Google Scholar: Searching court cases

As of November 17, 2009, there's a new radio button to click on Google Scholar: Google Scholar has added the ability to search for legal cases - U.S. federal and state district, appellate and supreme courts via Google Scholar. Handy for sure! See http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/11/finding-laws-that-govern-us.html for more information.

Phil Agre

Dr. McCook pointed out the recent story on NPR about Phil Agre's disappearance.  Agre, who is reported to suffer from bipolar disorder, had been at the Department of Information Studies at UCLA. He abandoned his job and apartment last year. (Unlike the artificial experiment reported in Wired "Writer Evan Raliff tried to vanish: Here's what happened" where it appears that Ratliff wasn't able to actually break ties with everyone, Agre seems  to have actually disappeared.)   I was an avid subscriber to Red Rock Eater News Service (RRE) and a fan of Agre's writings.  If you want to read only one of this pieces, read Advice for undergraduates considering graduate school .  Then... don't stop, keep reading.

Parents believe that information literacy is crucial

Good news for all of us who have been touting information literacy! From Project Tomorrow's Learning in the 21st Century: Parents’ Perspectives, Parents’ Priorities - a survey of more than 21,000 parents:  

"Parents believe that information literacy is crucial to their children’s success. Success in the 21st
century will depend on their children’s ability to conduct research, find, organize, and summarize data
and develop media literacy skills and to a large extent, students agree with them, though not quite
at the same level. Students in grades 6th-12th were more likely to believe that they will learn critical
media literacy skills on their own by using technology (40 percent) while parents (68 percent) believe
that students will develop skills by using technology as part of their regular classes."

Parents are also interested in the use of mobile technology, online textbooks, online organizational tools, smart boards in the classroom - and more.  See Education in the 21st Century

Tutors - from India

See Rai, Saritha. (November 20, 2009). Teacher in a box: Outsourcing homework to India. Need help wtih that term paper, young American? Meet Sawate Patnaik. GlobalPost. Retrieved November 23, 2009 from http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/india/091106/outsourcing-homework-india?page=0,1. "...For $99 a month, American customers of TutorVista get unlimited coaching in English, math or science from Patnaik or one of her 1,500 fellow tutors. Similar personalized services in the United States charge about $40 an hour..."

New Zealand Book Council video - Going West

Dr. Kathleen de la Peña McCook blogged this video - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_jyXJTlrH0 - from the New Zealand Book Council. I'm not sure if it'll entice anyone to read more books, but it might inspire some to try some animation!

Orange Gove Texts Plus - Florida's K-20 open access initiative

I attended a presentation on the USF campus given by Susie Henderson and Meredith Morris-Babb on the Orange Grove and Orange Grove Texts Plus - see more at http://www.theorangegrove.org/OGTtest.htm. This open textbook initiative is a partnership between Orange Grove Digital Repository and the University Press of Florida (UPF). Textbooks included in the repository can be downloaded or ordered in hard copy (print-on-demand) at around half the cost of a traditional textbook. What's the incentive for faculty to contribute textbooks?? UPF can ensure that the books are peer-reviewed and that faculty are allowed to collect royalities. There's a possibility that the work may count toward tenure and promotion and there's a potential for some royalties. That seems to take care of some of the issues many faculty have with producing open textbooks! (Interestingly I'm not finding any mention of that a the Orange Grove site.) Some campuses are busy providing faculty with various kinds of incentives to contribute to the open textbook initiative. Some campuses are providing funds to buy-out a course so a faculty member can author a textbook. Some campuses providing a pool of money for a department so that a group of faculty can work together on authoring an open source textbook. The books are indexed according to Florida's common course numbering system as well as other keywords, etc. There are around 100 textbooks at this point...

Kindle for the PC

Uh oh! As a newly-retired librarian trying to adjust to a seriously reduced annual income, I have been resisting toys - including e-book readers - but not there's a beta version of the Kindle reader that could run on a PC - perhaps even on my old, creaky HP tablet PC? This could be trouble(!) I'll do my best to resist and slog it out with print books from bricks n mortar libraries. See Kindle for PC