Wiki workshop slides
April 10th, 2008 Stewart
From earlier today:
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Actually, PubMed has never been very good…
March 30th, 2008 Stewart
I Am Not Yelling. Not Out Loud. - Lab Life - Anna Kushnir’s blog on Nature Network
As the blogger above will testify, PubMed is not at all attuned to how modern searchers search. On the other hand, it really has never been a particularly good search engine, so I don’t know why this is striking so many librarians as a harsh criticism. PubMed isn’t bad for government work, but it has many problems as we all know.
This isn’t an information literacy issue either, I’m sorry to say. Researchers and clinicians shouldn’t have to “learn to search” to be able to run basic searches, and instead they should call the librarian when things get rough. The analogy I like to use is for car owners: Everyone should be able to pump their own gas, some might even change their own oil, but sometimes you need to hire a pro to come in and fix the transmission.
Unfortunately, many of the competing products, including my old standby Ovid, are also just terrible for running simple MEDLINE searches. Partly this is due to legacy problems with MEDLINE, partly it’s due to limitations with the MeSH and the indexing, and partly it’s due to PubMed being coded in the mid-1990s and remaining largely unchanged this whole time. Researchers used to complain about PubMed’s imprecision; clinicians complained about getting too many hits. And now, we’re going to have a new generation of searchers used to very simple, effective techniques that work fine in Google and elsewhere not getting what they need either…
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RSS workshop slides
March 27th, 2008 Stewart
Okay, I’m having a lot of trouble posting these with this template for some reason. The slides are from a recent RSS workshop I gave, in preparation for a whole series of Web 2.0/3.0 workshops I hope to teach this fall:
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Student loan programs being investigated
April 6th, 2007 Stewart
Federal Official in Student Loans Held Loan Stock - New York Times
Today’s modern student loan program is a corrupt exercise in corporate profiteering built on the backs of students who find themselves left with no other options. Kudos to Andrew Cuomo for investigating student lenders and universities for their ethically-confused practices. Let’s hope to see this investigation extend to the federal level very soon.
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I’m going to stop calling them Helicopter parents…
November 8th, 2006 Stewart
And start calling them Complete Failures as Parents!
‘Helicopter parents’ try to help their kids land jobs - CNN.com
Employers, I’m begging you, send a clear message: “If your Mommy calls, you don’t get the job.”
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JMLA Case Studies in Health Sciences Librarianship
November 4th, 2006 Stewart
Yet another damn smart idea from the JMLA.
The JMLA provides a clinical question that needs an answer. You can then compare your answer with that of the case study author. As self-directed tutorials go, this one is very nicely done — My only (very minor) complaint is that the answer is being fed out in serial form, over several days. For those like myself who always peek at the book’s ending first, this can be a maddening experience.
Good stuff, and for health librarians with little or no clinical experience, a really great way to learn a little better how to deal with “front line” questions.
EDIT: As Rachel points out in the comments below, the article full text, along with the answers, is available online at:
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1629446
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An open access call to arms
November 4th, 2006 Stewart
Dean is very correct about the need to develop new tools and new resources that circumvent our overreliance on high-dollar electronic products like UpToDate and MDConsult.
I plan on taking up the cause myself in a number of ways. Recently I announced the launch of Communications in Information Literacy, a new open access journal that I’m co-editing. This coming Wednesday I’m conducting a public forum at the University at Buffalo about developing a new open access drug resource, whole cloth, as a wiki. Potentially, it will be able to be harnessed as an alternative to pricey clinical drug information systems and online formularies, while doubling as a drug education aid for information literacy efforts.
I’m very excited about the prospect, but my most fervent hope is that my colleagues in MLA, particularly the Pharmacy and Drug Information Section, will collaborate with me in building this new site. I should have more to report very soon, but if anyone is in the Buffalo area and would like to attend the open forum, please let me know and I will gladly provide directions.
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College Millennials — The stuff we apparently don’t know…
November 2nd, 2006 Stewart
10 Things Your College Student Won’t Tell You (10 Things: Personal Finance) | SmartMoney.com
Seventy percent admit to cheating, and more than that think it’s no big deal. Many of them are terribly depressed; 1,100 a year commit suicide. If they take off their clothes while drunk at a party, pictures will be proudly posted to Facebook the next day. And they’re racking up credit card debt at an astonishing rate, with most grads owning six different credit cards and owing over $3000 to the banks, and that doesn’t even get into their college loans.
Get ready, America. Millennial college grads are boomeranging back home.
All this and more in a neat little article from SmartMoney.com. Worth a quick read.
(Oh, and speaking of reads, my copy of Robbins’ The Overachievers just came into the library and I’m looking forward to starting it tonight.)
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Digital Natives, Immigrants and Pioneers
October 31st, 2006 Stewart
New Workers — pewresearch.org version _final_.pdf (application/pdf Object)
Thanks to Marilyn Pukkila via Barbara Fister’s ACRL blog entry and for pointing me to this little article from Pew that had slipped under my radar.
I continue to be a bit flummoxed over the fallout from Prensky’s article on Digital Natives, where he contends that there are only Digital Natives (Millennials) and Digital Immigrants (everyone else). It’s the sort of thing that is easily popularized in media. “Digital Natives” sounds more savvy than “Millennials,” and dividing everyone into two groups with no middle ground keeps things nice and simple for the average reader.
Of course, it’s all nonsense, in many respects. It suggests that there are no shades of gray — you either grow up with technology to the point where you are blind to it, or you can see technology and therefore must be a “Digital Immigrant.”
(For some time now, I’ve been suggesting another alternative: The Digital Pioneer. After all, someone had to first break the digital sod, yes? I think of myself and many of my peers as Digital Pioneers, first adopters and ground-breakers over all new types of resources and media. A quick search suggests I might just have coined it — Anyone else ever found it mentioned?)
Of course, all of these parallels are somewhat moot. Many so-called Digital Natives are as naive about information technology as the weariest Digital Immigrant, but they assume that what they don’t know cannot hurt them. Their gamesmanship and “Nintendo approach” to learning life lessons means that they leave themselves open to fraud and abuse that they cannot “see,” more of the “blurring of boundaries” that Barbara and Marilyn suggest.
As I say in my talks, Millennials believe in “unlimited lives” and they believe that technology can never harm them. This naivette makes them perfect targets for abuses that they might never even see coming.
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Weak IL skills among students
October 31st, 2006 Stewart
The Chronicle: 10/27/2006: Students Fall Short on ‘Information Literacy,’ Educational Testing Service’s Study Finds (link only good for a few days)
So the results of the ETS’s information literacy skills assessment are in and they are bleak. One shocker for me:
When searching a database of journal articles for a research project, 63 percent of students identified reasonably relevant materials.
This statement was listed by the ETS as “good.” Frankly, I find that percentage pretty appalling. I know that IL skills are not given the time or emphasis in the curriculum that they should be given, but for only a bare majority of students to be able to determine “reasonable relevance” of materials — a skill that more appropriately falls under “reading literacy” rather than “information literacy” — indicates a basic lack of understanding beyond the scope of IL instruction to correct.
In other words, 37 percent of the testers don’t know how to relate what they read to their knowledge needs. To my mind, that’s a marker of basic illiteracy.
In the recent Millennials talk in Corning, one participant commented on how Millennials do enjoy reading, but that they won’t read anything that is assigned to them — possibly because it isn’t interesting, or that they perceive such readings as “busy work,” or something similar. The ETS article, though, raises another possibility: Millennials cannot comprehend the relevance of such readings nor apply them in any meaningful way to their learning. They aren’t wired that way. They cannot learn from reading.
Thoughts?
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