Robert Darnton, Dean of Libraries at Harvard University, talks about the state of research libraries in the US in relation to scholarly communication issues, journal subscription pricing, open access and Google’s Book project vs. a Digital Public Library of America.
The Library: Three Jeremiads by Robert Darnton | The New York Review of Books.
From: Chronicle of Higher Education: Wired Campus Section
Students Lack Basic Research Skills, Study Finds
November 9, 2010, 5:26 pm
Despite the wealth of information available on the Internet, a recent study suggests that many students lack basic research skills.
According to the latest Project Information Literacy Progress Report, 84 percent of students say that when it comes to course-based research, getting started is their biggest challenge. The three sources cited most often by students were course readings, search engines like Google, and scholarly research databases. Only 30 percent asked a librarian for research help. The online survey polled 8,353 students from 25 college campuses nationwide.
Alison J. Head, a co-principal investigator for the project, said the results suggest that today’s students struggle with a feeling of information overload.
“They feel overwhelmed, and they’re developing a strategy for not drowning in all information out there,” she said. “They’re basically taking how they learned to research in high school with them to college, since it’s worked for them in the past.”
Ms. Head said the findings show that college students approach research as a hunt for the right answer instead of a process of evaluating different arguments and coming up with their own interpretation.
“Not being aware of the diverse resources that exist or the different ways knowledge is created and shared is dangerous,” she said. “College is a time to find information and learn about multiple arguments, and exploring gets sacrificed if you conduct research in this way.”
However, Ms. Head said the state of college research isn’t completely discouraging. In the report, only 26 percent of students said they had a problem evaluating sources. Also, students on average used at least four standards when evaluating the legitimacy of a print-based source and at least seven standards when it came to a Web-based source.
For the full report see: http://projectinfolit.org/pdfs/PIL_Fall2010_Survey_FullReport1.pdf
Gapminder is a non-profit venture – a modern “museum” on the Internet – promoting sustainable global development and achievement of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals.
Take a look at this web site which presents international statistics in easy to read graphs which show changes over time. Gapminder founder, Hans Rosling has done several TED lectures which are linked on the site. Go to:
http://www.gapminder.org.
Information and links to data providers are available at: http://www.gapminder.org/data/
Here’s some information from the site about their history and goals.
Gapminder was founded in Stockholm by Ola Rosling, Anna Rosling Rönnlund and Hans Rosling on February 25, 2005. Gapminder is registered as a Foundation at Stockholm County Administration Board (Länstyrelsen i Stockholm) with registration number (organisationsnummer) 802424-7721.
Gapminder does not award any grants. It is an operating foundation that provides sevices as defined by the board, sometimes as collaborative projects with universities, UN organisations, public agencies and non-governmental organisations.
The initial activity was to pursue the development of the Trendalyzer software. Trendalyzer sought to unveil the beauty of statistical time series by converting boring numbers into enjoyable, animated and interactive graphics. The current version of Trendalyzer is available since March 2006 as Gapminder World, a web-service displaying time series of development statistics for all countries.
In March 2007, Google acquired Trendalyzer from the Gapminder Foundation and the team of developers who formerly worked for Gapminder joined Google in California in April 2007. (History of Gapminder)
To fulfill our aim, we at Gapminder are currently working on:
All with the intention of being a “fact tank” that promotes a fact based world view
From: Bell, S. (2010). The library’s role in the textbook Revolution. Library Issues 31(1)
“Ask any college librarian what the most frequently asked question at the reference desk is during the first week of the academic term. In recent years, hands down, that question is ‘Does the library have a copy of my textbook?’
Fortunately, the problem of escalating textbook costs has hit the boiling point, and both the higher education and publishing industries are seeking solutions before the pot explodes and legislators step in to clean up the mess. A forced legislative solution is avoidable given the options for delivering instruction materials in new ways that range from bless costly but mostly traditional digital textbooks to open educational resources that faculty create and share freely in order to provide students with no-cost options for accessing course readings.
When it comes to deciding how textbooks should fit into the library’s collection development policy, a mid-2009 exchange of messages on the college librarians’ online discussion list (COLLIB) illustrated just how diverse the opinions are. One discussant indicated that while his library will acquire textbooks, not more than a third of those would fall into the category of traditional textbooks with the remainder being monographs or novels that the existing collection would accommodate. Another library director shared that her library acquired the textbooks for all introductory courses. The stated reason was to help students who could not afford them.
The good news is that options are emerging that could lead to that much desired win-win solution that simplifies the textbook conundrum for students, faculty, librarians, and academic administrators. Foremost among them is the birth of the open educational resources movement.
Alternative publishers such as Flat World Publishing [http://www.flatworldknowledge.com] and Connexions [http://cnx.org] encourage faculty to make their textbooks openly accessible by facilitating the collection of sharing of the texts, and then allowing students to access them for free online. As many students prefer printed textbooks, there is an option to order a print copy, on demand, for less than fifty dollars… With open education options, in combination with digital content provided by the academic library, faculty have the capacity to assemble only those chapters, articles, videos, and other learning materials that truly meet the needs of their students. Faculty may use their online courseware system, such as Blackboard or Moodle, to efficiently package and deliver the material to their students. In this way, faculty are no longer shackled to the tyranny of the static, costly textbook, which few if any faculty are able to entirely cover in a semester anyway.
WSJ.com – The ABCs of E-Reading
By GEOFFREY A. FOWLER And MARIE C. BACA
People who buy e-readers tend to spend more time than ever with their nose in a book, preliminary research shows. A study of 1,200 e-reader owners by Marketing and Research Resources Inc. found that 40% said they now read more than they did with print books. Of those surveyed, 58% said they read about the same as before while 2% said they read less than before. And 55% of the respondents in the May study, paid for by e-reader maker Sony Corp., thought they’d use the device to read even more books in the future. The study looked at owners of three devices: Amazon.com Inc.’s Kindle, Apple Inc.’s iPad and the Sony Reader.
While e-readers are still a niche product just beginning to spread beyond early adopters, these new reading experiences are a big departure from the direction U.S. reading habits have been heading. A 2007 study by the National Endowment for the Arts caused a furor when it reported Americans are spending less time reading books. About half of all Americans ages 18 to 24 read no books.
Some 11 million Americans are expected to own at least one digital reading gadget by the end of September, estimates Forrester Research. U.S. e-book sales grew 183% in the first half of this year compared with the year-earlier period, according to the Association of American Publishers.
Among early adopters, e-books aren’t replacing their old book habits, but adding to them. Amazon, the biggest seller of e-books, says its customers buy 3.3 times as many books after buying a Kindle, a figure that has accelerated in the past year as prices for the device fell.
It’s too early to tell the reading lift will sustain after the novelty of the gadgets wears off, and the devices go mass market. But because e-book gadgets are portable, people report they’re reading more and at times when a book isn’t normally an option: on a smartphone in the doctor’s waiting room; through a Ziploc-bag-clad Kindle in a hot tub, or on a treadmill with a Sony Reader’s fonts set to jumbo. Among commuters, e-readers are starting to catch up with BlackBerrys as the preferred companions on trains and buses.
Since getting her Kindle last year, Leslie Johnson has been reading more often and in more places—like on a kayak. On a recent trip, the 34-year-old engineer from Albany, N.Y., settled into a science-fiction novel while her husband fished. “I put it in a waterproof cover,” she says.
Mystery and thriller author Michael Connelly says he has about 30 e-books on his Kindle, Sony Reader and iPad, though he also still reads print books because he gets so many samples from his publisher.
“I will never stop loving the printed book,” Mr. Connelly says. Yet, “I am very interested in this world. E-books are here to stay.” He adds, “There is the advantage of being able to carry multiple things. I travel a lot—believe me, I notice the weight.”
The first consumer e-books, which were released in the 1990s, failed to catch on among consumers who were stuck reading them on computers or tiny cellphone screens.
Earlier this summer, Jakob Nielsen, a Silicon Valley researcher who has studied how people interact with technology for more than two decades, recruited 32 volunteers and asked them to read short stories by Ernest Hemingway in print, on an iPad and the Kindle. Mr. Nielsen timed how long it took them to read a story on each device. Compared with print, iPad readers were 6.2% slower and Kindle readers were 10.7% slower, though the difference between the iPad and Kindle results wasn’t statistically significant. Mr. Nielsen suspects the slowdown is caused by the screen technology in the devices, which is still less sharp than print.
“Both devices give you a more relaxed feeling as opposed to a computer,” said Mr. Nielsen, who runs research firm Nielsen Norman Group along with former Apple researcher Donald Norman.
In creating the Kindle, Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s chief executive, says he set out to develop technology that could encourage long-form reading, instead of just snippets.
“Everything is about getting the device to disappear so that you can enter the author’s world,” he said in a recent interview. “A nightmare scenario for me would be if this device would ever beep at me while I’m reading.”
E-readers also appear to be narrowing the gap in how men and women read. A study, released this month by the Book Industry Study Group Inc. found that men are bigger consumers of e-books than women by a narrow margin. Among e-book buyers, 52% were men compared with 48% for women—a reversal of print books, where women buy more.
E-reader users also say that 52% of their e-books were ones they purchased, while 48% of their e-books were free because they were sample giveaways or out-of-copyright.
Libraries are expanding services that let patrons virtually “check out” an e-book through the Internet, with e-book files that automatically lock down after the end of the loan period. According to the American Library Association, 66% of libraries offered e-book loans, up from just 38% in 2005.
The most checked-out adult fiction e-book at libraries is Stieg Larsson’s bestseller, “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” according to Overdrive, a company that provides e-book loans for more than 11,000 libraries. The same is true at Amazon, the largest e-bookstore online, where Mr. Larsson also tops e-book bestseller lists.
There are some aspects of reading a print book that e-readers still haven’t been able to re-create. Digital locks on e-books make it harder to lend a book to a friend, though free works are being shared much more rapidly online than ever before. Scribd.com, a social publishing and reading website, is used to share books and documents about 10 million times each month, the company says.
Page numbers are a problem for e-books, since the number of words on a virtual page depends on the size of the screen and type. Pages may be antiquated, but they’re very helpful for making sure reading-club participants or students in a classroom are all on the same page. No page numbers also means there’s no skipping ahead to sneak a peek at a page near the end of a book. Most e-readers have tried to replace page numbers by showing the percentage of the book read.
Technology has brought a range of features to books that wouldn’t be possible in print. Children’s author Lynley Dodd sells a title from her “Hairy Maclary” series as an app for the iPad. It lets parents or kids record themselves reading the book aloud, and a paint function lets kids color the original drawings themselves.
With an e-reader, readers can hold and turn pages with just one hand. Some readers hail how the devices can become large-type books with the click of a few buttons—and back-lit devices like the iPad work in bed even when the lights are off. Free sample chapters, common on most online stores, make it easier to try out—and potentially give up on—books before committing to a 400-page tome.
But paper pages do have one benefit that electronic devices don’t have: They don’t need to be put away during takeoff and landing on airplanes. On a recent trip to Seattle, 64-year-old Jamie McKenzie, a Bellingham, Wash.-based writer, said he felt a sense of superiority when his seatmate was asked to turn off his Kindle to prepare for takeoff.
“That guy may have had access to 10,000 books, but I was the one who was able to keep reading,” he says.
Write to Geoffrey A. Fowler at geoffrey.fowler@wsj.com
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/02/education/02cheat.html
At Rhode Island College, a freshman copied and pasted from a Web site’s frequently asked questions page about homelessness — and did not think he needed to credit a source in his assignment because the page did not include author information.
At DePaul University, the tip-off to one student’s copying was the purple shade of several paragraphs he had lifted from the Web; when confronted by a writing tutor his professor had sent him to, he was not defensive — he just wanted to know how to change purple text to black.
And at the University of Maryland, a student reprimanded for copying from Wikipedia in a paper on the Great Depression said he thought its entries — unsigned and collectively written — did not need to be credited since they counted, essentially, as common knowledge.
Professors used to deal with plagiarism by admonishing students to give credit to others and to follow the style guide for citations, and pretty much left it at that.
But these cases — typical ones, according to writing tutors and officials responsible for discipline at the three schools who described the plagiarism — suggest that many students simply do not grasp that using words they did not write is a serious misdeed.
It is a disconnect that is growing in the Internet age as concepts of intellectual property, copyright and originality are under assault in the unbridled exchange of online information, say educators who study plagiarism.
Digital technology makes copying and pasting easy, of course. But that is the least of it. The Internet may also be redefining how students — who came of age with music file-sharing, Wikipedia and Web-linking — understand the concept of authorship and the singularity of any text or image.
“Now we have a whole generation of students who’ve grown up with information that just seems to be hanging out there in cyberspace and doesn’t seem to have an author,” said Teresa Fishman, director of the Center for Academic Integrity at Clemson University. “It’s possible to believe this information is just out there for anyone to take.”
Professors who have studied plagiarism do not try to excuse it — many are champions of academic honesty on their campuses — but rather try to understand why it is so widespread.
In surveys from 2006 to 2010 by Donald L. McCabe, a co-founder of the Center for Academic Integrity and a business professor at Rutgers University, about 40 percent of 14,000 undergraduates admitted to copying a few sentences in written assignments.
Perhaps more significant, the number who believed that copying from the Web constitutes “serious cheating” is declining — to 29 percent on average in recent surveys from 34 percent earlier in the decade.
Sarah Brookover, a senior at the Rutgers campus in Camden, N.J., said many of her classmates blithely cut and paste without attribution.
“This generation has always existed in a world where media and intellectual property don’t have the same gravity,” said Ms. Brookover, who at 31 is older than most undergraduates. “When you’re sitting at your computer, it’s the same machine you’ve downloaded music with, possibly illegally, the same machine you streamed videos for free that showed on HBO last night.”
Ms. Brookover, who works at the campus library, has pondered the differences between researching in the stacks and online. “Because you’re not walking into a library, you’re not physically holding the article, which takes you closer to ‘this doesn’t belong to me,’ ” she said. Online, “everything can belong to you really easily.”
A University of Notre Dame anthropologist, Susan D. Blum, disturbed by the high rates of reported plagiarism, set out to understand how students view authorship and the written word, or “texts” in Ms. Blum’s academic language.
She conducted her ethnographic research among 234 Notre Dame undergraduates. “Today’s students stand at the crossroads of a new way of conceiving texts and the people who create them and who quote them,” she wrote last year in the book “My Word!: Plagiarism and College Culture,” published by Cornell University Press.
Ms. Blum argued that student writing exhibits some of the same qualities of pastiche that drive other creative endeavors today — TV shows that constantly reference other shows or rap music that samples from earlier songs.
In an interview, she said the idea of an author whose singular effort creates an original work is rooted in Enlightenment ideas of the individual. It is buttressed by the Western concept of intellectual property rights as secured by copyright law. But both traditions are being challenged.
“Our notion of authorship and originality was born, it flourished, and it may be waning,” Ms. Blum said.
She contends that undergraduates are less interested in cultivating a unique and authentic identity — as their 1960s counterparts were — than in trying on many different personas, which the Web enables with social networking.
“If you are not so worried about presenting yourself as absolutely unique, then it’s O.K. if you say other people’s words, it’s O.K. if you say things you don’t believe, it’s O.K. if you write papers you couldn’t care less about because they accomplish the task, which is turning something in and getting a grade,” Ms. Blum said, voicing student attitudes. “And it’s O.K. if you put words out there without getting any credit.”
The notion that there might be a new model young person, who freely borrows from the vortex of information to mash up a new creative work, fueled a brief brouhaha earlier this year with Helene Hegemann, a German teenager whose best-selling novel about Berlin club life turned out to include passages lifted from others.
Instead of offering an abject apology, Ms. Hegemann insisted, “There’s no such thing as originality anyway, just authenticity.” A few critics rose to her defense, and the book remained a finalist for a fiction prize (but did not win).
That theory does not wash with Sarah Wilensky, a senior at Indiana University, who said that relaxing plagiarism standards “does not foster creativity, it fosters laziness.”
“You’re not coming up with new ideas if you’re grabbing and mixing and matching,” said Ms. Wilensky, who took aim at Ms. Hegemann in a column in her student newspaper headlined “Generation Plagiarism.”
“It may be increasingly accepted, but there are still plenty of creative people — authors and artists and scholars — who are doing original work,” Ms. Wilensky said in an interview. “It’s kind of an insult that that ideal is gone, and now we’re left only to make collages of the work of previous generations.”
In the view of Ms. Wilensky, whose writing skills earned her the role of informal editor of other students’ papers in her freshman dorm, plagiarism has nothing to do with trendy academic theories.
The main reason it occurs, she said, is because students leave high school unprepared for the intellectual rigors of college writing.
“If you’re taught how to closely read sources and synthesize them into your own original argument in middle and high school, you’re not going to be tempted to plagiarize in college, and you certainly won’t do so unknowingly,” she said.
At the University of California, Davis, of the 196 plagiarism cases referred to the disciplinary office last year, a majority did not involve students ignorant of the need to credit the writing of others.
Many times, said Donald J. Dudley, who oversees the discipline office on the campus of 32,000, it was students who intentionally copied — knowing it was wrong — who were “unwilling to engage the writing process.”
“Writing is difficult, and doing it well takes time and practice,” he said.
And then there was a case that had nothing to do with a younger generation’s evolving view of authorship. A student accused of plagiarism came to Mr. Dudley’s office with her parents, and the father admitted that he was the one responsible for the plagiarism. The wife assured Mr. Dudley that it would not happen again.
via Apple Responds to iPhone Jailbreaking Decision | News & Opinion | PCMag.com.
by: Brian Heater, PC Magazine
The Electronic Frontier Foundation and hackers everywhere scored a victory this week when the Library of Congress’s Copyright Office ruled that users can legally jailbreak their phones – particularly Apple’s iPhone.
Jailbreaking, the government said, is “innocuous at worst and beneficial at best.”
Apple, which has long been vocally opposed to any meddling with the iPhone, doesn’t seem particularly excited by the decision, but it’s not going to let a little thing like a copyright ruling alter its existing policy of voiding the warranties of jailbroken phones.
“Apple’s goal has always been to insure that our customers have a great experience with their iPhone and we know that jailbreaking can severely degrade the experience,” Apple said in a statement provided to Cult of Mac. “As we’ve said before, the vast majority of customers do not jailbreak their iPhones as this can violate the warranty and can cause the iPhone to become unstable and not work reliably.”
Jailbreaking, the company said, leaves the phone open to the malicious attacks Apple works to avoid with its closed product ecosystem and App Store vetting process.
Apple outlined its concerns with jailbreaking on its support page, including device and application instability, unreliable voice and data, disruption of service, the aforementioned compromised security, shortened battery life, and inability to apply future software updates.
“It is also important to note that unauthorized modification of the iOS is a violation of the iPhone end-user license agreement,” the company wrote. “Because of this, Apple may deny service for an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch that has installed any unauthorized software.”
Monday’s Copyright Office ruling is part of a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) review conducted every three years by the librarian of Congress. The librarian, James H. Billington, looks at the DMCA to see if there are any emerging technologies that might be exempt from the law’s ban on circumventing access to copyrighted material.
This year, the EFF asked Billington to examine the jailbreaking issue, particularly as it pertains to the iPhone. Billington also granted exemptions for DVD remixing, wireless networks, video games, computer programs on dongles, and e-books.
By Jennifer Howard
http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Go-Ahead-Jailbreak-Your/25792/
The Library of Congress shook up the copyright world today with a major new round of exemptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DMCA. Every three years, the librarian of Congress issues a list of what’s exempted from the statute’s ban on circumventing the digital-rights management technology that controls access to copyrighted material. In today’s statement, James Billington, the librarian, listed six classes of works that will be subject to exemptions, depending on what users want to do with them.
The six classes include motion pictures on DVD’s, as long as they’re “legally made and acquired” and as long as the circumventing is done for educational, documentary, or nonprofit uses. That gives the green light to professors or film/media-studies students who want to incorporate “short portions of new movies into short works for the purpose of criticism or comment,” Mr. Billington’s statement said.
Another category now subject to exemptions from the DMCA ban is e-books. Users may work around e-books’ access-control technology if it prevents them from enabling the read-aloud function or from putting the text into a specialized reading format.
Mr. Billington’s statement also listed computer programs that allow smartphones “to execute software applications.” If the user wants to circumvent those programs in order to get legally obtained applications to work together, that’s now all right, the statement said. Observers concluded that jailbreaking an iPhone—getting the device to run applications not sanctioned by the manufacturer—is no longer verboten.
The Ars Technica blog concluded that “Apple loses big” under the new exemptions. “This time, the library went (comparatively) nuts,” it said, “allowing widespread bypassing of the CSS encryption on DVD’s, declaring iPhone jailbreaking to be ‘fair use,’ and letting consumers crack their legally purchased e-books in order to have them read aloud by computers.”
Watch for reactions from smartphone manufacturers and from publishers. Meanwhile, advocates for less-restrictive digital-rights management celebrated the announcement. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which lobbied for some of the new exemptions, posted a statement celebrating what it called “new legal protections for video artists, cellphone jailbreakers, and unlockers.”
Jimmy Wales, Co-Founder of Wikipedia
Jimmy Wales, a co-founder of Wikipedia, recently (June 9, 2010) sat down with the Tech Therapy team at the Chronicle of Higher Education to discuss the best-and worst-ways to use the online encyclopedia in teaching and research. And he challenges traditional newspapers to adopt some of Wikipedia’s practices. Click to hear the Tech Therapy podcast.
