16 Sunday Jan 2011
Posted in New titles added to JURN
Added to the JURN index:—
Tempo e Argumento (One English article so far, possibly more in the future. Postgrad history journal from the Universidade do Estado de Santa Catarina, Brazil. Not yet indexed by the usual Spanish-language open journal indexing services)
15 Saturday Jan 2011
Posted in Spotted in the news
Digital Learners in Higher Education: Generation is Not the Issue (September 2010, preprint)…
“a comprehensive review of the research and popular literature on the topic and an empirical study at one postsecondary institution in Canada suggest there are no meaningful generational differences in how learners say they use ICTs or their perceived behavioural characteristics. The study also concluded that the post-secondary students at the institution in question use a limited set of information and communication technologies”
“our review of the popular and academic literature shows that there is no empirical support for the most prevalent claims in […] the impact of this use on how this generation accesses and uses information, how they interact socially and how they learn; and the unique behavioural characteristics and learning styles of this generation.”
15 Saturday Jan 2011
Posted in Spotted in the news
Are Students in the Humanities Making Less Use of Printed Books? A Longitudinal Study at the University of Queensland Library (January 2011)…
“The rapid growth of electronic journals (and especially of resources such as JSTOR) has provided a convenient alternative to the monograph, and one that is accessible from any computer” … “students are using them heavily, and we suspect that this has a lot to do with their accessibility.”
“If we suspect that one factor in the decline in borrowing of humanities monographs is the inconvenience of the print format for today’s students, we should do everything that we can to increase our holdings of e-books in the humanities, as more such works become available.”
The other possibility, for popular books required for a course, is that the nerdy students already have them in pirated ebook format, which would account for a marginal drop in print access. Perhaps the Web-savvy ones are also viewing enough pages on Google Books / Amazon Look Inside to satisfy their needs. Yet I wouldn’t rule out on-demand piracy in future — with the advent of things like the Ion Book Saver, will the class nerd simply convert an essay-required book in 15 minutes and email it to the rest of the class?
14 Friday Jan 2011
Posted in My general observations, Spotted in the news
The new Ion Book Saver, a $150 non-destructive book scanner for the home or office. You have to flip the pages manually, although it seems it’s far faster than a traditional flatbed scanner. Sadly the device only seems to be available from big retail stores in the USA, and not via Amazon or in the UK. It’ll be interesting to see if these become available to the UK privately, via eBay sellers, and at a reasonable premium.
I’d also like to see a video of how it copes with a fat hardback and a tight spine. The device lifts up via the handle, but doesn’t appear to have the weight or clips needed to keep pages flat in such circumstances. Still, it looks useful for quickly digitising a lot of old ephemera such as newsletters and magazines. Paper journals, too. The device saves to .jpg or .pdf on the slot-in SD card.
Ion — if you can send me a review device I’ll happily give it a detailed review here at the JURN blog 🙂
13 Thursday Jan 2011
Posted in JURN blogged, My general observations
A few reciprocal backlinks, for those linking to JURN recently:—
Princeton University library links JURN on its Online Reference Shelf.
The Royal Library of Denmark links JURN on its main Humanities page.
The Library of the Universite Paris-Sorbonne links JURN.
Linked on the Journals page at Southern Cross University, Australia.
Linked on the Journals page at Lulea university, Sweden.
Linked on the Journals page at Singapore Management University.
Postcolonial Space journal has added the JURN search box to its courses website.
12 Wednesday Jan 2011
JURN’s search-engine is now 3,001 ejournals ‘up’ from its starting position of 951. Just 951 titles were indexed by the alpha version at launch on 3rd February 2009.
12 Wednesday Jan 2011
Posted in My general observations
Leading videogame guru David Braben (Elite, Lost Winds, leading light of UK trade body TIGA) confirms that ICT teaching in UK schools is dire…
“every kid I talk to says ICT is dull. They hate it. The majority is learning how to use certain MS [Microsoft] tools and how to find the on and off switch.” … “That is such a far distance from what I’m talking about, where self-driven learning happens. I think it was very well meaning to try and make ICT universal but I think it’s backfired.” He called for computer science teaching that “actually taught programming and all the things which are exciting about it.” The problem was particular acute, he felt, for those children who could not use PCs at home. “For those who didn’t have access to computers it just confirmed the fact that they weren’t interested.”
His comments follow reports that the Royal Society are setting up an investigation into why ICT teaching is so poor…
“Since 2006 there has been a 33 per cent fall in pupils taking ICT GCSEs, and numbers taking A-levels in ICT have fallen by a third in six years. The number of candidates taking A-level Computing has fallen 57 per cent in eight years. … “ICT and Computer Science in school seem to turn these young people off. We need school curricula to engage them better if the next generation are to engineer technology and not just consume it.”
Part of the problem apparently lies in the failure to recruit quality teachers, which has led to a dumbed-down curriculum that any 2:2 can teach by rote. A mildly-obsessive techie nerd — someone with the drive to keep pace with the ever-evolving world of ICT, and just the sort of person you want in front of a class of bright kids — would rightly run a mile from teaching ICT in British schools. A deeper part of the problem seems to be that our secondary education system and its follow-on ‘youth training’ & unemployment-handling routes are still deeply stuck in a ‘mass industrial’ / ‘mass retail’ / ‘mass secretarial’ mindset about the world of work.
15 years of hand-wringing reports, committees, and failed initiatives have failed to make a dent in the national picture. But if there is to be real reform, perhaps via ‘serious games’, then let’s hope that intensive search literacy is put at the heart of it.
12 Wednesday Jan 2011
Posted in New titles added to JURN
Added to the JURN index:—
Bogazici Universitesi Dergisi : Humaniter Bilimler (‘Bogazici University Journal: Humanities and Sciences’. 1973-1980. Mostly in English)
[ Hat-tip: AMIR ]
11 Tuesday Jan 2011
Posted in New titles added to JURN
Added to the JURN index:—
Dalumat (Philippines ejournal, “research and study in Humanities, Social Sciences, Philosophy and Science.”)
11 Tuesday Jan 2011
Posted in New titles added to JURN
Added to the JURN index:—
Kervan : international journal of Afro-Asiatic studies (2005-2010. Mostly in Italian, but also a good number of English articles, such as “Taiwanese composers and piano works in the XX century”)