Today's library is still at the heart of all university activities, helping students and faculty become better learners, teachers, and researchers. In recent years there has emerged the formalizing of one or more of these activities into an Academic Commons. These centers of information have been labeled variously but they all share a commonality:…

This publication presents a series of studies that the National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment (NILOA) staff, led by Staci Provezis and Natasha Jankowski, conducted over the past couple of years. It may be the most comprehensive examination yet of institutional transparency in terms of student learning outcomes and the assessment…

In August 2010 the "Los Angeles Times" published a special report on their website featuring performance ratings for nearly 6,000 Los Angeles Unified School District teachers. The move was controversial because the ratings were based on so-called value-added estimates of teachers' contributions to student learning. As with most…

In the alleged information society, providing access to ICT purportedly will enable people, in all walks of life, to actively participate across multiple realms of social, economic, and political life. However, ICT initiatives in Kenya have not necessarily promoted people's ideal participation in an information society. Emphasis on ICT in IL…

Stephen Krashen believes that schools can counter the effects of poverty in at least one area: access to books. However, little research has been done to determine whether students living in poverty have access to school library services comparable to those attending schools with low concentrations of students living in poverty. We examined the…

Introduction: Information encountering (finding information while searching for some other information), is a type of opportunistic discovery of information that complements purposeful approaches to finding information. The motivation for this paper was to determine if the current models of information literacy instruction refer to information…

While mastery of the scientific literature is a strongly desirable trait for undergraduate students, the sheer volume of the current literature has complicated the challenge of teaching scientific literacy. Part of the response to this ever-increasing volume of resources includes formal instruction in the use of reference manager software while…

The real danger with a successful president and a complacent board is that the board will no longer have the benefit of a "marketplace of ideas" when making critical decisions. Boards that rely on an experienced president as the major source of their information are just as likely as a student's single-source paper to arrive at…

In this inaugural column, the authors introduce Peter Palmer, erstwhile librarian at Bellaluna University who is being tasked with managing the library's and university's digital content as he begins his journey down the Digital Highway. As head of access services at Bellaluna University, Peter had been, by default, made responsible for managing…

In 2013, the Student Centre at The University of Tasmania began researching the development of distance learning support. A survey was designed as part of this endeavour, which attracted 1002 responses. The survey's broad context focused on the primary drawbacks and benefits of distance education in general and sought to identify emergent themes…

The persistently low college attainment rates of youth from poor families are partly attributable to their uncertainty about college affordability. The current federal financial aid system does not provide specific information about college costs until just before college enrollment and the information is only available to students completing a…

Most recently, Amazon crowed that it is selling more ebooks than hardcovers. Interestingly, the most recent figures from the Association of American Publishers indicate that new adult hardcover sales in both April and May rose by more than 40 percent over the same months last year, a rebound from last year's shopping paralysis brought on by the…

Go look it up. That is what students who have questions about words are often told. But where should they go? Depending on the question, some resources are better than others, and some are not very good at all, no matter what the question. Finding the most helpful word resource for students can be a challenge, especially now that search engines…

In this article, the author shares his experience and insights gained from his experience that he continued to carry in his role as a teacher, researcher, and cultural producer. In his own work, the author seeks to blur the distinction between scholarship, everyday life, and the arts. Working alone and with other people, he has written books,…

This summer, sports-crazy South Africa, recently named by the "New York Times" as one of the "31 Places To Go in 2010," will become the first African nation to host the FIFA World Cup. Soccer fans making the trip will be rewarded with world-class facilities, modern infrastructure, and a nation of startling contrasts and…