Beyond being a simple object of desire, the announced Apple Watch will be in classrooms around the world soon enough, as Rebecca Koening from the Chronicle of Higher Education points out.

I love some of the comments made by the experts she interviews, in particular Teresa Fishman, director of the International Institute for Academic Integrity at Clemson University as well as David M. Levy, a professor in the Information School at the University of Washington, who teaches a class called “Information and Contemplation.” Both advocate for a shift in teaching strategies.

And, yeah, I really desire an Apprle Watch althought I am not certain I would effectively use it in my daily life. And of course, you’re always better off waiting for the secound iteration of any Apple tech, you wouldn’t want to pay a high price to debug their device… this is the cost of Apple love.

A collague passed on this interesting article by Andrew Duffy from The Ottawa Citizen dated August 30, 2014, titled “The State of StatsCan Survey“. Mr Duffy provides important information about our national statistical agency.

I really like this award-winning poster presented at a recent Library Assessment conference by Dana Thomas and Weina Wang titled “Evaluating Library Contribution to Student Success” (see also this pic on the conference’s Twitter feed).

They obtained data from the registrars office and mapped it out to usage data of various library services for undergraduate students. They could then determine if the performance designation of a student’s academic standing was correlated with their library use.

This picture says a thousand words

The New Media Corporation (NMC), in collaboration with the University of Applied Sciences (HTW) Chur, Technische
Informationsbibliothek (TIB) Hannover, and ETH-Bibliothek Zurich, announces the publication of the NMC Horizon Report: 2014 Library Edition (PDF, 56 pages).

This report outlines the technicological changes as well as the solvable, difficult and wicked challenges facing libraries in the next 5+ years. For example, under trends affecting libraries in the next 2 years, they cite the increasing focus on research data management for publications and the prioritization of mobile content and delivery.

Under “solvable” challenges, they indicate embedding academic and research libraries in the curriculum and rethinking the roles and skills of librarians.

I’ve followed these Horizon repprts before and I am happy to now see a report on libraries. The education ones provided for interesting matter to reflect upon.

This is a worksheet I prepared for a presentation about creating table of contents in MS Word. The structured text is below, but you can also use these versions :
– Using MS Word (2007) with Style (PDF)
– Using MS Word (2007) with Style (.doc)

Using microsoft word with style

Outline

Creating a table of contents

– Establishing title structure

– Removing superfluous formatting symbols and styles

– Applying styles to reflect title structure

– Dividing the document: multiple page number formatting

– Inserting and managing your table of contents

Creating a list of figures

Creating an index

Creating a table of contents

Establishing title structure

Before you start writing, think about the structure of your document, such as the different sections and sub-sections. For example, the introduction section could have sub-sections which include an opening, a problem statement or research question, a literature review, etc.

This step does not involve Microsoft Word and is rather an effective writing method.

Removing superfluous formatting symbols and styles

If you are copying text from another document, make sure it is cleared of all formatting and other superfluous formatting symbols, such as empty paragraphs.

A good method if to use: Home > (Clipboard) Paste Special > Unformatted Text

Also, you could show the paragraph marks: Home > (Paragraph) ¶

Applying styles to reflect title structure

Use the style browser to apply a title level to each section titles and sub-section titles. Section titles are “Title 1” and sub-section titles are “Title 2”.

The style browser: Home > (Styles)

Dividing the document: multiple page number formatting

First, you must divide your document into different sections. Insert section breaks to a new page: Page Layout > (Page Setup) Breaks > (Section Break) Next Page

Then, access the page footer to make it different than the previous:

Insert > (Header & Footer) Footer > Edit Footer

Toggle this option: Design > (Navigation) Link to previous

This allows having different page numbering styles. Now, for each section, you need to do two things. First, you need to configure each footer’s page numbering style (Roman numerals, Arabic numerals, letters). Second, you need to insert the page number. Here’s how:

1. Format page numbering for section: Insert > (Header & Footer) Page Number > Format Page Number
   1. Select the desired Number Format
   2. Select Start at 1 (toggle from Continue from Previous Section)
2. Insert page number in the section: Insert > (Header & Footer) Page Number…

Repeat for each section with page numbers (you can have a section with no page numbers).

Inserting and managing your table of contents

Now, once you have applied styles to your section and sub-section titles and the formatting of the page numbers for each section, you are ready to insert the table of contents:

References > (Table of Contents) Table of Contents > Insert Table of Contents

This will open the table of contents dialog box. You can select a Format for your table of contents as well as cluck on the Options button to decide which “title levels” to include.

If you later change your document, you can update the table of contents with a click of the mouse. Just hover the cursor over the table of contents and activate the contextual menu (“right-click”) and select Update Field > Entire Table.

Creating a list of figures

First, below each figure, insert a caption:

References > (Captions) Insert Caption

Then, insert a table of figures:

References > (Captions) Insert Table of Figures

To update the table of figures, just hover the cursor over the table of contents and activate the contextual menu (“right-click”) and select Update Field > Entire Table.

Creating an index

First, manually go through your text. Each time you refer to a concept you want included in the index, mark the entry:

References > (Index) Mark Entry

Then, insert an Index:

References > (Index) Insert Index

To update the index, just hover the cursor over the table of contents and activate the contextual menu (“right-click”) and select Update Field > Entire Table.

Interesting, this list of top 20 articles compiled by the Library Instruction Round Table, see page 6 of their latest newsletter. This one seems of particular interest:

Stowe, B. (2013). Designing and implementing an information literacy instruction outcomes assessment program. College & Undergraduate Libraries, 20(3-4),
242–276.
This case study describes and analyzes the efforts of the library faculty at the Brooklyn Campus Library of Long Island University who are involved in developing, testing, and implementing a ground-up information literacy outcomes assessment program for the undergraduate core curriculum. Based on the increasingly prominent role given to information literacy by re-accreditation agencies, the library was prompted to significantly upgrade its assessment practice of collecting anecdotal evidence and administering clickers-based exit surveys. To detail the process of the upgrade, the article discusses such issues as key external and internal institutional forces that influence the development of an outcomes assessment programs. The library faculty members discuss choosing the appropriate assessment instrument (standardized or locally developed), establishing a hierarchy of priorities of assessment areas/goals, determining the actual assessment questions, and building the iterative assessment cycle (pre-assessment and post-assessment). The author includes examples from early versions of the evaluation instruments as well as the revisions of such instruments. The honesty of the library faculty members is disarming—they freely refer to the persistent personnel and managerial issues their library had been facing for some time and are generally very open about the challenges this represented in terms of developing a sustainable assessment program. As a result, this article provides an invaluable resource for other institutions trying to build their outcomes assessment program from scratch.

This just came out : the latest “Tips and Trends” report from the Instructional Technologies Committee members of the American College and Research Libraries and the American Library Association.

Tips and Trends, written by Instructional Technologies Committee members, introduces and discusses new, emerging, or even familiar technology which can be applied in the library instruction setting. Issues are published 4 times a year.

Technology for Flipping the Classroom
Spring 2014

By Angela Colmenares

Two interesting posts zipped in front of my eyes during my regular update:
(1) this presentation deposited in e-lis about the information literacy tutorial developed at the University of Ottawa:

Library Research Basics: The Evolution of an Online Information Literacy Tutorial
Hemingway, Ann and Dekker, Jennifer and Bail, Cynthia and Pinet, Richard and Rockeby, Steve Library Research Basics: The Evolution of an Online Information Literacy Tutorial., 2007 . In Ontario Library Association. Super Conference, Toronto, Ontario, January 31 – February 3, 2007. (Unpublished) [Presentation]

And the second, this First Monday article :

How today’s college students use Wikipedia for course-related research
Alison J. Head, Michael B. Eisenberg
Volume 15, Number 3 – 1 March 2010

And, here is my YouTube tutorial on Wikipedia:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rl5bAttk56k?list=PLaqfn26UOsX-k3NLTFgGTJGUY6BLjj4D_&w=560&h=315]

I’ve been working hard on an information literacy program for undergraduate students in the marketing and management departments at Concordia University’s John Molson School of Business (more on that later) but, in recent email exchange with a colleague, I came up with the following themes for graduate students:

Off the cuff, this curriculum would obviously discuss important academic resources such as peer-reviewed articles and related databases, but I feel it should also cover best practices with regards to managing one’s information need at the graduate level, well beyond “just” searching for information. This should include: using social media for graduate studies, active information discovery, advanced text processing, bibliographic management software, coping with information overload, etc.

Will come back to that later…