The Information Literacy Equation

March 9th, 2007 Stewart

I’ll be giving a Millennials talk at SUNY Fredonia in just a few hours and I’m pretty excited about it. My colleague and CIL co-founder Chris Hollister will be joining me, and it promises to be a special event.

What makes it special is that this is a conference on multimodal literacies, and that I’ll be addressing the concern of information literacy for the Millennial generation. My audience will be primarily English professors and librarians, and to have those two groups in the room while talking about information literacy can be a little daunting. But it’s also an exciting opportunity to launch a discussion among the parties best able to address information literacy concerns for their school.

I’m posting my slides here to be shared with the group (no handouts today) and this post can serve as a springboard for continuing our discussion. I’ll post more later today when I’m back from the event.

Posted in CIL, information literacy, millennials, writing | No Comments »

Five to the next generation…

March 4th, 2007 Stewart

Fellow library blogger Jennimi and I have started up a little meme from our comments on my last post. We’re asking everyone to post with their response to the following question:

“What 5 things would you say to the next generation?”

She’s already posted hers which I like a lot; here’s mine:

* Education is a process, not an outcome. If you aren’t learning anything in college, odds are you are failing the system as much as (if not more than) it is failing you.

* Other people cannot tell you who you are. Self-discovery can really only happen when you unplug from the world.

* Do you really want your children to see those pictures of you doing body shots in Cabo? Because once they are out there, they are out there forever.

* The only people who have ever been accused of being great are the ones who had original ideas and built original things.

* Give something back every single day.

You can join in by tagging your post “5tothenext” and posting your five things. To get the ball rolling, I’m calling out:

M. Banks
D. Rothman
M. Zafron

(David, if you do this, I’ll finally post that “five things you don’t know about me” thing that I didn’t do before.) Thanks all!

Posted in 5tothenext, education, generation x, millennials | 4 Comments »

The Conceit of Millennials

March 4th, 2007 Stewart

Self-Awareness Not a Problem at College - washingtonpost.com

While not really coming as much of a shock, it is noteworthy in how this research flies in the face of Howe & Strauss’s assertion that these kids were more altruistic than other generations. Meanwhile, Gen X’s Content of our Character Project has been collecting letters to the next generation that would hopefully appeal to their sense of social conscience.

EDIT: March 5, 10:45 AM — Howe & Strauss bite back. FWIW, I find that after a little while their relentless optimistic spin wears almost as thin as the generational bashing I find elsewhere. Truth usually lies somewhere in the middle.

Posted in education, generation x, millennials | 5 Comments »

Updates to Pubdrug

February 27th, 2007 Stewart

Main Page - Pubdrug

Our first several completed and certified monographs are now up. Once a monograph completes the review process it is “locked down” to be protected from malicious edits. Our certified monographs are:

• Alendronate
• Amlodipine
• Atorvastatin
• Cholecalciferol
• Escitalopram
• Montelukast
• Sertraline

This progress would not have been possible without the amazing efforts of a handful of fourth-year professional Pharm.D. students at the University at Buffalo. Their user pages are linked from the above records and I encourage everyone to visit them.

More news to come soon.

Posted in informatics, pubdrug, university at buffalo | No Comments »

Possibilities & Pitfalls: Kids living on the Internet

February 22nd, 2007 Stewart

A couple of links to accompany my brief talk Thursday morning at Elmwood Franklin:

Pew Internet: Social Networking and Teens
An excellent new survey report from Pew, highlighting teens use of sites like MySpace & Facebook.

Roommates, the online version - NYT
Innovative uses of Facebook and other online social engines to help select college roommates.

Beloit College Mindset List
A very popular list for identifying traits of the new college freshman.

High-tech cheating in college - NYT
Article cites the book, The Cheating Culture, a fascinating read about how values in the U.S. have led to widespread cheating and fraud in many areas of life, not just education.

EFF on Student Blogging
A very effective little FAQ for student bloggers. Gives a little insight into the potential pitfalls of posting about your school, job, friends, etc.

Cornell: Thoughts on Facebook
Another good overview for students about the ramifications of social networking online.

I’ll post more later on, depending on where the conversation goes tomorrow morning. Also, attendees are invited to comment on this post, anything and everything about the session. I’d appreciate your feedback.

ADDED 11:50 am Thursday — Thank you again to Nina Cascio and Laura Mangan, as well as the parents and staff at Elmwood Franklin, for having me out this morning. I really hope we can continue our conversation here.

With several mentions of child safety online, I thought I would share this official Google post that my wife forwarded to me. It suggests, essentially, four different approaches to the issue, and is well worth a quick read.

Posted in millennials, workshops | 1 Comment »

Looking ahead with PubDrug

January 26th, 2007 Stewart

The PubDrug initiative is in a much different place now than it was a month ago. One month ago we had a slightly anemic monograph template and a few bare-boned pages devoted to content development and management.

One month later, here’s our status:

• The University at Buffalo School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences has agreed to let P4 students on informatics rotations help develop PubDrug and two have completed their rotations. Another two will begin next week. This should continue throughout the semester.
• The first two full drug monographs, atorvastatin and amlodipine, are almost completed and undergoing final certification. A third monograph, esomeprazole, is being readied.
• From this work, the drug monograph template has been dramatically expanded. A rough methodology has been drafted and is being fleshed out.
• A process for reviewing and certifying monographs has been sketched out and is being refined.
• A reasonable, achievable goal has been set: Monographs for the top 200 drugs by the end of 2007.

Let’s be clear: There are many issues still needing to be resolved. Certification is a reasonable enough method for conducting editorial review, but a strong editorial body is needed to assume responsibility for doing the work. Many of the methods that have been devised will need to continue to be tested over the coming months. And, the general stigma about wikis as a content management system continues to plague these efforts somewhat, although the response today was overwhelmingly positive.

I wish to publicly thank Amy Jo and Bill for all their amazing work this past month. Bill has, in particular, gone above and beyond the call for this project — His output will guide our continuing efforts for a long time to come. I also want to thank PIC director Linda Catanzaro for her continued commitment to this project.

It’s been a long week. I’m heading home. I’ll get back to posting regularly next week.

Posted in informatics, pubdrug, university at buffalo | 4 Comments »

PubDrug student presentation

January 26th, 2007 Stewart

Bill Loeffler and Amy Jo Michnik are both in their fourth professional year of the Pharm.D. program here at UB. This past month, they were both assigned to pharmacoinformatics clinical rotations. I was very fortunate to get to work with both of them — They did amazingly complex and detailed work in developing the PubDrug monograph and creating the first two such monographs for the database.

This afternoon, they finished off their rotation by presenting on all the amazing work they have done for PubDrug. I didn’t record their presentation, but they were gracious enough to share their slides:

I will have more to write about PubDrug later today.

Posted in informatics, pubdrug, university at buffalo | 1 Comment »

Bibliometric tools you can use…

January 24th, 2007 Stewart

The State of the Union in Words: A Look at the 34,000 State of the Union Words Delivered of George W. Bush - New York Times

Interesting to compare Bush’s use of, say, “education” or “school” compared with “terrorists” or “Iraq.” And being able to quickly see those words in context is especially cool.

Bibliometrics rocks.

Posted in bibliometrics, informatics | No Comments »

Young & Wired vs. Middle-Aged & Tired…

December 7th, 2006 Stewart

Sorry I haven’t posted much lately, but things have been very busy as the semester is winding down. CIL is seeing submissions coming in, PubDrug is gearing up behind the scenes, and in between when I’m not answering reference questions or dealing with e-mail I’m busy writing my book chapter.

Still, this slideshow from Pew Internet’s Mary Madden is just too good not to pass along. She does a really nice job of clarifying how the Millennials have grown up alongside modern technology, to the point where they really don’t see it as “technology,” as such. Thanks to davidrothman.net for the link.

Posted in CIL, millennials, pubdrug | No Comments »

Updates on various…

November 17th, 2006 Stewart

PubDrug.org is getting underway, and there seems to be some interest in the project, judging from e-mails I’ve received and blog posts I’ve read. I would like to develop an editorial board to begin with, a group of volunteers who would guide PubDrug’s overall mission and coordinate it’s development. This isn’t a small commitment, I know, but if you think you’d be interested in serving in this capacity, please e-mail me. First up on the PubDrug to-do list — design a template for drug monographs. If you have ideas for improving it, feel free to edit the template directly! That’s what a wiki is for, after all.

Communications in Information Literacy has received several query letters describing some remarkable research in information literacy. Chris and I are both very excited about the quality of the queries we’ve received. There’s still room for more, though, so please consider submitting a paper for our Inaugural Issue due out this spring.

Lots of other stuff underway as well, including new workshops, a CE workshop I’m developing, and the book chapter. Onward and upward.

Posted in CIL, pubdrug, workshops, writing | No Comments »