The Kept-Up Academic Librarian

Social Networking Tools Good For Community College Students

Social-networking tools such as Facebook and Twitter can help community college students become more engaged in their academics, a recent report from the Center for Community College Student Engagement suggests. Although large numbers of students say they use such tools in their daily lives, many two-year colleges have yet to mine the potential of the technology. The survey found higher levels of engagement among students who said they used social media multiple times a day for academic purposes, such as communicating with other students, instructors or college staff about coursework, than students who said they don't use such tools at all. Read more at:
http://www.lancastereaglegazette.com/article/20091206/NEWS01/912060324/1002

Google And Microsoft Battle For Future Generation

With the recession taking a bite out of university endowments and public school budgets alike, the competition between Google and Microsoft to convert the nation's colleges, universities and schools to the companies' free e-mail and other IT services that run on the Internet "cloud" — outsourcing that can save a large university hundreds of thousands of dollars a year — has only grown more fierce. With the two companies fighting to baptize a future generation of computer users with their products, the stakes for both are significant. The battle has already reshaped classroom technology. Read more at:
http://www.mercurynews.com/education/ci_13921041?source=rss&nclick_check=1

Social Networks Can Increase Engagement When Used For Academics

Social-networking tools such as Facebook and Twitter can help community college students become more engaged in their academics, a report out today finds. But while large numbers of students say they use such tools in their daily lives, many two-year colleges have yet to mine the potential of the technology. The survey found higher levels of engagement among students who said they used social media multiple times a day for academic purposes, such as communicating with other students, instructors or college staff about coursework, than students who said they don't use such tools at all. It also revealed a potential downside for colleges that don't harness the technology: Students who frequently used social-networking tools but not for academic reasons tended to put less effort into their schoolwork. Read more at:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2009-11-16-ccsse16_ST_N.htm?csp=34

Latest "7 Things" Focuses On Google Wave

The lasted addition to the "7 Things You Should Know" series from Educause takes a closer look at Google Wave: Wave offers a compelling platform for personal learning environments because it provides a single location for collecting information from diverse sources while accommodating a variety of formats. By embedding mini-applications and other components, Wave makes interactive coursework a possibility for nontechnical students, moving larger numbers of students away from purely text-based assignments and into multimedia composition. Read more at:
http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ELI7055.pdf

Scientists Get Funds To Build A Social Network

The University of Florida, Cornell University and a handful of other schools have been awarded $12.2 million to build a social/collaborative network for scientists and researchers. The idea is to make it easier to find research and like-minded researchers in an effort to speed new discoveries. "The goal of the program is national networking of all scientists," said Michael Conlon, interim director of biomedical informatics for the University of Florida, in a statement. "Scientists have problems finding each other. We often find that researchers have pretty good networks with students or with scientists at institutions where they received their degree or worked before. But they don't always know people even at their own institutions." Read more at:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2009/10/20/urnidgns852573C40069388000257655007200C0.DTL

Ranking The Top Twitterversities

The University of Florida, Harvard University, and George Washington University are all leading higher education and research institutions. But the three powerhouse schools can add a new notch to their belts: top tweeters. Universitiesandcolleges.org released the findings of its September survey that examined accounts affiliated with university administrations at the top 100 colleges in the U.S.News & World Report 2010 Best Colleges rankings, and Harvard has the most followers (18,955) among those schools considered, the Associated Press reports (hat tip, Chicago Tribune). Florida had the most administration-affiliated accounts (24) on Twitter, and George Washington averaged the most tweets per day (57.7). Read more at: http://www.usnews.com/blogs/paper-trail/2009/10/19/florida-harvard-tops-among-twitterers.html

No More Landline Phones For Students At This IHE

Take a walk through Iowa State University's residence halls right now and you'll be hard pressed to find a landline telephone. Next year, the phones will be even more elusive. That's because the Ames, Iowa-based university is in the process of pulling all such phones out of the dorms in favor of the cell phones that students have been carrying around with them for several years now. a campus survey revealed that 90 percent of resident students had cell phones and were using them in lieu of traditional telephones. Digging deeper into the situation, Englin and his team learned that the school could save $140,000 annually by reallocating the landline resources, and by providing 802.11 wireless service for students. Read more at:
http://campustechnology.com/articles/2009/10/01/pulling-the-plug-on-landlines-at-iowa-state.aspx

IHEs Still Trying To Make Sense Of Social Networking

Facebook and other social media sites have invaded college admissions in a big way. But the great rush to use social media also raises questions about privacy and appropriate relations between administrators and students. For a college trying to improve its image and woo top students from more established competitors, one-to-one contact over Facebook might be a smart risk. For a selective and long-established university such as Johns Hopkins, those contacts are more trouble than they're worth. Read more at:
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/education/bal-md.socialmedia30sep30,0,7058660.story

University Press Will Offer Free Online Textbooks

The University Press of Florida — located behind Chipotle on West University Avenue — has teamed up with a digital book provider to offer free online textbooks and reduced price print copie­s. The plan is to eventually provide free online textbooks for every general education class taught at any of Florida's 11 state universities, said Meredith Babb, director of the press.

All they can do is offer the free books, Babb said. Professors can decide to adopt them or not. Read more at:
http://www.alligator.org/articles/2009/09/24/news/campus/090924_books.txt

MIT Students' Research Sheds Light On Social Network Privacy Issues

It started as a simple term project for an MIT class on ethics and law on the electronic frontier. Two students partnered up to take on the latest Internet fad: the online social networks that were exploding into the mainstream. they wondered whether the basic currency of interactions on a social network - the simple act of “friending” someone online - might reveal something a person might rather keep hidden. Using data from the social network Facebook, they made a striking discovery: just by looking at a person’s online friends, they could predict whether the person was gay. They did this with a software program that looked at the gender and sexuality of a person’s friends and, using statistical analysis, made a prediction. The two students had no way of checking all of their predictions, but based on their own knowledge outside the Facebook world, their computer program appeared quite accurate for men. Read more at:
http://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2009/09/20/project_gaydar_an_mit_experiment_raises_new_questions_about_online_privacy/?rss_id=Boston.com+--+Education+news