Moodle To Drop Native Mobile Apps, Move to HTML5

Moodle HQ is ending development of native My Moodle mobile apps for iOS and Android, according to a blog entry posted by Moodle founding developer Martin Dougiamas last night. "After much thought Moodle HQ is changing how we support mobile development for Moodle," Dougiamas wrote. "Our current approach of native apps per platform was costing a lot while not moving very fast and not serving our community."

Instead of native versions of the apps, Moodle's mobile components will move to HTML5, which will allow updates to be released across platforms simultaneously and will allow for modularity and greater participation from Moodle's developer community. Dougiamas said the HTML5 version will lose a bit of speed but should also improve some areas of performance.

He said the iOS version of the mobile app will continue to be available and will continue functioning "for a long time yet." The Android version was never completed.

Moodle was purchased by Blackboard this year. I wonder if that has anything to do with the change of plans.

Dry Weather Spreads Across U.S

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said in a report on Monday that based on the Palmer Drought Index, 55 percent of the contiguous United States was under moderate to extreme drought in June. That is the largest land area in the United States to be affected by a drought since December 1956.

Commodity Weather Group (CWG) on Tuesday said over half of the Midwest would continue with severe moisture deficits and plenty of heat, particularly in the western corn belt. 


This is serious. The drought gripping the United States is the worst since 1956. Fifty-five percent of the continental U.S. was in a moderate to extreme drought by the end of June.

Georgia State, Copyright, and You

After four years, a judge has finally decided upon the merits of the copyright lawsuit between Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, Sage Publications and Georgia State University.  Although the outcome legally affects only the northern third of Georgia,  this ruling will affect the way we do business in this library.

The library is sponsoring a web cast from the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) in which the ACRL copyright committee will discuss the specific ruling of the Georgia State case in detail, the affect that the case will have on future fair use analyses, the impact on library policies such as course reserves and interlibrary loan, and the way we will work with academic publishers from now on. Anyone who is interested in attending will be welcome. Please let me know if you will be attending.

Learning Outcomes:

• Understand the history of the Georgia State University copyright infringement lawsuit
• Understand the judge’s decision in the Georgia State University copyright infringement lawsuit
• Discover the impact upon Fair Use analyses
• Recognize some of the local library policies that will need to change
• Identify possible changes in the relationships between libraries and academic publisher

 Live Webcast
July 20, 2012 2 p.m.
Room 142

Revolutionary Plots

 "Revolutionary Plots" by Rebecca Solnit
 Read the first paragraph of Solnit's article about urban agriculture (community gardening) and thank Sandy Pearce for creating the Goodwin College community garden.

"THE ANTI-WAR POET and soldier Siegfried Sassoon reports that toward the end of World War I, Winston Churchill told him that war is the normal occupation of man. Challenged, Churchill amended this to “war—and gardening.” Are the two opposites? Some agriculture is a form of war, whether it’s clear cutting rainforest, stealing land from the poor, contaminating the vicinity, or exploiting farm workers, and some of our modern pesticides are descended from chemical warfare breakthroughs for the First World War. But gardening represents a much wider spectrum of human activity than war, and if war is an act of the state, gardening is far, far more ancient than city-states (if not nearly so old as squabbling)"

Read the rest HERE.

Source: Orion July/August Issue

Points of View Reference Center Database

The Hoffman Family Library now has Points of View Reference Center This database contains a balance of materials from all viewpoints, including more than 1,300 main essays, leading political magazines from both sides of the aisle, newspapers, radio & TV news transcripts, primary source documents and reference books. Features include:

• Hundreds of topics, each with an overview, point, counterpoint, and Critical Thinking Guide
• Guides to debate, develop arguments and write position papers, as well as the Video Encyclopedia of the 20th Century
• A unique and easy-to-use interface
• Full-text database containing essays and articles that present multiple sides of an issue

 The Points of View Debate Blog is a forum for students to voice their opinions and exchange ideas about topics in the news.  Classes can read up on topics, and use the comment field to debate the issues with their peers. Each month, the student with the most thought-provoking and well-crafted comment will win a prize. Learn from each other; join the debate!

You can access it from the Free Trials section of our research databases. It will soon be in the list of databases.

Try it now! 

Academics stay with Obama

The Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney has bashed President Obama for spending too much time in the faculty lounge during his time at Harvard University. If Mr. Romney—who holds two graduate degrees from Harvard himself—is right, that time may have been well spent, as the president continues to reap the bulk of campaign-contribution dollars from the academic community.

Source: Chronicle of Higher Education

Cheating Goes High Tech Online

Excerpt from article:

"Easy A's may be even easier to score these days, with the growing popularity of online courses. Tech-savvy students are finding ways to cheat that let them ace online courses with minimal effort, in ways that are difficult to detect.
Take Bob Smith, a student at a public university in the United States. This past semester, he spent just 25 to 30 minutes each week on an online science course, the time it took him to take the weekly test. He never read the online materials for the course and never cracked open a textbook. He learned almost nothing. He got an A".

Source: Chronicle of Higher Education June 3, 2012

Alcohol Abuse: CQ Researcher Report

 Alcohol Abuse: Can Underage Drinking be Curbed?

Americans are abusing alcohol less than in the past with one exception: college students, who drink more and binge drink more often than nonstudents of similar age. And alcohol continues to extract a high toll from those who abuse it at any age, killing 80,000 Americans a year and draining more than $220 billion from the economy. Although high school students drink and binge less, bingeing accounts for 90 percent of the alcohol consumed by teens who drink. Health experts also worry about the effects of new products, especially flavored alcoholic drinks, which seem to encourage young women and girls to drink and drink more. To combat alcohol abuse, many educational institutions, community organizations and government agencies are stepping up efforts to promote abstinence among the young and responsible drinking by adults who do imbibe.Full report is online through the Hoffman Library (user name and password required).

Source: CQ Researcher June 8, 2012

New Book Club Meets in August

The new book club will be meeting in August to discuss why are women reading 50 Shades of Grey and the other books in that trilogy plus other books that the Goodwin Community have read this summer. Watch for the date! It should be an interesting discussion, to say the least. Newsweek in April featured an article about the Grey books called "The Fantasy Life of Working Women: Why Surrender is a Feminist Dream." You can read it before the book club. There are plenty of others.
 

70,000 More Books in the Library

Ebook Academic Collection

The library this week has added 70,000 new books to our collection—just like that! The library now has EBSCO’s Ebook Academic collection, a new database somewhat comparable to the collection we have from ebrary. Both subscription packages with unlimited simultaneous users and downloads contains a large selection of multidisciplinary eBook titles representing a broad range of academic subject matter—from Business and Science, to Engineering and Humanities. Nearly 70,000 titles are included in this package, and additional titles will be added to the package each month at no additional cost. The library staff will offer instruction classes on how to use this exciting new resource.

You can view EBSCO e-books on your mobile devices now! Popular devices that are compatible with e-books on EBSCOhost include: Barnes & Noble Nooks. Sony Readers, Apple iPads, and many smart phones. Please contact the library for a complete list. Instructions for downloading will be on the library page this week.

We will be comparing this product with ebrary’s,  so please share your comments in the comments below or email me directly. In particular, we would like comments on ease of downloading, search capabilities, on-screen display, marking, saving and emailing capabilities, and any other feature you may consider important

You may access the Ebook Academic Subscription Collection on or off campus from the library page in the research database section--www.goodwin.edu/library.

This is very special Applause, please!

Plagiarism Research from Turnitin

Classroom instructors who deal with plagiarism regularly are acutely aware that plagiarism takes many forms; not all plagiarized material can be defined as a simple act of cut and paste. Turnitin recently compiled data from nearly 900 secondary and higher education instructors about the types of plagiarism they most frequently encounter and the problematic nature of each type.

The resulting white paper, "The Plagiarism Spectrum: Instructor Insights into the 10 Types of Plagiarism," classifies the most common types of plagiarism and includes a severity scale based on student intent. This study moves plagiarism beyond the black-and-white definition of “literary theft” to one that captures the nuances of how plagiarism can take form in student writing. The paper includes recommendations for educators on how to address plagiarism through academic integrity policies, honor codes and classroom intervention. The paper,  webcast, and video are available at Turnitin's web page or contact the library for the report.

Ebrary Apps

Yesterday, less than six months after launching a dedicated iOS app, ebrary announced a new Android app that will be freely available on Google Play this summer. With the increasing popularity of smart phones, tablets, and other devices, students and faculty will have a more optimized way to discover and use e-books, online and offline, on any Android device in addition to the iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch. ebrary’s Android and iOS apps work with e-books acquired under all of ebrary’s acquisition models including the 75,000 titles available through Academic Complete, which we have.

Statistical Abstract of US is alive

 ProQuest has rescued one of researchers’ most valued reference tools when it took on publication of the Statistical Abstract of the United States beginning with the 2013 edition. This ensures continuation of this premier guide to an extraordinary array of statistics, which has been published since 1878. 

The U.S. Census Bureau, responsible for publishing the work, announced in March 2011 that it would cease production of the Statistical Abstract after the 2012 edition. Why?

Graduates Return Library Items Before Graduation

Graduates!

Be sure to return any items checked out of the library to ensure you are cleared for graduation. Do this before June 7 to be on the safe side.

Publishers Reject Libraries

Did you know that these publishers refuse to sell or license eBooks to libraries?
Brilliance Audio
Hachette Book Group
Macmillan Publishing
Penguin Group
Simon & Schuster

Does this seem right to you? If you would like to know why this is happening, access HERE.

EDITIONS TO CREDO GENERAL REFERENCE

Credo's General Reference collection continues to grow each month and now has over 590 titles. The following well-regarded titles were recently added.

•American Human Development Project: The Measure of America 2010-2011: Mapping Risks and Resilience

•Comprehensive Handbook of Psychopathology

•Encyclopedia of Capital Punishment in the United States

•Encyclopedia of Chinese-American Relations

•Encyclopedia of Philosophers on Religion

•If the Paintings Could Talk, National Gallery

•Key Concepts in Health Psychology

•Key Concepts in Marketing

•Key Concepts in Radio Studies

•Making of Modern Economics: The Lives and Ideas of Great Thinkers

•Reformist Voices of Islam: Mediating Islam and Modernity

•Scientific Exploration and Expeditions: From the Age of Discovery to the Twenty-First Century

•Springer International Handbooks of Education: International Handbook of Educational Evaluation

•Springer International Handbooks of Education: International Handbook of School Effectiveness and Improvement

COLLEGES AND "FAIR USE" DOCTRINE

A federal judge on Friday outlined many ways colleges can continue to cite the doctrine of "fair use" to permit their making electronic copies of books and other materials for use in teaching and scholarship. In a landmark ruling over many issues not previously litigated to this degree in the digital era, the judge rejected many of the claims in a suit by three prominent publishers against Georgia State University. In 94 of the 99 instances cited by the publishers as copyright violations, the judge ruled that Georgia State and its professors were covered by fair use. And the judge also rejected the publishers' ideas about how to regulate e-reserves -- ideas that many academic librarians said would be unworkable.

At the same time, however, the judge imposed a strict limit of 10 percent on the volume of a book that may be covered by fair use (a proportion that would cover much, but by no means all, of what was in e-reserves at Georgia State, and probably at many other colleges). And the judge ruled that publishers may have more claims against college and university e-reserves if the publishers offer convenient, reasonably priced systems for getting permission (at a price) to use book excerpts online. The lack of such systems today favored Georgia State, but librarians who were anxiously going through the decision were speculating that some publishers might be prompted now to create such systems, and to charge as much as the courts would permit.

Source: Inside Higher Education Mary 14, 2012

Don't Pick Up: Kids Need to Break Away From Their Parents

 The cover story of the latest issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education features an article by Terry Castle, English professor at Stanford University, about the case for children breaking away from their parents. The following paragraph is a quote from her article:

"The sentimental pathology of the American middle-class family--not to mention the mind-warping digitization of everyday life--usually militates against such ruthless candor. But what the Life of the Orphan teaches-has taught me at least--is that it is indeed the self-conscious abrogation of one's inheritance, the "making strange" of received ideas, the cultivation of a willingness to defy, debunk, or just plain old disappoint one's parents, that is the absolute precondition, now more than ever, for intellectual freedom."

The article begins on page B6. It is available in the library.


Source: The Chronicle Review Section B of The Chronicle of Higher Education
 May 11, 2012

New Books

Cracking the New Job Market by R. William Holland just came in. The book includes a forward by Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed.

We also received Mastering APA Style Instructors Resource guide by American Psychological Association. The guide includes eight multiple-choice assessment surveys, correction keys, and answer sheets, along with instructions on how to incorporate this material into a curriculum.

More on the way!