Documents found
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3711.
An Assessment of Information Control: Understanding Library Service Quality from Users’ Perspectives
More informationObjective – This study aims to measure library users’ perceptions of the quality of information control using LibQual, a survey instrument that measures library users’ minimum perceived and desired levels of service quality across three dimensions: Effect of Service, Library as Place, and Information Control. Numerous studies using LibQual have emphasized the service aspect, while quality of information control has received less attention. Previous studies have reported low quality of information control in academic libraries. Methods – A descriptive survey was conducted at the library of the Universitas Islam Negeri Sumatera Utara (UINSU), Medan, Indonesia, where active members of the library total 49,892. Using proportional random sampling, 100 completed surveys were obtained from a total population of 49,892. Results – This study shows that the quality of information control in the library of UINSU Medan does not meet minimum user expectations. Nevertheless, ease of navigation of information was perceived as acceptable. The study also reveals that the library has promoted information services through exhibition activities, user education activities, and social media. Conclusion – The findings suggest the need for libraries to improve the quality of information services, including content of information, access protocols, search time, ease of navigation, interface, and access from outside the campus. Further, libraries need to conduct continuous service quality evaluation on a regular basis (using tools such as LibQual) to understand the needs of users in terms of information control better. The results from the present study provide strong evidence to support a recommendation that, in general, universities should provide required resources and funding for libraries to improve information services to ensure that the libraries meet quality standards.
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3712.More information
Objective - Seeking information is a key element of evidence based practice and successful healthcare delivery. Significant literature exists on both the information seeking behaviour of professional nurses and information literacy teaching methods, but scarce evidence connects nurses’ information behaviour and environments with their education. This study sought to use data from nursing alumni to answer the following research questions: What are the current information practices of professional bachelor’s-prepared nurses? How do recently-graduated nurses suggest that their education could have better prepared them to find and evaluate information in the workplace? Methods - The researchers conducted a descriptive study using a 59-item survey instrument with a variety of question formats including short-answer, multiple choice, Likert, and open response. The researchers distributed the survey to baccalaureate nursing alumni who graduated in 2012-2017 from four universities in the state of Utah in the United States. Results - Nurses seek practical information primarily to provide informed patient care, while also clarifying medical situations and expanding their health care knowledge. They frequently consult nursing colleagues and physicians when seeking information. The majority of nurses consult electronic health records daily. Respondents described time as the biggest barrier to accessing information. They requested authentic, clinically-focused scenarios, training on freely-accessible resources, and more explicit teaching of lifelong learning skills, such as critical thinking. Conclusion - Information literacy education should prepare student nurses for the fast-paced information environment they will face in the workplace. This means incorporating more patient-focused scenarios, freely available quality resources, and time-based activities in their education. The researchers suggest areas to prepare nurses for information seeking, including problem-based clinical scenarios, building guides with databases accessible for free or little cost, and added emphasis on critical thinking and self-motivated learning.
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3713.More information
Objective – Cultural heritage institutions with digital images on Wikimedia Commons want to know if and how those images are being reused. This study attempts to gauge the impact of digital cultural heritage images from Wikimedia Commons by using Reverse Image Lookup (RIL) to determine the quantity and content of different types of reuse, barriers to using RIL to assess reuse, and whether reused digital cultural heritage images from Wikimedia Commons include licensing information. Methods – 171 digital cultural heritage Wikimedia Commons images from 51 cultural heritage institutions were searched using the Google images “Search by image” tool to find instances of reuse. Content analysis of the digital cultural heritage images and the context in which they were reused was conducted to apply broad content categories. Reuse within Wikimedia Foundation projects was also recorded. Results – A total of 1,533 reuse instances found via Google images and Wikimedia Commons’ file usage reports were analyzed. Over half of reuse occurred within Wikimedia projects or wiki aggregator and mirror sites. Notable People, people, historic events, and buildings and locations were the most widely reused topics of digital cultural heritage both within Wikimedia projects and beyond, while social, media gallery, news, and education websites were the most likely places to find reuse outside of wiki projects. However, the content of reused images varied slightly depending on the website type on which they were found. Very few instances of reuse included licensing information, and those that did often were incorrect. Reuse of cultural heritage images from Wikimedia Commons was either done without added context or content, as in the case of media galleries, or was done in ways that did not distort or mischaracterize the images being reused. Conclusion – Cultural heritage institutions can use this research to focus digitization and digital content marketing efforts in order to optimize reuse by the types of websites and users that best meet their institution’s mission. Institutions that fear reuse without attribution have reason for concern as the practice of reusing both Creative Commons and public domain media without rights statements is widespread. More research needs to be conducted to determine if notability of institution or collection affects likelihood of reuse, as preliminary results show a weak correlation between number of images searched and number of images reused per institution. RIL technology is a reliable method of finding image reuse but is a labour-intensive process that may best be conducted for selected images and specific assessment campaigns. Finally, the reused content and context categories developed here may contribute to a standardized set of codes for assessing digital cultural heritage reuse.
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3714.More information
From its inception in Plato’s Republic and revival in Thomas More’s Utopia, the concept of a perfect (or as More originally put it in a qualification often lost, “best”) form of a republic has been dogged by the spectres of hypocrisy, contradiction, and authoritarianism. However, the matter is more complicated than a simple declaration that utopias provide a vehicle for totalitarian fantasy, that totalitarian governments inevitably portray themselves as creating a utopia. While today’s readers, at a comfortable distance from the early sixteenth century, may bridle at the lack of privacy, or at the ideological coerciveness in More’s Utopia, that does not eradicate how, in Walter Kendrick’s words, “what for us are problems are for them solutions.” It can be argued that the negative elements are a response to social ills. The same goes for Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and Dave Eggers’s The Circle. While the negatives in all three fictions undermine or put into question the positives, our realization that the authors also intended the negatives as genuine attempts at resolving genuine problems that cause untold misery invites us to complicate our judgments. The undermining is itself undermined.
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3716.More information
Overwhelming instructional technology options leave teachers searching for efficient approaches to foster differentiated instruction. This study examined an iterative, design-based research approach of one teacher’s 10-week digital literacy and language-guided small-group instructional intervention with second-grade unidentified language learners. Students explored 15 language and literacy apps, engaged in personalized reading experiences, and created authentic artifacts reflective of their culture. Findings led to the Culturally Relevant Model for Digital Language and Literacy Instruction, a roadmap for teachers and teacher educators to plan tailored instruction to better meet the needs of identified and unidentified students’ language and literacy skills.
Keywords: culturally responsive pedagogy, digital literacies, elementary school, english learners
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3717.More information
In line with a socio-critical approach to digital uses, which includes both the school and the extracurricular contexts in its analysis of student’s relationship to digital technologies, this article presents a review of the scientific literature on the transfer of learning regarding the three disciplinary skills of French as a first language induced by the extracurricular digital uses of adolescents. The data consisted of scientific documents obtained through a review of writings published between 2010 and 2018 and retrieved from databases and specialized journals. The results show that the transfer of learning is not a systematic process because when an adolescent uses a technology in the new context, they do not use the same skills as in the initial context.
Keywords: ordre d’enseignement secondaire, secondary level of education, digital uses, enseignement du français langue, caractéristiques des adolescents, teaching French as a first language, contextes scolaire et extrascolaire, transfer of learning, adolescents' characteristics, transfert des apprentissages, school context and extracurricular context, usages numériques
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3718.More information
This article identifies the reasons why Quebec readers of paper books do not read e-books. After analysing data collected from eleven interviews with people over 15 years of age who ex-clusively read paper books, the results indicate that they give a profound meaning to the paper book as a material object. The usage constraints associated with digital books also tend to put them off. The experience of read-ing on a digital medium seems to them both less comfortable and less rich in meaning. Their reluc-tance may stem from a sense of ambivalence towards the grow-ing place of digital interfaces in society and from a malaise in the face of increasingly blurred boundaries between reading and digital. Clearly, certain psycho-social factors influence, such as concern for the environment, the vision of technology and the re-lationship with the actors of the book industry.
Keywords: percepción, perception, perception, lectores, readers, lecteurs, livre papier, paper book, libro papel, digital book, livre numérique, libro digital, Québec, Quebec, Quebec
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3719.More information
This research seeks to analyze the logic of Brazilian academic capitalism that conditions a process of commodification of the production of knowledge, as well as the prioritization of the supply of training courses for professionals. This process is characterized as raw material knowledge contributing to the creation of a kind of World Class University. Concerning the methodological procedures of the research, it was decided to develop a bibliographic and documentary research based on critical-dialectic epistemology. Content analysis was used in the treatment of data. It is considered that, despite policy development for the entrepreneurship of higher education through public-private partnerships that subsidize the expansion of the private-mercantile sector of higher education through its financialization, the adaptation to the standard of the New American University is carried out from the movement to commercialize scientific production and private investments in the public sector, as well as prioritizing the offer of technological courses and bachelor's degrees to the detriment of undergraduate degrees, in addition to the incorporation of technological innovations resulting from the pandemic crisis, thus tending toward the constitution of the World Class University.
Keywords: Higher education, Academic capitalism, Crisis
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3720.More information
This paper is an ethnographic study of digital culture and Iranian online political humor: a hybridized genre of folklore which converges in both online and oral spheres where it is created and shared. It specifically explores the emergence and growth of politicized humorous cellphonelore, which I term “electionlore”, during and after the 2016 February elections in Iran. Analysing different joke sub-cycles in this electionlore, I argue that they serve as a powerful tool for my informants to construct their own “newslore” (Frank 2011) and make manifest what I define as “vernacular politics” through which they become mobilized and unified in their political activism. I diverge from the theory of “resistance jokes” (Powell and Paton 1988; Bryant 2006; Davies 2011) and propose a new framework for studying political jokes in countries suspended between democracy and dictatorship, demonstrating how jokes serve as an effective and strategic form of reform and unquiet protest.