UX and Your Library: A Scalable Model

User experience is immeasurably important for your patrons as they access your Web site. This article presents tips and strategies for testing user experience, suggests a number of different popular technologies and tools that are used in the UX field, and lays out a plan for sharing and utilizing data to make improvements on your Web site. It is the goal of this article to present a model for improving Web site usability that can be scaled up or down depending on the resources available at your institution.     

How Language Supports Adaptive Teaching Through a Responsive Learning Culture

For students to learn optimally, teachers must design classrooms that are responsive to the full range of student development. The teacher must be adaptive, but so must each student and the learning culture itself. In other words, adaptive teaching means constructing a responsive learning culture that accommodates and even capitalizes on diversity to ensure that each student is learning optimally. There are 2 primary resources for accomplishing this, engagement and the classroom talk that the teacher orchestrates.     

Managing Bibliographic Data Quality in a Consortial Academic Library: A Case Study

This article presents a case study of quality management for print and electronic resource metadata, summarizing problems and solutions encountered by the Cataloging and Discovery Services Department in the George A. Smathers Libraries at the University of Florida. The authors discuss national, state, and local standards for cataloging, automated and manual record enhancements for data, user feedback, and statewide consortial factors. Findings show that adherence to standards, proactive cleanup of data via manual processes and automated tools, collaboration with vendors and stakeholders, and continual assessment of workflows are key to the management of biblio-graphic data quality in consortial academic libraries.     

Developing a quality curriculum in a technological era

Educational technology research and development - There is considerable rhetoric internationally around the need for national curricula to reflect the changes that are taking place in the world...     

Realizing the integrative capacity of educational mixed methods research teams: using a complexity-sensitive strategy to boost innovation

ABSTRACT

Educational research teams are increasingly recognized as an optimal configuration for addressing more complex mixed methods research problems; however, their development is often approached as a conventional research collaboration rather than an integrative one. An approach informed by complexity theory provides the practical guidance for studying mixed methods research teams as complex adaptive systems with the capacity for generating novel educational research outcomes greater than the sum of individual contributions alone. In this paper, I advance a complexity-sensitive strategy through which to realize the integrative capacity of educational mixed methods research teams comprising of four interrelated elements: membership, contributions, interactions, and performance. These elements embody amalgamations from a decade of my readings of the literature and real-life professional experience. Each element is examined in light of the three key concepts of complex adaptive systems to describe the necessary conditions for emergence, influential challenges illustrating interdependency, and desirable individual and team adaptations. The study’s theoretical and practical implications are discussed.