OMG did ur dad frk out?

March 31st, 2005 Stewart

16-year-old girl texts up a $1058 cell phone bill

More than twelve thousand text messages that were sent in a mere thirty days, means that this Mil was averaging one text message every four minutes.

The father wants cell phones banned at school, claiming that the teachers should have stopped her somehow. I’m sorry, but if she’s averaging a message every four minutes, there’s no way that her parents shouldn’t have noticed this. Should teachers take phones away from students who are disrupting class or even cheating on exams as suggested in the story? Absolutely, and I would have no problem with the school keeping said phones until the end of the semester as punishment. But for the father to suggest that the school should ban cell phones in their entirety because his daughter was irresponsible and he was unobservant is illogical and wrongheaded.

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Putting the fear of God into those who plagiarize…

March 31st, 2005 Stewart

This will take a little explanation. A comedian who was online got IMed by a student who asked him to write her paper. She thought he was some sort of expert in Hinduism. He agreed to write her paper for 75 bucks and decided to teach her a lesson by turning her in:

Laura K. Krishna is a Plagiarist

Then the Internet sort of exploded all over his blog. Then the girl got scared. Then he revealed that he didn’t turn her in after all:

Laura K. Krishna is Just a Dumb Kid With a Nice Mom

It’s a very unusual, morally ambiguous tale that could only happen in the Era of the Blog. That said, I’m not sure it wouldn’t make a good classroom example of what can happen to ordinary students who plagiarize. A colleague and I have adapted some material for plagiarism instruction here at UB, and we try to impart to the students the potentially dire consequences of plagiarism, along with “real world” definitions and examples of what constitutes plagiarism and how to avoid it by citing your resources.

It’s one thing to tell them about what has happened to professors who plagiarize — Students give you semi-polite attention and think, “Yeah, so? I’m not gonna be a professor.” But if students see how another student got busted, humiliated on the web, and was maybe even kicked out of school, then that might have some real impact on their future behaviors.

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Pew Internet & American Life Project: Teens Online

March 23rd, 2005 Stewart

One interesting bit in the latest Pew Internet report that really shouldn’t be overlooked:

Some 13% of youth between the ages of 12 and 17 – about 3 million teens – do not use the internet. Nearly half (47%) of these non-users say they used the internet at one point or another, but then dropped off. About one in ten of all non-online teens report being offline because they had bad experiences, they face parental restrictions, or because they do not feel safe.

Amid all the discussions of parents protecting teens by placing computers in public areas of the house (73%), monitoring online activities (62%), and using Internet filtering software (54%), this is a staggering number of non-users, especially in light of how many of them previously used the net and then “dropped out.”

One of the questions I’ve been routinely asking participants of my Teaching the Millennials talk is how will this protected/coddled generation of Mils respond when they meet genuine adversity or hardship in their daily activities. For example, as we continue to ship jobs overseas at alarming rates, unemployment is on the rise, and Boomers are retiring from their jobs later in life than before, how will job-hungry Mils respond? Eighty percent of them expect to make $50,000/yr or more by the time they turn thirty; the average thirty year old in the US makes roughly $26,000. How will the realities of the job market affect them?

If the 1.5 million Internet drop-offs are any example, they might have difficulties.

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Weapons of Mass Instruction — The Millennial Generation

March 21st, 2005 Stewart

Weapons of Mass Instruction has posted an interesting piece on the Millennial Generation, mostly crafted from reading through the free Educause e-book, Educating the Net Generation. The book, BTW, is a solid read and I’d recommend it to anyone interested in these issues.

I agree with much of what WMI says, especially his conclusions. In the years leading up to college, it seems that Mils have been taught “to the test,” especially as regards standardized tests (SAT, Regents/Governors Exams, etc.). Traditionally, higher ed has focused on lifelong learning, creativity, originality, and critical thinking. Now there seems to be a general belief that higher education should change its model to more of a business-minded, goals-oriented diploma engine. This is a philosophical difference that will have a dramatic impact in the next few years in higher ed, mark my words.

That said, as someone who is frequently called on to present about Mils and their learning behaviors, I should mention that there are significant (and documented) differences between Mils and other generations. For example, Gen Xers despise team-based assignments and tend not to learn as much from working with a group as they do working on their own. Mils, on the other hand, tend to learn best working with other Mils. Boomers and other returning learners often have a harder time integrating multimedia and higher end IT into their learning models than do Mils. These are just a couple of examples.

The myth of multitasking, though, I think WMI hit dead on. Attention span is finite — split it between five tasks instead of just one and you’ll see a drop in quality across the board. Otherwise, many of the hallmarks of “good education” for the Mils are, as he suggests, simply hallmarks of good education in general.

Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments »

All-New, All-Different…

March 17th, 2005 Stewart

I decided that the old look was old, and changed the template to one of the cool pre-packaged ones Blogger offers. And the new photo doesn’t have a photoshopped weave plastered onto the front of my hair like the old one did, so that’s kind of nice.

Along with the new look though, I’ve decided to suck it up and start writing about matters other than just EndNote, Reference Manager and my conference schedule. Time for me to get a little involved, I think, and talk about some of the happenings in the library world that matter to me. I have over a decade’s worth of experience under my belt, but I’m still most definitely a Gen X librarian. I’m hearing a lot of talk these days about our “obligations” to the Boomers who came before us and their “legacy.” In the meantime, X-er librarians and researchers are building whole new tools like HubMed and CiteULike, using blogs to promote services and outreach, and generally changing the way business has been conducted in libraries for the last hundred years. Repeatedly, though, I hear X-ers complain that their opinions aren’t considered, opportunities for promotion are denied, and they are generally regarded less as “colleagues” and more as “resources.”

Most recently, ALA pres-elect Michael Gorman has ranted about Google and bloggers, cementing in my mind his complete “out-of-touchness” with both younger librarians and a new generation of information users. His are the feeble roars of the T-Rex as it spies the bright comets in the eastern sky. Because Gorman is so highly visible, though, he embarasses all of us that have embraced Google, blogging, and other non-traditional library technologies.

I have more to say… and I guess that’s kind of the point of this. I’m a thirty-six year old librarian with eleven years of experience. I got my feet wet with Mosaic. I wrote my library’s first Gopher and their first Web site. I’ve searched hundreds of databases for information, and that’s no exaggeration.

My voice matters. The Gen X librarian matters. The legacy is not the Boomers concern; it’s ours. And I have more to say…

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

BibTeX, EndNote & CiteULike

March 16th, 2005 Stewart

Okay, well, I’m probably only writing this one for myself alone, but here goes:

First off, I should say that CiteULike is one of the coolest apps for researchers and academics that I’ve seen in many a moon. Think of it as a giant online repository for your favorite articles. If you search PubMed, you can use the CiteULike posting tool to automatically add records to your personal list. You can then share your list with the world of CiteULike users. They, in turn, can download your selected list of articles, book chapters, etc. to their own bibliographic software, like EndNote.

What’s a little harder, tho by no means impossible, is uploading your EndNote library to CiteULike. I just did this and it seems to have worked out great, but there is a trick. For those brave few of you still reading, here’s what I did:

1. CiteULike can import files in BibTex format.
2. EndNote can export as BibTeX using the “BibTeX Export” style.
3. EndNote’s “BibTeX Export” has to be modified in v.8.0.2, but it’s a minor modification. Use EndNote’s Style Editor to change “Label” to “Record Number” for each reference type in the bibliography.
4. Export your library, using the new style. Save the file with a “.bib” extension.
5. Use CiteULike’s Import from BibTeX tool to import the records from your new .bib file.

All CiteULike libraries can be searched, exported, or viewed through RSS feeds. If you are doing any library work, you should definitely try this out.

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Harry Frankfurt’s "On Bull***t"

March 16th, 2005 Stewart

Harry Frankfurt’s “On Bull***t” was originally an essay before it was recently republished as a small book — a small book which is currently #4 on Amazon’s bestseller list. It’s also an interesting read, though, as one might suspect, the language used is not for the faint of heart.

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

CiteULike and HubMed

March 14th, 2005 Stewart

I’m probably behind on my cool web sites these days, but here’s two that everyone here should probably check out.

CiteULike

HubMed

In particular, Hubmed appears to have several advantages over Pubmed’s standard interface. Give it a try…

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

A few quick notes

March 4th, 2005 Stewart

It’s been a while since I posted here, and I wanted to mention a few things before heading into what looks like a pretty busy conference season for me.

First, and most importantly, I want to say that EndNote 8.0.2 is a success and that I’m finally glad to endorse it — Oh yeah, like you’ve been waiting on my word anyway. The bugs that remain are pretty minor, and I’ve heard that there will not be a version 9 this summer, meaning that this is the new version for a long time to come. If you’ve been waiting to download it from UB Libraries, wait no more.

Second, I finished work recently on an EndNote bibliographic style for Cancer Immunology Immunotherapy. It seems to work pretty well, and anyone who would like it is welcome to download it - just right-click and “Save As” to C:\Program Files\EndNote\Styles. I also plan to forward a copy to the journal editors for their use. I developed it with EndNote 7, so it should be forward-compatible with version 8.0.2.

I will also be posting some additional EndNote/RefMan class notes and related materials here in the next month or so.

Lastly, while I still intend to post here from time to time, it will not be very frequently for the foreseeable future. April and May will both be very demanding months for me, and I’m still committed to getting another couple of publications out the door prior to my tenure vote this year.

Thanks for reading!

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »