Tag Archives: research

For Women’s History Month: an Online Resource

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In honor of Women’s History Month (March), you might want to visit the Library’s online subscription to: Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000.

This is a resource for students and scholars of U.S. history and U.S. women’s history. Organized around the history of women in social movements in the U.S. between 1600 and 2000, the collection  currently includes 91 document projects and archives with more than 3,600 documents and 150,000 pages of additional full-text documents, and more than 2,060 primary authors. It also includes book, film, and website reviews, notes from the archives, and teaching tools.

Curricular Technology Usage Analysis: Audio Capture

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Have just published another curricular technology usage analysis on the Segue from Segue blog, this one on audio capture.  Audio recording is frequently used in language study.  There are also a few examples of podcasting including lectures on International Political Economy by James Morrison (Political Science), discussions of digital audio by students in Jason Mittell’s Media Technology & Culture course.   For more details, see:

Curricular Technology Usage Analysis » Audio Capture

Quick-Start Guide for new library web site

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Our updated Quick-Start Guide to Library Research [pdf] provides:

  • a screenshot “map” of research resources in the new library web site
  • step-by-step instructions for finding journal articles

We often use this guide as a handout in research workshops.  It prints on one page, double-sided.  Please use it and distribute it widely!

And that’s the news for today…

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Looking for the latest news? Just as nationally the number of dailies and weeklies available at the newsstand, the local drugstore or delivered to your doorstep has decreased in recent years, so too has the number of paper subscriptions that the library receives and puts out on the shelves in the Harman Reading room. But access to news from both the United States and around the world, current and archival, has actually increased through the library’s subscriptions to news databases. To locate and explore the wealth of news sources available to you through the library portal follow the link to the newspaper guide. And keep up with the latest political scandal, cricket scores or just compare sources for accuracy and bias.

Making federally funded research results freely available

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Today (Dec 10 2009) begins the comment period for President Obama’s
Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) Public Forum on How Best to Make Federally Funded Research
Results Available For Free.
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Review of Technology in Education Sites

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To help us create a section of the LIS site on Curricular Technology, I thought it would be good to see how other institutions publish comparable information.  What we are currently calling “curricular technology” is described in various ways including “instructional technology“, “educational technology,” “academic technology,” and “technologies for teaching, learning and research.”  What all of these labels have in common is seems to be the use of technology in education.

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Surveys and Focus Groups

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Clearly both surveys and focus groups are important tools for gathering information about a particular population.  Usually surveys are used first, to a get general sense of the population.  Surveys are then followed by focus groups that get more in depth information.

However a case can be made for reversing this order and starting with focus groups first, followed by surveys (see: “Use of Focus Groups in Survey Item Development“, The Qualitative Report, Nassar and Borders, March, 2002).  Focus groups can often help to define survey questions or inform how questions are phrased.  This can be particularly important for technology surveys, helping to couch questions in terms that those surveyed can understand.

Meeting Notes 2009-09-01

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This meeting focused on brainstorming about the use of curricular technologies at Middlebury in terms of:

  • What we know about how faculty/students are using curricular technologies now
  • What we need to verify about their technology usage
  • What we don’t know about what faculty/students want or need in terms of curricular technologies now and/or in the future

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