Author: Paul R. Pival
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Online Assessment Tools
Sherri just posted about something called PHP Surveyor, which looks nice and nifty, but I don’t know anything about PHP and SQL, and I’ll be most of you don’t either. Just the other day, a colleague pointed me towards a free hosted assessment tool called FAST, which stands for (are you ready?) Free Assessment Summary…
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A first look at Google Scholar: What’s included and what’s not
On Google Scholar points us to an information page put together by the Penn Library: A first look at Google Scholar: What’s included and what’s not. Does a nice job of letting folks know what they can expect from the search engine, but they don’t appear to proxy it, since they include the following points:…
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Term Paper Help Now! The Writing Survival Guide Enters the Blogosphere
Not really a library function, but something I get asked fairly regularly by distance students. Fortunately we have an Effective Writing Centre here on campus so I can refer students to them, but if you don’t, you might bookmark or incorporate some of these links into your general support pages… Link: E-Learning Queen: Term Paper…
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Chat’s Positive Side: Reference Services Online – Carol Tenopir, Library Journal
A very short piece – won’t take you any time at all to read… Chat’s Positive Side: Reference Services Online – Carol Tenopir, Library Journal "I have absolutely no regrets about enhancing our reference services through chat." "It’s been a smooth and successful expansion of our existing reference service." "It’s so successful we’ve moved from…
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Other Distant Librarians
While working on an article recently I scared up a few other blogs that are run by distance education librarians. Just this morning another appeared thanks to a pubsub feed I have. I thought you might be interested in these ones if you’re reading mine. Of course each of these are dedicated to a slightly…
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IRRODL: CIDER is Born
Hmmm, interesting information for our Canadian readers. The most recent issue of The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning introduces us to a new initiative called CIDER, the Canadian Institute for Distance Education Research. It appears to be a clearinghouse for, well, distance education research in Canada. There’s pretty much nothing there…
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Distance Teaching: Comparing Two Online Information Literacy Courses
From Volume 30, Issue 6 of The Journal of Academic Librarianship Distance Teaching: Comparing Two Online Information Literacy Courses Pages 482-487 Elizabeth Blakesley Lindsay(These links should work if your institution has Science Dirct) This article compares the author’s experience teaching a for-credit information literacy course through two different institutions. Lots of background on the way…
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Jackson Library IE Toolbar
A great idea for the distance student: a browser toolbar that provides links and access to library-specific resources. All these nifty Google Scholar tools we’ve been playing with could be incorporated into something like this. This version only works for IE 🙁 Link: Stanford Graduate School of Business: Jackson Library: Jackson IE Toolbar. Originally found…
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Best Videoconferencing Solutions For Classroom-based Work: What To Choose?
Many years ago a collegue and I wrote up our experiences of using NetMeeting to deliver library instruction to distance students: Pival, Paul R. and Johanna Tunon. “NetMeeting: A New and Inexpensive Alternative for Delivering Library Instruction to Distance Students.” College & Research Libraries News. 59(10) (November 1998), p. 758-760. Haven’t really done any experimentation…
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Information Literacy and Macromedia Captivate
Ahh, the cross-pollination continues 😉 Gary Roberts has some very positive words to say about Macromedia Captivate, which I have yet to download and play with. He closes his post with, "My prediction is that libraries will widely adopt this application to create demonstrations for remote users." Link: The Library I.T. Blog :: Information Literacy…