Interdisciplinary Synergy: A Partnership Between Business and Library Faculty and Its Effects on Students’ Information Literacy

In today's information-rich environment, business faculty are challenged to teach students how to conduct effective business research and evaluate information critically. We describe collaboration between business professors and reference librarians in an introductory business course. Students were surveyed before and after completion of a Business Discovery Project requiring use of print and electronic sources in writing a research paper on a publicly traded company. Student perceptions indicated increased abilities in communication skills, research skills, use of business information sources, and composition skills; paired t tests showed these increases to be significant.     

把家变成游乐场

沙发是一个可以让飞船停靠的新星球,转椅是一只等待被驯服的长颈鹿,收纳可以变成一场藏宝游戏——准备好一切．让家变成游乐场．让孩子尽情又安心地玩耍吧!     

Implementing and managing legal deposit in South Africa: Challenges and recommendations

This article discusses an investigation which was undertaken on behalf of the Legal Deposit Committee into the state of legal deposit in South Africa. Legal deposit cannot be successfully implemented in a country without the positive and committed participation of publishers and legal deposit institutions. The main aim of the study was therefore to investigate how the attitudes, opinions and behaviours of these core role players affect the depositing of material subject to legal deposit. Face-to-face interviews were conducted with selected groups or individuals representing the publisher populations. Similar interviews were conducted with representatives of the five legal deposit libraries. As no studies have been done in South Africa to determine the state of compliance with legal deposit requirements in the country, a smaller investigation in the form of a feasibility study was undertaken with the aim of obtaining figures that reflect the levels of compliance over a specific time period. Based on the results obtained from these investigations, suggestions and recommendations for improved procedures and methods for monitoring and managing legal deposit in the future were provided. Although this study is specific to the South African situation at the present time, the methods employed and suggestions provided may have a wider scope for implementation than in this country only. Other countries on the African continent, for example, could use the methods and suggestions of this study, or adaptations thereof, for their own purposes.     

Regulation,Politics and Media

Paul P. Ashley's Say it Safely: Legal Limits in Publishing, Radio, and Television (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1976—$9.50)

David E. Price, The Commerce Committees: A Study of the House and Senate Commerce Committees ($16.50, 358 pp.)

Peter N. Schuck, The Judiciary Committees: A Study of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees ($16.50, 446 pp.)

Harry R. Olsson, Jr.'s Legal and Business Problems of Television and Radio (Practicing Law Institute, 810 Seventh Ave., New York 10019—$20.00, paper)

Robert Agranoff's The Management of Election Campaigns (Boston: Holbrook Press, 1976—price not given)     

Role of Discrepant Questioning Leading to Model Element Modification

Discrepant questioning is a teaching technique that can help students “unlearn” misconceptions and process science ideas for deep understanding. Discrepant questioning is a technique in which teachers question students in a way that requires them to examine their ideas or models, without giving information prematurely to the student or passing judgment on the student’s model. This strategy prompts students to see the contradictions in their own model. This study focused on the analysis of small group tutoring sessions on human respiration. Individual and small group construction of mental models was analyzed after instructed with a standardized teaching sequence based on model construction and criticism theory (Rea-Ramirez in Model of conceptual understanding in human respiration and strategies for instruction, Dissertation Abstracts International, 59 (10), 5196B, 1998). Analysis provided deeper understanding of the role discrepant questioning played in this construction of understanding and suggested new models of learning.     

Knowledge sharing in global virtual team collaboration: applications of CE and thinkLets

Although a global virtual team (GVT) can provide organizations with increased competitive advantages and greater flexibility due to its unique ability to transcend traditional boundaries of time, locations, and organizational constraints, knowledge sharing in globally dispersed and culturally diverse members also poses unique challenges to organizations wishing to capitalize on diverse knowledge of GVTs. This work, therefore, examines extant literature on collaboration engineering (CE) and thinkLets and further proposes that CE and thinkLets can help organizations develop predictable patterns of knowledge-sharing behaviour and a sense of structure in GVT collaboration. Implications of using CE and thinkLets for organizational practice and research are also discussed in the virtual collaboration context.