Digital Commons Network^™

Format As A False Judge Of Credibility: Messages From Librarians And Faculty And Student Responses, Amy E. Mark

Communications in Information Literacy

The purpose of this case study is to explore how students make sense of and respond to messages about information in higher education. This study identifies the messages students in higher education receive about information gathering, conducting research, and the credibility and authority of information sources. This research revealed that students are receiving the message from faculty that format is a stand-in for credibility. Research to date focuses on how to steer students to information privileged by the academy: academic, peer reviewed articles, and books. The voice of students is often absent. This study employs the critical framework of Paulo …

Information Literacy For Multiple Disciplines: Toward A Campus-Wide Integration Model At Indiana University, Bloomington, Brian Winterman, Carrie Donovan, Rachel Slough

Communications in Information Literacy

Within disciplines are a set of shared values and thought processes that students must master in order to become participants of that discipline. Information literacy as defined by the ACRL is a set of standards and principles that can apply to all disciplines. In order to produce information literate undergraduates in a given discipline, information literacy standards must be integrated with the values and processes of the discipline. In this study, librarians partnered with faculty in gender studies and molecular biology to integrate information literacy with courses in those areas. Student performance and attitudes improved as a result of the …

Teaching Matters: Developing As A Teacher/Librarian. Budding Researchers And The Process Of Framing Research Questions, Patrick P. Ragains

Communications in Information Literacy

This column stresses the importance of questioning in research. Librarians must keep this in mind when in order to help students who may have framed their topic or thesis statement prematurely.

An Assessment Of Peer Coaching To Drive Professional Development And Reflective Teaching, Caroline Sinkinson

Communications in Information Literacy

Given the competing demands on librarian's time, teaching and instruction are often a professional responsibility experienced in isolation with minimal colleague feedback beyond summative assessment. This article will describe a peer coaching pilot designed to increase teacher reflection, teacher collaboration, and to indentify future training and professional development needs. The article will report on the program's assessment facilitated by participant surveys. The peer coaching program described offers a model for fostering a community of teachers who are intent on improving and invigorating teaching practice.

Privileging Peer Review: Implications For Undergraduates, Amy E. Mark

Communications in Information Literacy

Librarians and teaching faculty privilege peer review articles out of ideals rooted in academic culture more then for pedagogical reasons. Undergraduates would find greater benefit in the opportunity to search and critique sources related to their personal and creative interests as well as relevant to academic research projects. Librarians can adopt the role of change-agents by engaging relevant teaching faculty in discussions about the goal of research assignments relative to peer review literature. Framing this discussion is Paulo Freire's theory of banking information discussed in Pedagogy of the Oppressed (2000).

Supplementing A Librarian's Information Literacy Toolkit With Textbooks: A Scan Of Basic Communication Course Texts, Melissa A. Gains, Richard A. Stoddart

Communications in Information Literacy

This inquiry subjectively examines selected basic communication textbooks for information literacy concepts from the communication discipline point of view. Librarians can build on these concepts in library skills instruction sessions for first-year communication students. This analysis reveals that communication textbook authors are addressing information literacy concepts and standards with content, exercises, examples, and most importantly, context, and they are often utilizing their own discipline-specific terminology to do so. Since finding, using, and evaluating information is a cornerstone of communication education, and because the most successful information literacy efforts result from learning its tenets in a variety of contexts, librarians supporting …

Review Of Race And Politics: Asian Americans, Latinos, And Whites In A Los Angeles Suburb, Albert Pham

Anthós

In this review of Race and Politics: Asian Americans, Latinos, and Whites in a Los Angeles Suburb by Leland Saito, I discuss and analyze Saito’s argument, and his use of supporting evidence. I also discuss the fit between the argument and evidence, as well as the strengths and weaknesses of his sources, methods, and interpretation. In doing so, I situate Saito’s work into context with similar works examining the relationship between spatial practices and racial formation.

The Femme Fatale And The Exotic Queer Within Shinya Tuskamoto's Tetsuo: Gender As Narrative Tool Within An Allegory For Post Wwii Japan's Industrialized Identity Crisis, Nickolus Walters

Anthós

Within Shinya Tsukamoto’s seminal independent horror masterpiece Tetsuo, the viewer’s perceptions of reality and the present are distorted within a temporally disjointed blend of horrific fantasy and banal existence; this instability reflects the vocal and subconscious critiques of historical ontological truths exhibited within the emergent transnational genres of Japanese cyberpunk and American Avant-pop ideologies of the late 1980’s. Author Takayuki Tatsumi uses Shinya Tsukamoto's Tetsuo to illustrate the emergence of the "Japanoid," a technologically driven fusion of American and Japanese post-war identity best understood as a manifestation of Donna Haraway's socio-political "cyborg." Tatsumi strongly advises avoiding interpretation through a "queer" …

Embedding Parallel Computation In A Stochastic Mesh Network: A Morphogenetic Approach, Max Orhai

Anthós

Many basic techniques in computer science have been founded on the assumption that physical computing resources are scarce but orderly, and that the cost of effective direct communication between physically distant parts of a computer system is affordable. In ubiquitous computing systems such as sensor networks, or in the design of nano-scale systems, these familiar assumptions may not hold.

What if we suppose instead that computing capacity is plentiful, but that only local communication is possible, and the exact structure of the communication network is not known in advance? This is the domain of spatial programming.

How can we program …

Aphorism's Destructive Capacity Towards Logocentric Text In Friedrich Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra, Joseph Van Der Naald

Anthós

The "spirit of gravity" and all of its connotations is central to the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche. In Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra, Zarathustra proclaims that the spirit of gravity is his devil and that it can only be vanquished through laughter. In this explication, I will show that Nietzsche uses intertextual allusion to place this laughter that destroys the spirit of gravity in relation to the words of the character Clytemnestra in Aeschylus' Agamemnon. I will also show that Nietzsche binds this allusion to aphoristic text, thus framing aphorism as a multivalent form of writing that destroys absolute, …

The Epistemology Of Ignorance, Olaf Dana Thomas Stockly

Anthós

Nancy Tuana explores the nature of the epistemology of ignorance in her essay titled, "Coming to Understand: Orgasm and the Epistemology of Ignorance". She describes our current epistemologies as too narrow, lacking in scope and truth because they focus only on the knowledge we have and ignore the knowledge we don’t have. If we want to more fully understand how our culture produces information, “we must also understand that practices that account for not knowing, that is, our lack of knowledge about a phenomena or, in some cases, an account of the practices that resulted in a group unlearning what …

Landslide Susceptibility In Tryon State Park, Oregon, Tracy E. Handrich

Anthós

LIDAR and topographic data were used to identify areas of high landslide susceptibility. An arctangent equation was used to calculate slope angle, design criteria of susceptibility and designate zones of high, moderate, and low risk.

In Defense Of The Unmother: Rhetoric, Motherhood, And Social Networking, Rebecca Ingalls

Harlot: A Revealing Look at the Arts of Persuasion

Wanted: kind, nurturing, compassionate females. Childless women need not apply. Link to video: Rhetoric, Christmas Cards, and Infertility: A Season of Silence

Sexual Disorientation, Anne Balay

Harlot: A Revealing Look at the Arts of Persuasion

She used to wish for a lesbian daughter. Predictably, the joke's on her.

Harlot Runs In The Family, Paul Muhlhauser, Kelly Bradbury

Harlot: A Revealing Look at the Arts of Persuasion

Much to our delight, our call for this special issue on family rhetoric attracted a record number of submissions. For some, the connection was deeply personal; for others, cultural representations of family and/or the role of various communities on family drew shrewd attention. Ultimately, the pieces in this issue were selected not only for their brilliant and creative insights about family rhetoric (how family members communicate with each other) and the rhetoric of family (how culture and society inform us about the meaning of family), but also because they represent an array of perspectives, experiences, and forms of expressing our …

A Name On The Tree, Laura J. Davies

Harlot: A Revealing Look at the Arts of Persuasion

What's in a name? For some, family history, arguments, and identity.

Mothers And Teen Daughters: Make Room For The Internet, Jaqueline Mcleod Rogers

Harlot: A Revealing Look at the Arts of Persuasion

When the internet steals our daughters, mothers turn cyborg.

Rhetoric, Christmas Cards, And Infertility: A Season Of Silence, Kristin L. Arola

Harlot: A Revealing Look at the Arts of Persuasion

Revising notions of family. One card at a time.

Worlds Collide! Facebook, Family & George Costanza, Amy L. Spears, Julie Driscoll

Harlot: A Revealing Look at the Arts of Persuasion

If facebook and social media have wrecked our ability to sustain lengthy treatises on topics, well then, by George, we'll make the blurb our convention and still tell you what we think. Link to video: Independent George - Worlds collide

Of Peerenting, Trophy Wives, And Effeminate Men: Modern Family's Surprisingly Conservative Remediation Of The Family Sitcom Genre, Christina M. Lavecchia

Harlot: A Revealing Look at the Arts of Persuasion

Just because the family is modern doesn't mean the family is new.

There Are Two Parts To My Life, Danielle Hunt

Harlot: A Revealing Look at the Arts of Persuasion

Often, there are tunnels and holes and shovels for fingers. This poem is about the digging process.

Things Dad: The Kansas Years, Sue Webb

Harlot: A Revealing Look at the Arts of Persuasion

When recipes help tell the story.

Tyranny, Marriage, And A New Market, William Holden

Anthós

This will be an explication of John Stuart Mill’s Autobiography along with a discussion of its relationship to the works of Jean Jacques Rousseau in regards to the models of gender and womanhood painted by each thinker in his texts. First, I will offer a quantified taxonomy of several formal structures in Mill’s text, including a summary of the uses of the phrase “my father” alongside a summary of the instances of Mill’s claims of having read an author. Next, I give a summary of the uses of the phrases “my wife” and “my daughter” alongside a discussion of the …

Teaching Matters: A Panel Critique Of Budd's Framing Library Instruction And The Author's Rejoinder, Patrick P. Ragains

Communications in Information Literacy

A detailed examination of John Budd's book, Framing Library Instruction, including discussion of cognitive theories and the state of information literacy instruction.

Why Information Literacy Is Invisible, William Badke

Communications in Information Literacy

Despite the many information literacy programs on higher education campuses, the literature of information literacy and the concept of information literacy as a viable academic subject remain hidden to most professors and academic administrators. Information literacy is invisible to academia because it is misunderstood, academic administrators have not put it on their institutions' agendas, the literature of information literacy remains in the library silo, there is a false belief that information literacy is acquired only by experience, there is a false assumption that technological ability is the same as information literacy, faculty culture makes information literacy less significant than other …

Expect (And Collect) A Response From Everyone In The Classroom, Karen Bronshteyn

Communications in Information Literacy

A positive and descriptive book review of Derek Bruff's 2009 book Teaching with Classroom Response Systems: Creating Active Learning Environments.

Information Literacy, Collaboration, And Teacher Education, Cindy Kovalik, Mary Lee Jensen, Barbara Schloman, Mary Tipton

Communications in Information Literacy

Information literacy is a critical component of a 21st century education. Teacher educators are confronted with teaching about information literacy on two levels: Not only do pre-service teachers need to become proficient in IL skills for their own success, they also need to learn how to teach their future students to become information literate (Branch, 2003; Carr, 1998; Hinchcliffe, 2003). In an effort to determine the extent to which teacher education programs incorporate information literacy instruction, researchers at a large Midwestern university conducted a survey of teacher education faculty in selected states. The survey sought to gather data related to …

Source Evaluation And Information Literacy: Findings From A Study On Science Websites, Nora J. Bird, Claire R. Mcinerney, Stewart Mohr

Communications in Information Literacy

An essential component of information literacy is the evaluation of information resources. Integral to evaluation are users' judgments about which Web sources might prove reliable when learning about a particular topic and the ones that they would choose for short term and long term use. Past Website quality studies have used research methods that involved asking participants to recall quality factors without the benefit of concurrent Web searching. Users in this study evaluated Websites during live searching on the “open”or unrestricted Web in a quasi-experimental protocol to determine the quality factors they valued and how these factors relate to gaining …

"Clicking" With Your Audience: Evaluating The Use Of Personal Response Systems In Library Instruction, Emily K. Chan, Lorrie A. Knight

Communications in Information Literacy

University of the Pacific librarians used personal response systems (PRS) or clickers in first-year mandatory library instructional sessions to assess their effects on student engagement and retention of learning outcomes. Students who utilized clickers during their library session reported greater enjoyment and encouragement to participate (n=291). Students in the sessions not utilizing the clickers achieved better learning outcomes than their counterparts who utilized clickers (n=326). The implications of these results are discussed, specifically within the context of pedagogy and tailoring instruction to the Millennial generation.

Towards A New Ethnicity: Canada’S Western Plains First Nations, John W. Friesen

Northwest Journal of Teacher Education

Although social scientists have for a long time refrained from employing the term "ethnic" when describing First Nations cultures, recent developments in those communities have necessitated a second look at this practice. If the ethnic designation is applicable to any group of people typically related through common filiation, or blood, and whose members also usually feel a sense of attachment to a particular place, a history, and a culture (including a common language, food, and clothing), then Canada’s First Peoples may also be considered ethnic. The educational implications of this reality are that the needs of Indigenous students are more …