The Canadian Council on Learning recently released the results of a five-year study on Canada’s education system, all the way from preschool to the post-secondary level, including adult learning and Aboriginal learning. Researchers concluded that Canada has a “Learning Paradox”: there are positive signs with a mainly highly educated population, but also “signs of systemic
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Two U of Calgary researches, Sharon Friesen and Michele Jacobsen, found that computers alone don’t generate success in classes. The teachers need to be tech savvy themselves, and must use engaging instructional techniques in order for students to have success. As Jacobsen stated, “The purpose of the investigation was to understand how students’ learning in
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Wednesday, Google announced that it was stopping development on Google Wave, the service that was supposed to change how people communicate. As the official Google blog stated, “We were equally jazzed about Google Wave internally, even though we weren’t quite sure how users would respond to this radically different kind of communication…But despite these wins,
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Relationships between researchers and traditional library and university support for research have shifted radically; many of the services most valued by researchers are found not in the library but on the network.

The majority of researchers interviewed for this study use online tools – and commercial services – related to their discipline rather than tools provided by their university. This report summarizes interviews held with researchers, research assistants, graduate students, grant and other research administration specialists, and university administrators at four elite U.S. research universities. It complements a similar study undertaken in four English universities, to be published shortly.

The latest research report from Project Information Literacy evaluates handouts for research assignments. Twenty-eight US colleges and universities are represented in the 191 voluntarily submitted handouts. Key findings are 83% of handouts required a standard research paper, over other formats. 85% required students to work individually. “Six in 10 handouts recommended students consult the library
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Inside Higher Ed has a great article on ditching the library orientation session and integrating library instruction into the curriculum, but from the instructor’s perspective. From the article: After years of frustration, last spring I gave up on the orientation. In my mind it created three types of the students: the half who tuned out,
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The latest issue of Educause Quarterly has several interesting articles on cloud computing in higher ed, but also this article on libraries and the mobile web. Key points include: Web-enabled smartphones (and their applications) have converged with cloud computing to change the ways people interact with each other and their environments. The academic community has
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Academic librarians might be interested in checking out The Canadian Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, the new peer-reviewed journal of the Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education. The official announcement notes that the journal  “seeks to advance the scholarship of teaching and learning in Canadian post-secondary institutions. It therefore provides
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The LOTW (LOEX of the West) Library Instruction Conference was held at Mount Royal University in Calgary in early June. It was a great conference, filled with many practical ideas for enhancing academic library instruction. I’m delighted to see that many of the conference presentations and supporting material have been posted on the web site
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Thanks to the ever-helpful Peter Scott for blogging the latest edition of Research Library Issues, No. 269 (April 2010): Special Issue on Strategies for Opening Up Content. If you don’t have this site bookmarked, you might just want to.