New Books in the New Library

Stop by to see the wonderful new library! They are hanging bird feeders outside the library today to attract more birds. We also have a few new books:

A Mercy by Toni Morrison--The fate of a slave child abandoned by her mother animates this novel about orphaned women who form an eccentric household in late-17th-century America. Read the first chapter.

The Forever War by Dexter Filkins--The New York Times correspondent let us witness the rise of the Taliban, the attacks of 9/11, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. This book is hailed as one of the best books about America's wars and the nature of war itself. Read the first chapter.

These two were chosen in the ten best books of 2008 by the New York Times. The first chapters provided here come to us from the New York Times book section. Other new books include:
Nothing to be Frightened of by Julian Barnes*
The Hour I First Believed by Wally Lamb
Snake Oil Science by R. Barker Bausell
2666 by Roberto Bolano*
The Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War by Drew G. Faust*
The World is What it is by Patrick French*
Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives by Palfrey & Gasser
Wikipatterns by Stewart Mader
Four Skills of Cultural Diversity Competence by Mikel Hogan

(*These books were also on the Times Best Boooks of 2008 list.)

Library Moves to New Campus Thursday

The Goodwin Library is moving to the new campus at One Riverside Drive on Thursday, December 18. There will be no acess to the library catalog or databases on or off campus from December 19 to December 23. (The picture was taken before the building was finished.)

CQ Researcher New Blog

The mission of the CQ REsearcher blog is to open the CQ Researcher up to be more participatory. What topics should they cover in the coming months? What’s your opinion on the latest pro/con question? What ideas do you have for making the Researcher better? They will share some of the behind-the-scenes, sausage-making that goes into the CQ Researcher. And we will blog about how a current news story or an issue in library land. But most importantly we will play and experiment.
Source: CQ Researcher news

Second Life for Nursing Students

In Second Life,the wildly popular virtual world now inhabited by more than eight million residents, Elsevier has conducted a large prototype project and built a small simulated environment to train nurses in how to use the communication protocol SBAR (Situation, Background, Assessment and Recommendation). As it allows multiple, geographically dispersed colleagues to meet and collaborate online in real time, using text chat and voice communication, Second Life was a natural choice for this project. Elsevier is a leading publisher and database vendor in the field of nursing and health science fields.

The clinical environment in SL features simulated patients which respond to visitors via simple chat bots and react following a basic model of human vital signs that can be tailored for different scenarios. Nurses can interact with the environment and use instruments to assess patients and then, following the SBAR protocol, talk to the assessor doctor in-world.
Source: Elsevier Library Connect Newsletter December

New Web 2.0 Platform for Education

The Social Media Classroom (SMC) is a new project started by Howard Rheingold which offers an open-source Drupal-based web service to teachers and students for the purpose of introducing social media into the classroom. The service includes tools like forums, blogs, wikis, chat, social bookmarking, RSS, microblogging, widgets, video conferencing, and more. The SMC is more than just a collection of new media tools repurposed for educational use, though. The end goal of the service is to move education away from being a unidirectional delivery of knowledge to become a more collaborative learning process.
Source: National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE)

New ACCUPLACER Platform Coming Soon

I am pleased to remind you that beginning in 2009, the ACCUPLACER program will be supported by a new platform, ACCUPLACER i3, created by Pearson Education. Really, this is good news. ACCUPLACER i3, ACCUPLACER's third Internet-based platform, will maintain the same general functionality of the current system, while offering more features and flexibility.

The move will begin in early 2009 and conclude by June 30, 2009. ACCUPLACER i3 will have a look and feel very similar to the current system, and we anticipate only a minor learning curve. To ensure a smooth transfer, Person Education will provide ample training and assistance. Several Goodwin representatives will attend a training session in January. If you want to know more, just ask us.

Majors Making a Difference

For our students looking for a career in which they can make a difference in the world, this series from WorldChanging will be of interest. The fact that several of these seem to be careers of the future makes them even more appealing. Worldchanging is a media organization that comprises a global network of independent journalists, designers and thinkers covering the world's most intelligent solutions to today's problems.
Source: Worldchanging

E-patients

About 80% of internet users go online for health information. Surprisingly, E-patients who feel they have serious health problems are more likely to go online in search of health information. For example, 75% of e-patients with chronic conditions reported their last health-related search affected a decision about how to treat an illnes or condition.
Source: Pew Internet & American Life Project

What happened in Bhopal?

On the night of Dec. 2nd and 3rd, 1984, a Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India, began leaking 27 tons of the deadly gas methyl isocyanate. None of the six safety systems designed to contain such a leak were operational, allowing the gas to spread throughout the city of Bhopal.[1] Half a million people were exposed to the gas and 20,000 have died to date as a result of their exposure. More than 120,000 people still suffer from ailments caused by the accident and the subsequent pollution at the plant site. There are extensive links from the parent page of Bhopal.org at:
http://www.bhopal.org/