Celia's

...“Students do not have adequate information literacy skills when they come to college, and this goes for even high-achieving students,” said Asher, the lead research anthropologist at the Enthographic Research in Illinois Academic Libraries (ERIAL) Project, which recently studied the search habits of more than 600 Illinois students spanning a range of institutions and demographic groups.

“And they’re not getting adequate training as they’re going through the curriculum,” he said.

...“Student overuse of simple search leads to problems of having too much information or not enough information … both stemming from a lack of sufficient conceptual understanding of how information is organized,” he said.

...Those libraries that have tried to teach good search principles have failed, he continued, because they have spent “too much time trying to teach tools and not enough time trying to teach concepts.” It would be more useful for librarians to focus training sessions on how to "critically think through how to construct a strategy for finding information about a topic that is unknown to you," Asher said in a follow-up e-mail to Inside Higher Ed.

...[More]

From Inside Higher Ed

Thanks to Ingrid Thomson for this.

 

... Ford Madox Ford recommended instead that readers "open the book to page ninety-nine and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you". A new website, page99test.com, launches next month to test that premise. It will offer (courageous) authors and aspiring authors the chance to upload the 99th pages of their works and invite readers to comment on whether they would buy, or like to read, the rest...[More]

Abstract:
The social sciences in sub-Saharan Africa continue to operate under conditions that are seriously under-resourced. The fact that there is still sustained and vibrant social sciences research in countries which, with a few exceptions, have little government support, poor institutional facilities and many other challenges says a great deal about the resilience and resolve of the scholars concerned.

In : The 2010 World Social Science report released by United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) focuses on the Knowledge Divide. It emphasizes the key role played by knowledge in social development, the disparities in research capacities across countries and the fragmentation of knowledge that hamper the capacity of the social sciences to respond to the challenges of today and tomorrow.

The report is available in English: http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0018/001883/188333e.pdf

The 2010 World Social Science report released by United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) focuses on the Knowledge Divide. It emphasizes the key role played by knowledge in social development, the disparities in research capacities across countries and the fragmentation of knowledge that hamper the capacity of the social sciences to respond to the challenges of today and tomorrow.

The report is available in English.

Yozi new library of cellphone stories – also known as mobile novels or m-novels – was launched by the . as part of its m4Lit (mobiles for literacy) project. see the project release at http://m4lit.wordpress.com/2010/08/23/press-release-launch-of-yoza-m-novel-library/ 

via  

http://lselibraryresearch.blogspot.com/

 

 

 

http://www.yoza.mobi/

From a Computerworld Report by Daniel Grotta and Sally Wiener Grotta

Before we begin, the introduction is worthy of a special mention since it offers a very useful overview of the e-book reader scene.

From the Comparison Section of the Intro:

Including privately branded devices and Asian knockoffs, there are probably more than a score of e-readers currently on the American market. For this roundup, we focused on currently shipping, readily available models, most by mainstream vendors. These include the Alex, jetBook Lite, iPad, Kindle, Kobo, Libre eBook Reader Pro, Nook and Pandigital Novel.

Sony has recently introduced new versions of its three e-readers: the Reader Pocket Edition, Reader Touch Edition and Reader Daily Edition. While the upcoming models weren't available in time for this article, Computerworld did get a first look at the devices -- check out the article: Sony introduces three light, bright touch-screen e-readers

Because of deadline pressures, we could not include a number of e-readers scheduled or rumored for imminent third- or fourth-quarter release, including devices from Velocity Micro, Asus, Acer, Sharp, Sony and Copia.

Each Review Contains the Following Sections:

+ What's Interesting:

+ What's Good

+ What's Not

+ Bottom Line

+ At a Glance (Basic Specs)

Access the Complete Report

Source: Computerworld via Resourceshelf

Just a small number of bad referees can significantly undermine the ability of the peer-review system to select the best scientific papers. That is according to a pair of complex systems researchers in Austria who have modelled an academic publishing system and showed that human foibles can have a dramatic effect on the quality of published science.

Scholarly peer review is the commonly accepted procedure for assessing the quality of research before it is published in academic journals. It relies on a community of experts within a narrow field of expertise to have both the knowledge and the time to provide comprehensive reviews of academic manuscripts.

While the concept of peer review is widely considered the most appropriate system for regulating scientific publications, it is not without its critics. Some feel that the system's reliance on impartiality and the lack of remuneration for referees mean that in practice the process is not as open as it should be. This may be particularly apparent when referees are asked to review more controversial ideas that could damage their own standing within the community if they give their approval.

Questioning referee competence...

[more]

From: 

http://physicsworld.com/

Over 200 civil society organisations and numerous prominent individuals have endorsed a civil society statement titled "Let the Truth Be Told! Stop the Secrecy Bill".

The statement characterises the Protection of Information Bill as fundamentally undermining the struggle for whistleblower protection and access to information and as  reminiscent of our apartheid past. The statement calls for a redrafting of the Bill to comply with the constitutional values of access to information and freedom of expression.

The Right to Know campaign will also be announcing plans to raise public concern about the Protection of Information Bill and other threats to the freedom of expression through a week of action that will commence on 19 October 2010 (the commemoration of Black Wednesday). The statement will remain open for further endorsements through the campaign website.

The 200 odd organisations endorsing the statement include Afesis-Corplan, the Alternative Information Development Centre, Amnesty International, Black Sash, Ceasefire Campaign, CIVICUS, Democracy Development Programme, Diakonia Council of Churches, Earthlife Africa, Freedom of Expression Institute, Gay & Lesbian Network, Idasa, Institute for Security Studies, Open Democracy Advice Centre, M&G Centre for Investigative Journalism (amaBhungane), National Welfare Forum, Palestine Support Committee, Professional Journalists’ Association, Section27, South African History Archives, and the South African National Editors Forum as well as various social movements including Equal Education, Social Justice Coalition, Social Movements Indaba, Treatment Action Campaign, and the Unemployed People’s Movement.

Over 400 individuals have also endorsed the Statement, including Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Nadine Gordimer, Prof Kader Asmal, Zakes Mda, Dr Max Price, Prof. Jonathan Jansen, Zackie Achmat, Pieter-Dirk Uys, Mary Burton, Mazibuko K Jara, Andrew Feinstein, Richard Spoor, Andre Brink, Terry Bell, Laurie Nathan, Pierre de Vos, Max Du Preez, Paul Graham, Pippa Green, Prof Hoosen Coovadia and Breyten Breytenbach.

A full list of endorsing organizations and individuals will be released at the Statement launch.

http://www.right2know.org.za/

Resources

The documents for download below contain all the information needed to stay informed on how the bill will affect society.

Included is the actual bill that is being proposed, as well as a plain language version of the bill and various submissions to parliament by civil society.

The page is regularly updated with the latest documentation on the bill.

Documents / URLs

- Protection of Information Bill - In plain language

- Protection of Information Bill

- Submission from the Institute for Security Studies and the Open Society Justice Initiative to the Ad Hoc Committee considering the Protection of Information Bill

- Community Media Views

- South African Human Rights Commission submission

- South African History Archive and Nelson Mandela Foundation [SAHA and NMF] submission

- South African Media and Gender Institute [SAMGI] submission

- COSATU submission

- M&G Centre for Investigative Journalism Submission

- M&G Centre for Investigative Journalism Briefing Note What is wrong with the Protection of Information Bill

- Protection of Information Bill, Statement by Cardinal Napier

- Right2Know

- Video of R2K Cape Town Launch

Cutting through the confusion: A step-by-step guide to the Protection of Information Bill and the Media Appeals Tribunal

Written by: Dario Milo and Okyerebea Ampofo-Anti of Webber Wentzel.This article was originally published in the Saturday Star on 7 August 2010  Webber Wentzel Media Practice Group News, p.5-7. [pdf]

In recent weeks there has been much publicity about the Protection of Information Bill and the ANC's proposal for the establishment of a Media Appeals Tribunal and how both of these developments represent a serious threat to media freedom. Unfortunately some media reports have tended to conflate the two issues and one could be forgiven for feeling confused. What follows is a broad overview of both issues...[More]  From Polity.org.za

 

Archie L Dick

Historians of reading generally agree that it is more challenging to uncover how and why people read than what they read, and when and where they read. They identify times of social upheaval and political turmoil as productive contexts for examining these elusive dimensions of reading. In this way, they show the centrality of reading in times of social, cultural and political change. I focus on South Africa’s Western Cape region during the Apartheid era as another locale for investigating these questions about reading.

I include in my analysis the roles of professional and on-professional librarians that acquired, circulated, hid, and sometimes helped to produce banned reading materials, and that used their libraries as spaces for readers to debate anti-apartheid strategies. I also include in my analysis the roles of readers who used these materials in their reading circles and study groups with the help of, and sometimes in spite of the help of librarians. My focus is on librarians and readers because their stories tell how ordinary South Africans stood up to an authoritarian and racist regime. Their stories are also at risk of being forgotten.

Take the story of the librarian Mogammad Dollie. I worked with Mogammad in a Cape Town public library in the early 1980s. But I learned only recently that he had been an operative for MK (Umkhonto weSizwe), the armed wing of the African National Congress (ANC). He was a political intelligence recruiter, and the library was often used for clandestine meetings. School students planned street marches at such meetings, and when security police searched the library, the students sat on their school blazers and read books to avoid detection. Library work, according to Mogammad Dollie, was good preparation for becoming a member of the ANC’s underground spy network...[More]

From: CANGONET

The introduction of the Intellectual Property Rights from Publicly Financed Research and Development Act will have implications for South African companies that contribute to research projects that benefit from public funding and could compel such companies to reconsider their approach to such programmes.

Bowman Gilfillan director Llewellyn Parker tells Engineering News that, with the introduction of the legislation, private institutions will no longer be able to exploit a university research base to access “cheap research” when public funding is also involved.

Therefore, companies wishing to secure their position as sole beneficiaries of such research will not only need to fund it in full, but also ensure that no public funding is used. This is because the new legislation has put in place safeguards to ensure that benefits for publicly funded research flow to taxpayers rather than to single corporate entities.

There are, nevertheless, potential positive spin-offs for research-supporting companies owing to the fact that, in instances where a university or individual researchers refrain from applying for intellectual property (IP) protection, private enterprise will be offered the opportunity to apply for such protection... [More]

 

With this issue we introduce a new nline project—the AAUP Journal of cademic Freedom. Scholarship on cademic freedom—and on its relation
to shared governance, tenure, and ollective bargaining—is typically cattered across a wide range of isciplines. There has been no single journal devoted to the subject. Now here is. It is published by the rganization most responsible for efining academic freedom.

Contents
Volume One, 2010

Essays
Professionalization as the Basis for Academic Freedom and Faculty Governance
By Larry Gerber

The AAUP, Academic Freedom, and the Cold War
By Phillip Deery

The Eroding Foundations of Academic Freedom and Professional Integrity: Implications of the Diminishing Proportion of Tenured Faculty for Organizational Effectiveness in Higher Education
By Ernst Benjamin

Ward Churchill at the Dalton Trumbo Fountain: Academic Freedom in the  Aftermath of 9/11 (Corrected essay, posted February 22, 2010)
By Ellen Schrecker

The Last Indian Standing: Shared Governance in the Shadow of History          
By Cary Nelson                                                                                

The Demise of Shared Governance at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
By Nancy D. Campbell and Jane Koretz

Paranoia and Professionalization: The Importance of Graduate Student
Academic Freedom
By Dan Colson

Toward an Autonomous Antioch College: The Story of the Nonstop Liberal Arts Institute
By Jean Gregorek

Hidden (and Not-So-Hidden) New Threats to Faculty Governance
By Jan H. Blits

Academic Freedom and the Digital Revolution
By Ashley Dawson

Conference Proceedings
Rethinking Academic Traditions for Twenty-First-Century Faculty
By Judith M. Gappa and Ann E. Austin

Institutionalized Attacks on Academic Freedom: The Impact of Mandates by State Departments of Education and National Accreditation Agencies on Academic Freedom
By John M. Elmore

The Corporatization of American Higher Education: Merit Pay Trumps
Academic Freedom
By Robert P. Engvall

"I Have No Idea What You Do Out Here": Community Colleges, Academic Freedom, and the University as Global Marketplace
By Libby Garland and Eben Wood

Copyright 2010, American Association of University Professors

Can community-minded Web developers fix scientific publishing? 

From Technology Review:
...

Liquid Journals follow the disintermediated tendencies of the web to their logical conclusion: Liquid Journals do not rely on peer review. Instead, they are assembled by individuals or groups of scientists and experts using the Liquid Journals platform.

The Liquid Journals platform does not discriminate between peer reviewed and non peer reviewed papers, raw data sets and blog posts. The idea is that smart scientists can decide for themselves what belongs in their own liquid journal, and influential leaders and groups in the movement will organically accrue a readership to their journal according to the quality of the work they select.

See Also: Access Liquid Journals Web Site (Free to Use, Login With a Facebook ID)

See Also: Lean More About Liquid Journals (via it's EU Page)
Worth a Mention: Springer is listed as a partner in the project.

See Also: Technical Report/Research Paper: Liquid Journals: Knowledge Dissemination In The Web Era (12 pages; PDF; February, 2010)
by Marcos Baez, Fabio Casati, Aliaksandr Birukou And Maurizio Marchese

From the Abstract:

In this paper we redefine the notion of "scientific journal" to update it to the age of the Web. We explore the historical reasons behind the current journal model, and we show that this model is essentially the same today, even if the Web has made dissemination essentially free. We propose a notion of liquid and personal journals that evolve continuously in time and that are targeted to serve individuals or communities of arbitrarily small or large scales. The liquid journals provide "interesting" content, in the form of "scientific contributions." that are "related" to a certain paper, topic, or area, and that are posted (on their web site, repositories, traditional journals) by "inspiring" researchers. As such, the liquid journal separates the notion of "publishing" (which can be achieved by submitting to traditional peer review journals or just by posting content on the Web) from the appearance of contributions into the journals, which are essentially collections of content. In this paper we introduce the liquid journal model, and demonstrate through some examples its value to individuals and communities. Finally, we describe an architecture and a working prototype that implements the proposed model.

 via Resourceshelf