TL INFOBITS     April 2008              No. 22          ISSN: 1931-3144

About INFOBITS

INFOBITS is an electronic service of The University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill ITS Teaching and Learning division. Each month the
ITS-TL's Information Resources Consultant monitors and selects from a
number of information and instructional technology sources that come to
her attention and provides brief notes for electronic dissemination to
educators.

NOTE: You can read the Web version of this issue at
http://its.unc.edu/tl/infobits/bitapr08.php

You can read all back issues of Infobits at
http://its.unc.edu/tl/infobits/

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Report on E-Learning Returns on Investment
Information Searching Behavior of "Google Generation" Students
Publishing Policies for Faculty Authors and Open Access
Using Leisure Devices in the Learning Environment
Recommended Reading

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REPORT ON E-LEARNING RETURNS ON INVESTMENT

"Within the academic community there remains a sizable proportion of
sceptics who question the value of some of the tools and approaches and
perhaps an even greater proportion who are unaware of the full range of
technological enhancements in current use. Amongst senior managers
there is a concern that it is often difficult to quantify the returns
achieved on the investment in such technologies. . . . JISC infoNet,
the Association for Learning Technology (ALT) and The Higher Education
Academy were presented with the challenge of trying to make some kind
of sense of the diversity of current e-learning practice across the
sector and to seek out evidence that technology-enhanced learning is
delivering tangible benefits for learners, teachers and institutions."

The summary of the project is presented in the recently-published
report, "Exploring Tangible Benefits of e-Learning: Does Investment
Yield Interest?" Some benefits were hard to measure and quantify, and
the case studies were limited to only sixteen institutions. However,
according to the study, there appears to be "clear evidence" of many
good returns on investment in e-learning. These include improved
student pass rates, improved student retention, and benefits for
learners with special needs.

A copy of the report is available at
http://www.jiscinfonet.ac.uk/publications/camel-tangible-benefits.pdf

A two-page briefing paper is available at
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/publications/bptangiblebenefitsv1.pdf

JISC infoNet, a service of the Joint Information Systems Committee,
"aims to be the UK's leading advisory service for managers in the
post-compulsory education sector promoting the effective strategic
planning, implementation and management of information and learning
technology." For more information, go to http://www.jiscinfonet.ac.uk/

Association for Learning Technology (ALT), formed in 1993, is "the
leading UK body bringing together practitioners, researchers, and
policy makers in learning technology." For more information, go to
http://www.alt.ac.uk/

The mission of The Higher Education Academy, owned by two UK higher
education organizations (Universities UK and GuildHE), is to "help
institutions, discipline groups, and all staff to provide the best
possible learning experience for their students." For more information,
go to http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/

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INFORMATION SEARCHING BEHAVIOR OF "GOOGLE GENERATION" STUDENTS

The British Library and the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC)
commissioned a study "to identify how the specialist researchers of the
future, currently in their school or pre-school years (the 'Google
generation'), are likely to access and interact with digital resources
in five to ten years' time." How this group uses the Internet for
information and research has implications for both instructors and
librarians. Some of the group's characteristics revealed in the study
conclude that:

--they "have a poor understanding of their information needs and thus
        find it difficult to develop effective search strategies"

-- they "have unsophisticated mental maps of what the internet is,
        often failing to appreciate that it is a collection of
        networked resources from different providers"

-- they "find it difficult to assess the relevance of the materials
        presented and often print off pages with no more than a
        perfunctory glance at them"     

A number of popular myths about the Google generation were explored,
with the researchers concluding that many popularly-held beliefs about
the generation are, in fact, not substantiated by the research.

The study's report "Information Behaviour of the Researcher of the
Future" (January 2008) is available at
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/programmes/reppres/gg_final_keynote_11012008.pdf

The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) is a strategic advisory
committee working on behalf of the funding bodies for further and
higher education in England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. For
more information on JISC, see http://www.jisc.ac.uk/

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PUBLISHING POLICIES FOR FACULTY AUTHORS AND OPEN ACCESS

"[O]n February 12, 2008, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) at
Harvard University took a landmark step. The faculty voted to adopt a
policy requiring that faculty authors send an electronic copy of their
scholarly articles to the university's digital repository and that
faculty authors automatically grant copyright permission to the
university to archive and to distribute these articles unless a faculty
member has waived the policy for a particular article. Essentially, the
faculty voted to make open access to the results of their published
journal articles the default policy for the Faculty of Arts and
Sciences of Harvard University."

The SPARC/Science Commons White Paper "Open Doors and Open Minds: What
Faculty Authors Can Do to Ensure Open Access to Their Work Through
Their Institution" (April 2008) describes Harvard's policy and provides
a plan of action for other institutions contemplating similar policies
to extend access to faculty publications. The paper is available at
http://www.arl.org/sparc/bm~doc/opendoors_v1.pdf

SPARC, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, is
"an international alliance of academic and research libraries working
to correct imbalances in the scholarly publishing system. Developed by
the Association of Research Libraries, SPARC has become a catalyst for
change. Its pragmatic focus is to stimulate the emergence of new
scholarly communication models that expand the dissemination of
scholarly research and reduce financial pressures on libraries." For
more information, contact: SPARC, 21 Dupont Circle, NW, Suite 800,
Washington, DC 20036 USA; tel: 202-296-2296; fax 202-872-0884; email:
sparc@arl.org; Web: http://www.arl.org/sparc/

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USING LEISURE DEVICES IN THE LEARNING ENVIRONMENT

"[T]he blurring of leisure and learning has corroded the respect that is
necessary to commence a scholarly journey."

In "Learning to Leisure? Failure, Flame, Blame, Shame, Homophobia and
Other Everyday Practices in Online Education" (JOURNAL OF LITERACY AND
TECHNOLOGY, vol. 9, no. 1, April 2008, pp. 36-61), Juliet Eve and Tara
Brabazon "map a singular teaching hypothesis: when using platforms most
frequently positioned in leisure-based environments, such as the iPod,
text messaging, and discussion fora, there are institutional and
ideological blockages to creating a successful learning experience and
scholarly environment." From their in-class experimentation and the
work of other researchers, they observed that the "user-generated
content 'movement' -- including Flickr, wikimedia, blogs, podcasting,
MySpace, Facebook and YouTube -- has provided a channel and venue for
the emotive excesses of grievance, hostility and insolence against
teachers, students and education." The paper is available at
http://www.literacyandtechnology.org/volume9/jlt_v9_1_eve_brabazon.pdf

The Journal of Literacy and Technology [ISSN: 1535-0975] is an online
peer-reviewed international academic journal "exploring the complex
relationship between literacy and technology in educational, workplace,
public, and individual spheres." For more information, contact The
Journal of Literacy & Technology, Florida Atlantic University, School
of Communication and Multimedia Studies, 777 Glades Road, Boca Raton,
FL 33431 USA; tel: 561-297-2623; fax: 561-297-2615; Web:
http://www.literacyandtechnology.org/

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RECOMMENDED READING

"Recommended Reading" lists items that have been recommended to me or
that Infobits readers have found particularly interesting and/or
useful, including books, articles, and websites published by Infobits
subscribers. Send your recommendations to carolyn_kotlas@unc.edu for
possible inclusion in this column.

Shakespeare's Global Globe
http://www.orbismundi.org/

Shakespeare's Global Globe, conceived by Michael Witmore an associate
professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University, is "a web resource
that provides an instantaneous visualization of all self-reporting
readers of Shakespeare on the planet, viewable by region, genre and
play. Upon arrival at the site, visitors are asked to indicate which
Shakespeare play they are currently reading and where they are on the
planet. The site then locates that reader and play at a particular
point on the globe, which remains illuminated for two weeks. Site
visitors can also explore what other readers of Shakespeare are doing
in different cities, regions or continents using a range of display
options."