Celia's

Welcome to the first installment of “How Twitter Saved my Literature Class: A Case Study with Discussion.” For more on teaching with twitter, please visit the Wheel’s social media section.[by aojones on January 25, 2012]

More than anything else, what distinguishes a great class from an adequate class is the attitude of the participants...When an instructor’s course objectives are clear, when a professor brings enthusiasm to lectures and to class discussions, and when he or she sets high expectations for all of the class’s participants, then learning can take place. But primarily it is the participants’ reaction to these necessary elements of a class that can make that class truly successful... [More]

From :  The Wheel is a blog designed to provide information about educational technology to faculty members at University of California, Davis.

...Thomson Reuters Launches Academic Reputation Survey for 2012 Largest undertaking of its kind delivers more accurate representation of research institutions.

Philadelphia, PA, London, UK, March 12, 2012 - The Intellectual Property & Science business of Thomson Reuters today announced the launch of its 2012 Academic Reputation Survey, for a current evaluation of higher education institutions globally. This is the third consecutive year the reputation survey has been conducted.

The survey, which is sent to over 200,000 academics and researchers around the world, engages professional scholars to obtain a more accurate assessment of the institutional landscape. Survey respondents are asked which institutions they consider the best in terms of research, teaching and other factors, such as geographical region. These assessments are combined with other key variables to create a comprehensive profile for each institution...

The survey forms an important part of Thomson Reuters Global Institutional Profiles Project, an initiative to create data-driven profiles of globally significant research institutions. Combined with citation metrics from Web of Knowledge(TM) and data provided by the institutions themselves, these results are delivered in the Institutional Profiles module of InCites(TM) to analyze productivity and benchmark against peers worldwide...

For more information on the Institutional Profiles module of InCites, visit

http://researchanalytics.thomsonreuters.com/incites/.

National ETD Portal South Africa: South African theses and Dissertations
This site is run by the South African National Research Foundation (NRF) in collaboration with the Committee of Higher Education Librarians of South Africa (CHELSA).It provides access to the full text of many thousands of doctoral PHD and some other dissertations produced in South African universities. These cover the full range of science, social science and humanities topics. There is some coverage from as early as the 1970s although there are larger numbers of post 2009 records. Search by keyword or browse.From LSE Library New Research blog

Teens and young adults brought up from childhood with a continuous connection to each other and to information will be nimble, quick-acting multitaskers who count on the Internet as their external brain and who approach problems in a different way from their elders, according to a new survey of technology experts.

Many of the experts surveyed by Elon University's Imagining the Internet Center and the Pew Internet Project said the effects of hyperconnectivity and the always-on lifestyles of young people will be mostly positive between now and 2020. But the experts in this survey also predicted this generation will exhibit a thirst for instant gratification and quick fixes, a loss of patience, and a lack of deep-thinking ability due to what one referred to as "fast-twitch wiring." From overview

+ Direct link full report (PDF; 1 MB)

 Millennials Will Benefit and Suffer Due to Their Hyperconnected Lives By Heather Negley

Source: Pew Internet & American Life Project.

Code Academy – This website presents an opportunity to teach everyone how to code through taking and developing courses. Badges and other rewards are offered.

Celia: It doesn't support Internet Explorer. It supports Google's Chrome, Opera and Mozilla Firefox

The annual Horizon Report has been published by the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) and the New Media Consortium (NMC). It profiles six new and emerging technologies which will impact education over the coming years. Here’s a brief recap of their findings:

Time to adoption: One Year or Less

Time to adoption: Two to Three Years

• Game-based Learning
• Learning Analytics

Time to adoption: Four to Five Years

• Gesture-based Computing
• Internet of Things

From iLibrarian  Link to full report:  http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/HR2012.pdf

In this podcast, C&RL News editor-in-chief David Free talks to Richard Ray, provost at Hope College in Holland, Michigan, about the ways in which libraries contribute to academic success.

Download [length 6.25]

The interview was recorded at the IMLS grant-funded Value of Academic Libraries Summits in Chicago.

About the Music:
The music in ACRL Podcasts is “Don’t you,” mixed by stefsax and available on ccMixter. The music is used under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 license.

Getting Journal Articles Published

with:
Professor Miriam Zukas
Professor Li Wei
Professor Esther Leslie

In 2011-12 BISR is running a new series of lunchtime workshops on ‘Developing your research career’.  The workshops offer opportunities to develop and share knowledge about key aspects of a successful academic career: publishing journal articles, gaining grants, getting book contracts, networking and getting promoted. All the workshops are relevant to early career researchers, some will also be useful to research students and to more experienced staff.

This session will examine useful practices for increasing your chances of getting articles published in academic journals.  The panel is made up of Birkbeck academics who serve as editors for both traditional and open access journals.  The session will look at the question of where to publish and how to produce articles that are likely to be accepted.  Research students and staff at all stages of their careers are welcome. http://backdoorbroadcasting.net/2012/01/developing-your-research-career-getting-journal-articles-published/

New enhancements

• 43 new titles are now available
  • The new titles are identified by green “NEW” icons
• Enriched SRMO Lists function, including drag-and-drop feature
  • You can now quickly add relevant topics to your lists by dragging and dropping content
• Methods-in-Action search widget into SAGE Journals to explore related online journal content
  • This allows you to type a methodology into this widget and expand your research experience by exploring SAGE Journals.
• Term definition pop-ups within the Methods Map
  • You can now slide your mouse over a term on the Methods Map to get a short definition.
• Improved author pages with photos, bios, affiliations, and contact information
  

By Gary A. Olson

The Modern Language Association—the principal organization representing the disciplines of English and foreign languages—held its annual convention in January, and while the event was in session, I received calls from a handful of deans and department chairs. They were concerned about a trend they found alarming: the growing number of commentators there who were recommending changes in how the discipline conceives scholarly work.

Such recommendations, my callers unanimously agreed, would damage not only the careers of aspiring and new professors but also the reputation of the humanities. The proposed changes would also present substantial challenges to academic administrators charged with evaluating scholarship for tenure and promotion... [more]

Authors

The e-Reader — an Educational or an Entertainment Tool? e-Readers in an Academic Setting

Authors

Peter Ahlroos, Tritonia Academic Library, Vaasa, Finland
Jonna Hahto, Tritonia Academic Library, Vaasa, Finland

Source

LIBER Quarterly (The Journal of European Research Libraries)
Volume 21 (2012), No. 2

Abstract

In this paper the authors will discuss a pilot project conducted at the Tritonia Academic Library, Vaasa, in Finland, from September 2010 until May 2011. The project was designed to investigate the application of e-readers in academic settings and to learn how teachers and students experience the use of e-readers in academic education. Four groups of students and one group of teachers used Kindle readers for varied periods of time in different courses. The course material and the textbooks were downloaded on the e-readers. The feedback from the participants was collected through questionnaires and teacher interviews. The results suggest that the e-reader is a future tool for learning, though some features need to be improved before e-readers can really enable efficient learning and researching.

 Read the Complete Article

 

From INFOdocket

This video presentation was used to introduce the two-day workshop, "The Squeezed Middle: Exploring the Future of Library Systems," sponsored by JISC and SCONUL on 19-20 January at the University of Warwick. In the video, Lorcan Dempsey talks about how libraries are changing in the network environment, how they are organizing their services and how they are relating to other services in a Webscale world. He focuses on changes in how libraries are using their resources to create value: space, systems, collections and services/expertise. What should libraries specialize in and what things should they do collaboratively or externalize to other parties? Watch this video to learn how libraries are dealing with these and other important issues now as well as how they may do so in the future.

 says new report

"...Presented in the UK Scholarly Reading and the Value of Library Resources report, the research examines how valuable scholarly reading has become for academics, especially in terms of access to journal articles. It surveyed academic and associate staff at 6 UK Higher Education institutions in 2011 exploring how academic library collections support research and teaching activities and how reading patterns of articles, books, and other materials differ..."

University libraries are saving academics time by helping them find quality material more quickly, says a new report.

Academics are choosing the library as their first choice for getting hold of scholarly material because access is quick, it helps them make new connections to related information and the library may be the only place they can access that material.

Academics are then using their reading to inspire new thinking and improve their research results.

This picture of the library at the heart of university life has emerged as part of a new JISC Collections¹ report which canvassed over 1000 academic and associate staff at six UK universities in 2011.

Lorraine Estelle is chief executive of JISC Collections which is responsible for negotiating journal and database deals for the higher and further education communities as a whole.  She said: "This report provides further evidence about the value and impact of the resources and discovery systems which UK academic libraries make available. This makes it even more important for JISC Collections to continue to work with publishers and libraries to secure affordable and sustainable journal deals for the future."

Although the survey focuses on academics, reading articles also helps them teach, so staff and students alike are benefiting from access to these resources.

Dr Hazel Woodward, chair of the electronic information resources working group and librarian at Cranfield University said: "At this time of economic constraint, it is important for policy makers and Library directors to provide additional evidence of the value of library-provided resources. Whilst in the past these resources have been regarded as implicitly valuable, this research goes some way to making that value more explicit by focusing on specific benefits and outcomes for academics."

The research is part of a wider international Lib-Value project ²being coordinated by the Center for Information and Communication Studies at the University of Tennessee.  

JISC News

From The Chronicle of Higher Education:

Timothy Gowers of the University of Cambridge, who won the Fields Medal for his research, has organized a boycott of Elsevier because, he says, its pricing and policies restrict access to work that should be much more easily available. He asked for a boycott in a blog post on January 21, and as of Monday evening, on the boycott’s Web site The Cost of Knowledge, nearly 1,900  scientists have signed up, pledging not to publish, referee, or do editorial work for any Elsevier journal.

The company has sinned in three areas, according to the boycotters: It charges too much for its journals; it bundles subscriptions to lesser journals together with valuable ones, forcing libraries to spend money to buy things they don’t want in order to get a few things they do want; and, most recently, it has supported a proposed federal law (called the Research Works Act) that would prevent agencies like the National Institutes of Health from making all articles written by its grant recipients freely available.

Read the Complete COHE Article by Josh Fischman

 

From INFOdocket