Merry Christmas!

Advent has been full of music making and end of term so that's why no posts!
It's time to say Happy Christmas to all those who read my site! Watch out for 2012 there will be some news!
The pic below is of an old building in the centre of St. Albans : it was all snowy that year : reckon it will be quite warm and no snow this year!

Framing transliterate learning through inquiry and participatory culture

This inspiring presentation by Buffy Hamilton, whom I much admire, at AASL 2011 asks how we are helping students create conversations about multiple ways of reading and writing today’s world?
It includes a number of definitions of transliteracy from various experts and proponents of the term. Having just done a good deal of research around this area myself I can recommend this presentation as a good indication of where librarians should be positiooining themselves to help our students in schools and beyond. Regret no time now to view say more : I shall return to this. I do admire such a great presentation but 148 slides may put you off...It wears me out to imagine how long this lot took to prepare! Some great images and captions though!

Framing Transliterate Learning Through Inquiry and Participatory Culture

View more presentations from Buffy Hamilton

Libraries to go : mobile tech in libraries

Ellyssa Kroski has done it again! A great summary of how libraries are engaging with mobiles.Last year at the Online conference in London I was able to see her present and this latest update is really worth looking at.

Mobile Tech in Libraries

View more presentations from Ellyssa Kroski

Truth, lies and the internet

This Demos report here looks at the ability of young people in Britain to critically evaluate online information. We librarians may have a view on this already (!) This report reviews current literacture and the views of 500 teachers.
The report calls for scepticism online to ba the heart of learning. Censorship of the web is neither needed nor desirable. This will be a useful report to be able to use and cite.
Great stuff!

Web 2.0 tools in education : a quick guide

Came across this guide by Mohamed Amin Embi from Centre of Academic Advancement, University Kebangsaan Malaysia. It is a remarkable guide available for us all to consult on the web using FlipSnack. The experience is therefore like reading an orginal book and flipping over the pages. Coverage includes blogs, Diigo, Evernote, Facebook, Flickr, Glogster, Jing, Prezi, Sype, Slideshare, Twitter, YouTube and Wordle.
Each is explained with visual diagrams. Great and useful resource.

Research Supervisors and Information Literacy

Just in case you haven't come across the recent RIN report "The role of research supervisors in information literacy" - here is the link. It looks at the role of PhD supervisors in ensuring research students have the appropriate level of IL ability to manage their work and later career. Two online surveys were done (one for supervisors and one for research students)plus 5 case studies. A complex and variable picture emerges (doesnt surprise me..) Supervisors are an influence, even if they dont real;ly recognise the IL concept.A minority do not engage their students in IL. There is emphasis on academic writing and importance of critical thinking which I finbd encouraging. Supervisors are not always aware of the training and help available (surprise surprise). Many admit to being out of date or not fully up to date.
We have an opening here and the recommendations will help this. See here

Information Literacy 2.0

I agree with so much of an article by Meredith Farkas on Information Literacy 2.0 when she says :
"The birth of the web made it necessary for librarians to shift more towards teaching search strategies and evaluation of sources. The tool-focused “bibliographic instruction” approach was later replaced by the skill-focused “information literacy” approach. Now, with the growth of Web 2.0 technologies, we need to start shifting towards providing instruction that will enable our patrons to be successful information seekers in the Web 2.0 environment, where the process of evaluation is quite a bit more nuanced."
She goes on to emphasise the importance of critical evaluation. This has always been important : it is simply that it is now the most important factor - in my opinion.Search is significant but its what you do with the results - how you interpret them and make them into an argument. That's what my students can't do and need help with. And of course being able to use the wonderful collaborative tools that Judy O'Connell was speaking about here.

Teacher Librarians are important

Brilliant post from Judy O'Connell about the importance of teacher librarians.
"The importance of the teacher librarian is intrinsically linked to effective and responsive information curation and dissemination in distributed environments within and beyond the school. Use of Web 2.0 tools has become embedded in good practice, and information curation has extended beyond the library catalogue to library and school information management systems for bibliographic and media resources, and various organizational tools that reside beyond the school in web environments, such as Libguides, Diigo, Live Binders, wiki, Delicious, Google tools, RSS, media tools, netvibes, iGoogle, and many more."
Read this clarion call!

Textbooks of Tomorrow

Stephen Abram posted about the Textbook of Tomorrow. It shows predictions as an Infographic.
I ask though : would 1 in 4 students really give up sex for a month in order to have all-digital textbooks?!

QR codes and Information Literacy

I have been playing with QR codes for over a year now.Students have been slow to take to this new technology. Lauren Pressley has done a large presentation on QR codes, location based services and augmented realit, including a section on IL. I am sure this is an important and developing area.
At the moment it is still about experimentation. Some great slides. See here.

RefWorks Tutorials on Video

I owe a big thank you to LSU Health Sciences Center for producing such useful videos about Write n Cite and RefGrabit to help with our RefWorks training. I imagine that other libraries who have to do RefWorks training will find them equally helpful. Here they are.

Finding free images online!

Judy O'Connell has provided a terrific guide to finding free images here.
She says "It’s not just about copyright – its about being practical, and showing students the wonderful world of possibilities beyond Google images or taking anything they find that is not actually in the public domain – a vital point as more students and teachers move into online environments of blogs, wikis and more. Including images with postings enriches the experience for the reader and can also help to illustrate or support the writer’s viewpoint." Thank you Judy!

More about Infographics

Kathy Scrock has collected some information about Infographics on her site here : books, samples, online tutorials and advice on how to create them and how to use them in class.

Integrating Information Literacy into the HE curricula

I have long believed that IL should be integrated into the curriculum where it fits into the student learning experience. This is preferable to those standalone study skills units which mean little to the student.
The challenge is to get the stuff embedded. When I was in Brisbane at the RAILS seminar at Queensland University of Technology (QUT)I found out about a thesis by Xiaoli Wang which goes into the characteristics of IL integration, key stakeholders involved,curricula design strategies and the process of integration.Here it is in the QUT depository,

Infographics are in!

The 2.0 phenomenon has spawned the ability to create visual representations of data, which can be really powerful. Of course creating visuals was always possible but it has got easier and "infographics" are here to stay. Here is an example of one from UMPF about the use of social media by people in the UK, based on a survey of 2387 UK adults.See original posting for details.
It was also featured and commented upon on the Cool Infographics blog. It's the infographic that you should look at.

Slideshare and Facebook joined up

After a long break (which I shall explain in later posts) I'm back and catching you up with things you may already know about!!
SlideShare announced :
"While the Facebook application is not an exact replica of SlideShare, we have tried to include the core features. You can upload your presentations, tag them, comment on others’ presentations and browse using “latest” or “most viewed” tabs . You can also import any of presentations from SlideShare into Facebook with a single click, by specifying the username or tag. This saves the hassle of copying-pasting the embed code. These presentations will show up in Facebook as “imported” with the proper attributions to the original author/user on SlideShare. We think this feature will allow the best content from SlideShare to be consumed by an entirely new audience. "

Day in the Life Project Round 7 26 July 2011

I am still an Academic Liaison Librarian here at University of Bedfordshire in Luton, UK.

I usually mutter about how does anyone have the time! I have done it though before and this week I thought I will go with it! Let's do today!

At the moment I am locked in combat with writing a few chapters of a book about Information Literacy. I woke up about 5.00 a.m. and was trying to make some sense of what the hell IL is all about....how sad is that!

Yesterday I spent most of the day chained to my laptop (see pic) except for the time when I went and moved a few bushes round in the garden! Guess which gave me the most satisfaction...(see pic).

I came to work by bus and had to read an important book for my research : sentences like "the focus of information literacy has largely been centred on instrumental or cognitive views of learning, which have historically been framed within a Cartesian approach to learning" and then there are epistomological concerns and I want to scream!

At work I find I have 85 e-mails again and it takes me til 11.20 to sort through them all!
Everyone is very quiet : perhaps they think I am grumpy because of all those e-mails.
Two more articles arrived from British Library electronically in my e-mail. What a huge improvement this service is but I have to read them now! "Millennial students' mental modes of search : implications for academic librarians and database developers" and "Towards Library 2.0 : the adoption of Web 2.0 technologies in public libraries". I'll save them for the bus on the way home...hope I dont sleep through my stop....
Found out about the Library 2.0 online megaconference planned for November. Must follow this up.

What does the rest of the week hold? Oh no I find I have a whole day on Friday teaching RefWorks. That's the first of the sessions we offer to M level students. Suppose they all come at once..... I dont go in for booking in advance : it went OK last time : "I always hope for the best" : reckon that should go on my tombstone.

I spy a book on my desk - that's unusual - it's a PhD thesis for cataloguing - how I admire anyone who has the staying power to go through all that. Think of the referencing...even with RefWorks.Can't face cataloguing it : there's a new version of Dewey around and that might complicate things.Talking of that reminds me of shelving books years ago with those huge long numbers after the decimal point - always wanted to get the Dewey revising committee to do a few days shelving...

Go to a leaving party for our University Head of Student Welfare : very moving as he has been here 18 years and will be much missed.Lovely jokes too but such a noisy room.

Preparing for session for 5 international students on a Writing course tomorrow. Only 5 : 3 Russians, 1 Finn and 1 Roumanian. It will be about social media : what a nice change from banging on about databases. Reckon I might learn as much from them and the way they are operating as they will from me.I'll do Facebook, Twitter, Delicious, Dropbox, Blogger, Netvibes, Evernote according to their interests.

Half an hour on the phone talking to my ex-colleagues at London South Bank University who have been through a management restructure and are being made redundant. I had that 4 years ago. I know how they feel. To say that they will feel very different about it in a month or two is no comfort.These restuctures are going to be conmmon in this economic environment.

Just found out about two great little videos from LSU Health Sciences Center New Orleans from our E Services Librarian.They will really help our sessions on Friday. I hope that others are using our Just a Minute videos on other topics available here.

It's no good : time to go back to reading about Information Literacy. Let's see "........current information literacy frameworks based on these concepts are 'incompatible with emergent concepts of knowledge and epistemology for digital and online environments". Aaaaaargh! Time for tea.
The answer lies in the Naxos Library (only £13 a year I think I pay) so I can listen to all the stuff in their library. Just the thing when I am ordering or in this case reading tricky stuff.
Am trying Honegger's score for "Les Miserables."I like Honegger but this isnt the happiest music he has written!
Time to go home : read on the bus and then piano playing and maybe a bit of writing late on tonight but no mention sof epistomology or praxis or whatever it was!

Transition Literacy

Information literacy from school to higher education is one of the most important areas for development. I was very interested to find this recent presentation at WILU at Regina in Canada. They used the term transition literacy to describe this challenge : a useful label I think.

T8 Grassroots collaborations and beyond : bridging the gap between high school and post-secondary, by Jennifer Sigalet, Okanagan College, Leslie Barton, Pleasant Valley Secondary School and Sherri Savage, San Jose State University (MLIS). See it here.

The abstract said :

"Recent surveys indicate there is a widening gap between the information literacy skills of high school students and the information literacy skills expectations post-secondary professors have of first-year university students. In response to this growing concern, a high school teacher-librarian and a college librarian recently collaborated on a joint production of the video Research Skills: Bridging the Gap Between High School & Post-Secondary. The film features interviews of six university professors discussing their research skills expectations of first-year university students. The interviews confirm the results of ongoing studies and reports on information literacy and the significant gap between high school and first-year university student preparedness.

Since its production (2010), Research Skills: Bridging the Gap Between High School & Post-Secondary has become a powerful tool for creating an awareness of the existing information literacy skills shortfalls of students entering post-secondary education. The film has subsequently been presented to key players in education including high school administrators, teachers, teacher librarians, school boards, and university professors and librarians.

The original goal of the film Research Skills was to create an impactful means of advocating for teacher-librarians while reiterating the importance of teaching information literacy skills in high schools in preparation for post secondary education. As well, the film has subsequently stimulated discussions amongst high school teacher-librarians and post-secondary librarians as they continue to explore collaborative bridging opportunities within school districts.

The session will bring together useful information on the current state of bridging the gap between high school and post-secondary and will explore collaborative ways of bridging this information literacy gap."

There was also a useful handout here.

Comic guide to Miller Library, McPherson College

Take a look at this new style Library guide for the Miller Library at McPherson College, Kansas here.
They call it a Zombie Guide. It will be interesting to know how their users take to it! Certainly different!

This is the Silver Bullet!

I didnt put the title of the article as the title of this post in case it put you off!
Participation and pedagogy : connecting the social web to ACRL learning outcomes, by Greg Bobish, Journal of Academic Librarianship, 37 (1) 54-63 is the most comprehensive and important summary of how Web 2.0 can be used to deliver Information Literacy!
True, it is tied to the ACRL standards and this makes for a long and detailed article, but there are so many great ideas here! It is really the epitome of much of what our book and this blog is about! It is the article that I should have written (but was too lazy) months or years ago applied to the SCONUL Seven Pillars Framework.
So thank you Bob for this.

New Teaching Tools for Chat Reference

This brilliant presentation using Prezi was given recently at WILU 2011. It was by Lauren DiMonte and Joanna Szurmak from University of Toronto Mississauga. They demonstrate the value of a chat reference service in a University Library and then show how they developed short videos to meet FAQs. They refer to recent articles about screencasts and include an example of their own work at Toronto. Wish I'd been at the presentation to applaud!

M-Libraries 2011 Summary

Alex Miller has done a great job summarising the M-Libraries Brisbane 2011 Conference in a Prezi

m-libraries 2011 summary on Prezi

Information Literacy and Higher Education : a toolkit for curricular integration

Jennifer Jarson has written a great paper here in College and Research Libraries News (Nov 2010) which " is to guide readers to important resources for understanding information literacy and to provide tools for readers to advocate for information literacy’s place in higher education curricula."

Reading this and following the links is likely to save colleagues who need sources and justification for their IL interventions hours of time!

Good practice advice for using Web 2.0 in schools

Somehow I came across this useful attempt at a good practice guide for schools wanting to move on using Web 2.0. It is by Matthew"Toward a set of theoretical best practices for Web 2.0 and Web-based technologies" and it appeared in Meridian School Computer Technologies Journal this year. Access it here.

SCONUL Seven Pillars Model revised!

At the LILAC Conference in London recently Moira Bent and Ruth Stubbings unveiled the new version of the SCONUL Seven Pillars Information Literacy framework. This is a major development and I should have shouted about it before! I quote :

"In order for the model to be relevant to different user communities and ages, the new model is presented as a generic “core” model for Higher Education, to which a series of “lenses”, representing the different groups of learners, can be applied. The Research Lens is the first of the lenses to be developed."

Here is the generic model for HE
Here is the research lens

It's just not the same : mobile information literacy

This is the presentation Andrew Walsh (University of Huddersfield) and I gave at M-Libraries in Brisbane.

This was the abstract :

"Libraries are increasingly developing services that take into account the massive effect of mobile devices upon our users. But what does this increase in use of mobile devices and related services mean for information literacy?
Some databases and library catalogues are delivered in mobile friendly formats, or cross platform search tools (such as Summon at University of Huddersfield). More of our users have the equipment to take advantage of these services each year, with mobile access to the internet soon expected to overtake fixed access. When a library user is as likely to search for information on a mobile phone, tablet or handheld
gaming device as on a fixed PC or in the physical library, will that change the concept of what it means to be information literate? How does mobile search change the discovery, evaluation and re-use of information?
We should consider how the concept of information literacy may be affected in this pervasive mobile context and whether we need to develop a new lens through which to view the literacies required by our clientele.
This paper will first consider the mobile context for information literacy. Then the presenters will compare and contrast their experiences in meeting and harnessing these devices in the delivery of Information Literacy in their own institutions, the University of Bedfordshire and University of Huddersfield in the UK."

You can see a pdf here

Social media survey

There is a survey about use of social media, from the International Federation of Library associations and Institutions.
"In an effort to learn more about how librarians, library workers, library students, and library associations use social media, the Free Access to Information and Freedom of Expression committee of the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) has developed a short survey on these topics. Our hope is that the results will allow us to communicate better with those in the worldwide library community - using the most effective tools at our disposal. We're also very interested in those who DON'T use certain social media, and why they don't."
"If you have not yet done so, please take a few moments to complete the survey (deadline: Wednesday, 1 June 2011) and share it widely with your colleagues and members!" Also you can "Be a fan of FAIFE on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/faife"
In English: http://www.surveymonkey.com/IFLAsocialmedia
En Español: http://www.surveymonkey.com/IFLAredessocial-espanol
En Françes: http://www.surveymonkey.com/IFLAreseauxsociaux-frances

M-Libraries 2011 : Keynote: Stephen Abram

I have heard Stephen talk before but his was way the best : entertaining, challenging and in the end hard to keep up with! Here it is :

M libraries final

View more presentations from Stephen Abram

Back from Oz!

This has been the longest gap between posts-ever!
Most blogs which I follow are drying up a bit so I guess I am not unusual. However the main reason is that much of May I have been in Australia visiting and attending the RAILS seminar and M-Libraries Conference in Brisbane. I shall be posting about these as fast as I can.
The first presentation at M-Libraries I want to showcase was one I didnt even go to! It is by Sally Cummings, Julie Cartwright and others from Charles Darwin University, at Darwin. It is an excellent description of how they have used a treasure hunt to engage new users both on and off campus. The slides show uses of QR codes and how the treasure hunt helped to encourage the use of these. There are details of how effective they felt the hunt had been and pointers for the future.I particularly liked the plans for future use of QR codes there "Aim for high impact low cost.Linking physical spaces or items directly to associated electronic resources."A lot of the presentation resonated with our experience at University of Bedfordshire but there are some great tips which we can use too. Wish I had gone to this session and isnt Slideshare wonderful that we can all "attend" it now!

Exploring student engagement with mobile technologies at a regional university

View more presentations from Sally Cummings

Nicholas Carr : the age of perpetual distraction

Nicholas Carr (author of The Shallows, what the internet is doing to our brains) features in the latest Project Information Literacy (PIL) "Smart Talks" here. It's both interesting and provocative. Makes me want to read the above book. As it mentions the report mentiuoned in the previous post about the latest research by Head and Eisenberg, this is a useful follow-on.

This excerpt is the most interesting for me ;

"I don’t think anyone is “born digital” (at least not yet). We’re all born with human bodies and human minds, and those bodies and minds are influenced in similar ways by the ways we use them and the environment in which we use them. I’ve never subscribed to the fear that people wouldn’t be able to figure out how to navigate online information. People are generally pretty good at learning how to use new media, to separate the wheat from the chaff—and that goes for older people as well as younger ones. I’m 52, and I don’t take anything I find online at face value, either. What concerns me is the mode of thinking that the online world encourages, with its emphasis on speed, multitasking, skimming, and scanning. The web provides little encouragement or opportunity for quieter, more attentive ways of thinking, such as contemplation, reflection, introspection. Those ways of thinking used to be considered the essence of the human intellect. Now they’re seen as dispensable."

So, following from this does this mean that our information literacy interventions should pay more attention to this need to encourage reflection?

BTW this is the 400th post on this blog!!! Somehow I dont think we will make 500...

Latest Head and Eisenberg research

How college students use the Web to conduct everyday life research in First Monday, is the latest piece of research by Alison Head and Michael Eisenberg. (Project Information Literacy PIL).
Here is the abstract
"This paper reports on college students’ everyday life information–seeking behavior and is based on findings from 8,353 survey respondents on 25 U.S. college campuses. A large majority of respondents had looked for news and, to a slightly lesser extent, decision–making information about purchases and health and wellness within the previous six mont

Publish Post

hs. Almost all the respondents used search engines, though students planning to purchase something were more likely to use search engines, and those looking for spiritual information were least likely to use search engines. Despite the widespread use of search engines, the process of filtering relevant from non–relevant search results was reportedly the most difficult part of everyday life research. As a whole, these students used a hybrid information–seeking strategy for meeting their everyday life information needs, turning to search engines almost as much as they did to friends and family. A preliminary theory is introduced that describes the relationship between students’ evaluation practices and their risk–associated searches."

What is Information Literacy?

Mike Eisenberg answers some key questions in this excellent vodcast.He still sees IL at the centre of the literacies in the 21st century, with technology and digital literacies fitting in as part of the IL process. He refers extensively to his Big6 framework. It's a really useful vodcast for those wanting answers to the basic questions of what IL might be and how to start putting it into the curriculum.

Barack Obama and information

"Is education mainly about information?" asks a little video made by the University of New Brunswick Library. In the clip Barack Obama makes a guest speech at a University (in an amazing blue robe).This might be useful trigger video for a discussion about education or what the library can offer.
Information + Time for Research, Reading, and Thinking = Success for Your Research Paper.

Blogs Wane as the Young Drift to Sites Like Twitter

No doubt about it : I don't blog as much as I did ; there aren't so many posts on the blogs that I follow.
In an article 'Blogs wane as the young drift to sites like twitter" in the New York Times Feb 20, 2011 by Verne. G. Kopytoff, we discover the trends. The Internet and American Life Project at the Pew Research Center found that from 2006 to 2009, blogging among children ages 12 to 17 fell by half. Among 18-to-33-year-olds, the project said in a report last year, blogging dropped two percentage points in 2010 from two years earlier.
Among older internet users blogging is still preferred. Some will see Twitter and Facebook as complementary to blogs - a place to promote their blogs.

Glimpse of the future

This article from the XPLanation : What the educational technology world can expect - convergence, product evolution, and problems with metadata management : is a bit outside what I usually cover.

However it raises so many important issues :

He postulates by autumn 2012 tablet devices will take up 25% of HE computing devices in HE.
Students will be using these for sheer convenience : they are for e-books or word-p[rocessing but for convenience....
E-Books are disruptive and libraries will find them hard to come to terms with and manage.

They aren't learning to think critically...

Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, a book (Univ. Of Chicago Press)by Richard Arum, derives from an unusual study that followed several thousand undergraduates in the USA through 4 years of study. The important finding is that 45% of students made no significant improvement in their critical thinking, reasoning or writing skills during the first two years of college. After four years, 36% showed no significant gains in these so-called "higher order" thinking skills.
Being able to be critical about what you find and read and then build up an agument is what I am teaching most of the time. Therefore this report is of interesting to me and is a light bulb moment for those of us involved in Information Literacy. For more see here and here.

Five years Later Library 2.0 and Balance

These two massive articles by Walt Crawford are full of insights. Taken from Cites and Insights vol.11, nos.2 and 3 they are of great interest to anyone interested in the Library 2.0 phenomenon. I shall not begin to summarise them : your time is better spent taking a look through them! I am just in awe of anyone having the time and dedication to produce such material.
Here is the first part and here is the second part.

Don't make it easy for them!

I'm catching up with some posts at last! Been too busy with teaching lately (we did have to see 400 students in groups of 8 over 3 days...) but enough of excuses!

Don't make it easy for them was a little article on ACRLog by Andy Burkhardt of Champlain College, Vermont.
He says :
"I love customer service in libraries. I love improving our systems and services so they are more user-friendly. I love helping students with their research and answering their questions. But I don’t want to make things easy for students. If I did, I wouldn’t be giving them what they want: an education."

Then he goes into the old quandary : are we there to guide or do the work for them?
I understand this only too well because in a few moments I have to e-maila student about books on outsourcing. He seems to expect me to recommend an exact book and if there are no books with that subject keyword or title, we have failed. So do I take the easy way out and go search through dozens of book indexes or spend as long explaining how to do it in an e-mail? I shall do the latter but as Andy says "it's hard work" and "If my job is starting to seem easy, I’m doing something wrong."

Pic is of our learning space in the 70s. So they used to work in groups then too!

Images of QR codes

We have been experimenting with QR codes here at University of Bedfordshire. If you need some neat images of QR codes I recommend you go to Robin Ashford's set of QR codes on flickr here.

Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century

This occasional paper "Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century" is by Henry Jenkins (MIT) and others. It is published by the MacArthur Foundation and springs from their major initiative in 2006 to investigate how young people are being affected by digital technologies to learn, play, socialise and participate in civic life.

It talks a lot about a participatory cultures.

To quote :

"Some have argued that children and youth acquire these key skills and competencies on their
own by interacting with popular culture.Three concerns, however, suggest the need for policy
and pedagogical interventions:
The Participation Gap — the unequal access to the opportunities, experiences, skills, and
knowledge that will prepare youth for full participation in the world of tomorrow.
The Transparency Problem — The challenges young people face in learning to see
clearly the ways that media shape perceptions of the world.
The Ethics Challenge — The breakdown of traditional forms of professional training and
socialization that might prepare young people for their increasingly public roles as media
makers and community participants."

It's a useful document for anyone researching how the present generation learn and for explaining the challenges we face in supporting them.

Peer review : trial by Twitter

Blogs and tweets are ripping papers apart within days of publication, leaving researchers unsure how to react writes Apoorva Mandavilli in NatureNews for 19 January. Apparently the practice of
critques of scientific papers via twitter is growing and is of concern to some researchers. Should these critiques be answered?

It's a useful articles and draws together open review practices which have gone on in the scientific community for some time. It also considers how there would be interest in methods to aggregate and quantify all online responses and evaluations of an article.

Academic Library autopsy report, 2050

Brian T.Sullivan wrote here in the Chronicle of Higher Education, 02/01/11

"The academic library has died. Despite early diagnosis, audacious denial in the face of its increasingly severe symptoms led to its deterioration and demise. The academic library died alone, largely neglected and forgotten by a world that once revered it as the heart of the university. On its deathbed, it could be heard mumbling curses against Google and something about a bygone library guru named Ranganathan."

It's a nice little read for the start of the year and has provoked some reactions!

He declares "Information literacy was fully integrated into the curriculum" Not here I here you saying!

How Twitter is changing

Brian Solis has come up with an interesting take on how Twitter seems to be developing.
How have we 150 million Twitter users changed in the past year?
For example 69% now share their biography which double last year.
Who you follow says a lot about us.
Only 0.06% Twitter users have over 20,000 followers.
22.5% of users post 90% of tweets.
Take a look here.