as millenials millenialize, it's a constant struggle to make the case for the library's role in academic life. It's hard to know both who our best champion's are and who our most determined opponents are. Sitting in the library talking to ourselves is probably…
jdupuis | May 4, 2010That's the title of the short article I have in our most recent York Libraries Faculty Newsletter. It's a rejigged version for faculty of the two posts I did a while back on the blog I use for IL sessions, here and here. I'll be doing a more formal report on the IL blog at an upcoming conference, but that's for another post.
A lot of the newsletter is of local interest only, but there are a couple of articles that will have a broader appeal:
Information Literacy and Peer Tutors in the Classroom
Research Study on Perceptions of IL
It's also worth pointing out the short profile of Toni…
jdupuis | April 14, 2010From Twitter, here's the announcement:
Have you ever sent out a "tweet" on the popular Twitter social media service? Congratulations: Your 140 characters or less will now be housed in the Library of Congress.
That's right. Every public tweet, ever, since Twitter's inception in March 2006, will be archived digitally at the Library of Congress. That's a LOT of tweets, by the way: Twitter processes more than 50 million tweets every day, with the total numbering in the billions.
We thought it fitting to give the initial heads-up to the Twitter community itself via our own feed @librarycongress. (…
jdupuis | April 13, 2010There's a massive libraryland industry organized around figuring out what students want from us in terms of space, collections, services, etc. We survey, observe and focus group them to death. And that's great and incredibly valuable. But sometimes I think we might have a tendency to see what we want when we're observing and they might have a tendency to tell us what they think we want to hear when we survey or focus group.
Personally, I like to do Twitter searches. It's an interesting way to find out what they're saying and thinking about us when they're being candid and brutal and don't…
jdupuis | March 24, 2010Nice article by Delaney J. Kirk and Timothy L. Johnson on Blogs As A Knowledge Management Tool In The Classroom (via).
Based on their experiences in a combined 22 business courses over the past three years, the authors believe that weblogs (blogs) can be used as an effective pedagogical tool to increase efficiency by the professor, enhance participation and engagement in the course by the students, and create a learning community both within and outside the classroom. In this paper they discuss their decision to use blogs as an integral part of their course design to contribute to both…
jdupuis | March 15, 2010ISTL is a great resource for those of us in science and technology libraries. I'm happy to report on the tables of contents from the last two issues.
Winter 2010
Evaluation of an Audience Response System in Library Orientations for Engineering Students by Denise A. Brush, Rowan University
Open Access Citation Advantage: An Annotated Bibliography by A. Ben Wagner, University at Buffalo
Information Portals: A New Tool for Teaching Information Literacy Skills by Debra Kolah, Rice University and Michael Fosmire, Purdue University
Are Article Influence Scores Comparable across Scientific…
jdupuis | March 5, 2010The Huffington Post has a couple of posts featuring the most amazingly beautiful libraries in the world, Part One here and Part Two here.
Here's the text from the two posts:
Times are changing for libraries everywhere. But even as many libraries build their digital collections and amp up their technological offerings, we thought we'd take a step back and show our appreciation for the beauty of many of these vast collections of books. Below are some of the most amazingly beautiful libraries from around the world.
Let us know what you think of these and let us know your favorites.
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Last…
jdupuis | March 4, 2010I'm away for a couple of days, so I thought I'd fill in a bit with an oldy-buy-goody from February 4, 2009. It ended up being the first of three parts, with the other two being here and here. As usual, the first part got the most readers and comments, with the two after that being decidedly less popular. Go figure.
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I was just going to call this post "On Blogging" but I decided I like Robert Scoble's rather provocative statement better. This is not to say that I agree with his rather extreme stance, because I definitely don't, but I think it's an…
jdupuis | March 1, 2010The inaugural Canadian Engineering Education Association Conference will be held this year from June 7-9 at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario.
The Canadian Engineering Education Association (CEEA) is a new organization whose mission is to "enhance the competence and relevance of graduates from Canadian Engineering schools through continuous improvement in engineering education and design education." This first annual CEEA conference will integrate and grow on the previous efforts of the Canadian Design Engineering Network (CDEN) and the Canadian Congress on Engineering Education (C2E2…
jdupuis | February 25, 2010My Lakehead University colleague Janice Mutz and I reprised the session I did at OLA two years ago this morning for an active and engaged crowd of about 50 librarians -- a great crowd for the very first session of the conference since a lot of people are still trickling in after arriving and registering.
This time around, we really put the emphasis on engagement and conversation, running the session like a combination Information Literacy and unconference session. Overall, we were really pleased with how it went and enjoyed the input from so many great librarians. Of the 20 or so "…
jdupuis | February 22, 2010Here's what they're about:
The first draft of Panton Principles was written in July 2009 by Peter Murray-Rust, Cameron Neylon, Rufus Pollock and John Wilbanks at the Panton Arms on Panton Street in Cambridge, UK, just down from the Chemistry Faculty where Peter works.
They were then refined with the help of the members of the Open Knowledge Foundation Working Group on Open Data in Science and were officially launched in February 2010.
Here they are:
Science is based on building on, reusing and openly criticising the published body of scientific knowledge.
For science to effectively function…
jdupuis | February 17, 2010A bit of self-promotion. Forgive me. I'll be brief.
My TAIGA fisking post from a while back is featured prominently in Walt Crawford's most recent Cites & Insights (March 2010) (pdf, html) with quite a bit of value-added comment from Walt on TAIGA, the Darien Statements and other topics. Thanks, Walt.
I'm flattered to be mentioned in Graham Lavender's presentation at the recent Web2.You conference in Montreal. His very fine presentation was on Blogs and Twitter for Individuals and Institutions. No doubt referring to my 2008 presentation at Web2.You, on slide 3 he mentions that "…