Building a technology foundation for future teachers

It is fitting that the teachers of tomorrow are provided with the correct modeling of technology in their first education class. To separate technology from education is both impossible and foolish. The sooner college students are exposed to the latest forms of technology, the more equipped they will be to integrate these tools into their teaching strategies for the benefit of future learners.     

Neural information retrieval: at the end of the early years

A recent “third wave” of neural network (NN) approaches now delivers state-of-the-art performance in many machine learning tasks, spanning speech recognition, computer vision, and natural language processing. Because these modern NNs often comprise multiple interconnected layers, work in this area is often referred to as deep learning. Recent years have witnessed an explosive growth of research into NN-based approaches to information retrieval (IR). A significant body of work has now been created. In this paper, we survey the current landscape of Neural IR research, paying special attention to the use of learned distributed representations of textual units. We highlight the successes of neural IR thus far, catalog obstacles to its wider adoption, and suggest potentially promising directions for future research.     

Talk Back with Yik Yak? Exploring User Engagement via Anonymous Social Media in an Academic Library

This article presents results of a study of library-related posts on Yik Yak, a former social media app, and questions received via more traditional library-maintained virtual reference service platforms—namely, chat/instant messaging, SMS/text messaging, email, and LibAnswers' Query Spy—at College of Charleston's Addlestone Library. Based on an analysis of the results, suggestions are made for using social media tools similar to Yik Yak as a tool for interacting with patrons in academic library settings, specifically as a means to gather feedback about the library and to provide basic reference services.     

Bringing evidence to practice: a team approach to teaching skills required for an informationist role in evidence-based clinical and public health practice

Objective: The objectives were (1) to develop an academic, graduate-level course designed for information professionals seeking to bring evidence to clinical medicine and public health practice and to address, in the course approach, the “real-world” time constraints of these domains and (2) to further specify and realize identified elements of the “informationist” concept.Setting: The course took place at the Division of Health Sciences Informatics, School of Medicine, Johns Hopkins University.Participants: A multidisciplinary faculty, selected for their expertise in the course core competencies, and three students, two post-graduate National Library of Medicine (NLM) informationist fellows and one NLM second-year associate, participated in the research.Intervention: A 1.5-credit, graduate-level course, “Informationist Seminar: Bringing the Evidence to Practice,” was offered in October to December 2006. In this team-taught course, a series of lectures by course faculty and panel discussions involving outside experts were combined with in-class discussion, homework exercises, and a major project that involved choosing and answering, in both oral and written form, a real-world question based on a case scenario in clinical or public health practice.Conclusion: This course represents an approach that could be replicated in other academic health centers with similar pools of expertise. Ongoing journal clubs that reiterate the question-and-answer process with new questions derived from clinical and public health practice and incorporate peer review and faculty mentoring would reinforce the skills acquired in the seminar.

Highlights

• Interdisciplinary faculty designed and offered a graduate-level course to teach the skills required by an informationist in clinical and public health practice, further elaborating a model for preparing informationists.

Implications

• This scalable approach to teaching skills for the transfer of evidence into practice could be replicated in academic health centers with similar pools of expertise; such replication could contribute data toward validating this training approach.
• Greater clarity on an appropriate, or “good enough,” standard of evidence for supporting point-of-action decision making is needed.
• Based on the assumption that practicing skills increases confidence and the likelihood that skills will be applied, this course included mentored practice of oral and written evidence presentation skills. Further research could determine whether a course that includes such mentored practice increases the likelihood that students will apply their newly acquired skills.

     

The District and Charter Sectors of American K–12 Education: Pros and Cons

This article probes ways in which the school-choice marketplace as it developed via chartering has not worked as well in practice as many had hoped. It includes reflection on the profoundly different operating principles and theories of action that separate the district and charter sectors in their pure forms. It also offers market-strengthening suggestions that blend the 2 approaches, organizing them under 10 categories.     

Validity of SenseWear® Armband v5.2 and v2.2 for estimating energy expenditure

We compared SenseWear Armband versions (v) 2.2 and 5.2 for estimating energy expenditure in healthy adults. Thirty-four adults (26 women), 30.1 ± 8.7 years old, performed two trials that included light-, moderate- and vigorous-intensity activities: (1) structured routine: seven activities performed for 8-min each, with 4-min of rest between activities; (2) semi-structured routine: 12 activities performed for 5-min each, with no rest between activities. Energy expenditure was measured by indirect calorimetry and predicted using SenseWear v2.2 and v5.2. Compared to indirect calorimetry (297.8 ± 54.2 kcal), the total energy expenditure was overestimated (P < 0.05) by both SenseWear v2.2 (355.6 ± 64.3 kcal) and v5.2 (342.6 ± 63.8 kcal) during the structured routine. During the semi-structured routine, the total energy expenditure for SenseWear v5.2 (275.2 ± 63.0 kcal) was not different than indirect calorimetry (262.8 ± 52.9 kcal), and both were lower (P < 0.05) than v2.2 (312.2 ± 74.5 kcal). The average mean absolute per cent error was lower for the SenseWear v5.2 than for v2.2 (P < 0.001). SenseWear v5.2 improved energy expenditure estimation for some activities (sweeping, loading/unloading boxes, walking), but produced larger errors for others (cycling, rowing). Although both algorithms overestimated energy expenditure as well as time spent in moderate-intensity physical activity (P < 0.05), v5.2 offered better estimates than v2.2.     

DEVELOPING RESEARCH QUESTIONS THROUGH GRANT PROPOSAL DEVELOPMENT

Developing good research ideas is both a science and an art. Teaching students how to select and then conceptualize the research idea requires both tools and practice. This paper discusses the identification of an appropriate research question and the refinement of it into a working research plan in the format of a grant proposal. The author has used the development of a grant proposal to demonstrate the linkages between theoretical models of aging policy and aging policy research in a master's level Aging and Public Policy Course. In this course students choose, develop, and refine a research statement in response to a request for proposal from an independent foundation. The theoretical knowledge cycle is used to discuss how these students learn over time to refine and reformulate their ideas into workable research questions. Students report that writing for a real funding entity allows them to develop both proficiency with the construction of a research question and research plan and develop expertise with aging policy.