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.”

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?

Something rather dangerous in its potential long-term consequences, coming in Firefox 4.0…

“In Firefox 4.0, there will be no RSS button on the toolbar [address bar] by default (it has been moved to the bookmarks menu). … If RSS dies, we lose the ability to read in private.”

The author may overstate his case, but I’m also deeply uneasy about the way it’s simply being assumed that the childish follow-my-leader activity on Twitter/Facebook can somehow take the place of actually educating people in information discovery.

Warpspire on URL Design…

A URL is an agreement

A URL is an agreement to serve something from a predictable location for as long as possible. Once your first visitor hits a URL you’ve implicitly entered into an agreement that if they bookmark the page or hit refresh, they’ll see the same thing.

I seem to have missed out on mentioning a couple of recent articles on the state of ejournals in China:

1. An article from Nature, on China’s severe problems with academic journals…

“in a Correspondence to Nature last week, Yuehong Zhang of the Journal of Zhejiang University–Science reported that a staggering 31% of the papers submitted to that campus journal contained plagiarized material (Nature 467, 153; 2010).”

2. And a long article in the New York Times…

“The Lancet, the British medical journal, warned that faked or plagiarized research posed a threat to President Hu Jintao’s vow to make China a “research superpower” by 2020.”

“a recent government study in which a third of the 6,000 scientists at six of the nation’s top institutions admitted they had engaged in plagiarism or the outright fabrication of research data.”

As far as I know, no mainland Chinese journals are accessible via JURN, since the Chinese state requires them all to be kept on a central server in page-scanned image form only (i.e.: no Googleable text).

Ars Technica has a long review of the Mendeley academic research management tool.