Special Collections as Laboratories

Special Collections as Laboratories

Interesting post from the Chronicle of Higher Education

It’s a report on a recent forum which looked at the opportunities for using special collections to teach students about the possibilities and principles of research: “Such collections should be put to use as laboratories where students work hands-on with primary documents, incorporate them into original research projects, and even publish the results in institutional repositories.”

Panelists at a session on “An Age of Discovery: Special Collections in the Digital Age” — part of the Coalition for Networked Information’s fall forum, held in tandem with the membership meeting of the Association of Research Libraries — laid out case studies of what can happen when you turn undergraduates loose in special collections. Barbara Rockenbach, director of undergraduate and library education at Yale University Library, described how students in an urban-studies course, “The Mediated City,” created annotated digital city guides as part of their class work. In a history class, “Otherwise Engaged: Intellectuals, Politics, Education,” undergraduates created online narrative exhibits that illustrated specific moments in time.

“What we discovered is that you set high expectations, and the students tend to live up to them,” Ms. Rockenbach said. She also pointed out that it’s easier to justify the resources your special collections eat up if those collections aren’t just sitting there gathering dust.

At the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, students take part in the Ethnography of the University Initiative, creating research projects that investigate campus history and culture. Sarah L. Shreeves, coordinator of Illinois’s Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship (Ideals), talked about how the student ethnographers work through the full circle of scholarly communication, beginning with original research and ending with the chance to deposit their work in the Ideals institutional repository alongside the work of other students and faculty members.

Interesting ideas.

Report claims rankings can have positive effects

It seems that global rankings might not be entirely terrible

The Chronicle carries an item on a report suggesting, somewhat surprisingly, that there are some benefits arising from league tables.

The report, “Impact of College Rankings on Institutional Decision Making: Four Country Case Studies,” comments that more than 40 countries have rankings systems, which it describes as “entrenched.”

The report, which is based on interviews with people at more than 20 higher-education institutions in the four countries, seeks to determine what role rankings play on their campuses and to suggest lessons for American institutions. While criticizing the impact of rankings in ways that will be familiar to American readers — skewing priorities, warping hiring decisions, hurting disadvantaged students, and so forth — the interview subjects say that rankings can have positive effects.

Among them are better decision making based on data, better teaching and learning, prompt recognition and easy copying of model programs, and increased collaboration, not just competition, among peer institutions.

However, all require decisive action by institutions – steps which they should be undertaking in any case – and it is far from clear that these positives outweigh the many negatives.

iPhone giveaway leads to worries

Diverting piece in the Chronicle about the impact of new technologies on student behaviour and the campus experience: Abilene Christian U. Will Continue iPhone Giveaway.

The giveaway seems to have had an impact on the way students relate to each other and they are now obsessed with their devices:

The university’s unusual effort to give every freshman an iPhone or iPod Touch has been a huge success, officials say, and they recently decided to continue the project in the fall. But the devices are altering campus life at the 4,800-student college—and students say that not all of the shifts are positive.

“It has changed how people interact with one another on a day-to-day basis,” said Daniel Paul Watkins, a senior who is president of the student government. “Now walking around campus, nine out of 10 students either have their iPod headphones in or they’re texting or they’re talking on the phone,” he said. Sure, that’s happening at colleges across the country, but Mr. Watkins, who bought his iPhone, believes it is even more pronounced at a campus that has pushed the latest cellphones. “The West Texas charm of ‘Hey, howdy, everybody knows your name,’ has shifted inward—everyone’s enthralled by their device.”

The other concern is that iPhones simply make it easier to cheat:

“Since the iPhones were introduced, I honestly think that academic integrity has gone down,” said Mr. Watkins. “I’ve seen people cheat, and I’ve heard people talk about how easy it is to cheat.”

This though should be easier to control.

Outsourcing Student Services

Interesting and slightly scary blog post in the Chronicle on the opportunities for outsourcing student services in US higher education. As one person interviewed puts it: “It’s almost taking the people out of it”.

Some of the wonderful products on offer include:

• Rave Wireless lets students set cellphone timers that alert campus police if they do not arrive at their destinations. “We call it putting a blue-light telephone in everyone’s pocket,” said Robert Jones, Rave’s director of marketing.
• University Parent produces printed guides, Web sites, and electronic newsletters for college parents.
• Lifetopia tells colleges it will help them “put people in their place” — with a Web site where students can create profiles and select their own roommates.
• CourseScheduler offers software to help students choose classes at hours they can handle. Otherwise “they’re just going to slap something together” — at the risk of burning out if their schedules are unmanageable, said Michael Smyers, a recent graduate of Kansas State University who founded the company.

And this is the best:

• With Snoozester, students can request wakeup and reminder calls, such as to start studying for a test a week in advance. This product particularly frustrated some administrators. “People have just stormed away,” said Neville Mehra, the company’s chief executive. But most absences from class, he said, are a result of oversleeping.

Just what we’ve all been waiting for.

Another winning QA idea: international standardisation

From the Chronicle

Quest for International Measures of Higher-Education Learning Results Raises Concerns
By AISHA LABI

A fledgling international effort to develop comparable assessment standards for measuring how much students are learning at higher-education institutions throughout the world is provoking concern from several quarters, even though the project is still in its preliminary stages.

The project is being led by the OECD and it seems that at a meeting of education ministers they were a bit short of discussion topics over dinner:

the apparent dearth of available data on student-learning outcomes prompted discussion about how to fill that void. “It became evident that there are a lot of measurements about research outcomes at institutions of higher education, but what about the learning outcomes?” said Barbara Ischinger, director for education at the organization, which is known as the OECD.

However:

“The notion of measuring students’ achievement within the United States has been very controversial,” said Terry W. Hartle, senior vice president for government and public affairs at the American Council on Education. “The notion of developing a mechanism to do it across the world seems orders of magnitude more controversial.”

(which is putting it mildly)

The OECD has held two meetings of about a dozen experts this year, with a third scheduled for next month in Seoul, South Korea. “We’ve started to exchange information and views about existing assessment programs in some countries,” said Ms. Ischinger. “It is now shaping up more into a direction of what could be done in terms of assessing generic-skills competencies, such as analytical reasoning, critical thinking, and also discipline-related competencies — for instance, in the natural sciences and engineering.”

But this is hard enough to achieve within disciplines, it’s pretty challenging at the institutional level and next to impossible in any meaningful way in a national context. It is difficult to imagine quite how generic these things are going to be when articulated in a (literally) universal way.

No grounds for concern though, it will all be up to us to decide:

According to summaries of the minutes of the first two meetings, the OECD has decided to focus its approach, at least initially, on voluntary participation at the institutional level.