Engaged Scholarship in the Academy: Reflections from the Margins

This paper represents a series of reflections on collective and individual efforts of diverse women scholars to reconcile alternative views of scholarship within the academy. We document our collective experience with embedding the concept of the “scholarship of engagement” in our practice of research, teaching, and service through a process of collaborative inquiry. In addition, we discuss individual efforts to challenge university colleagues and students (many of whom are teachers in training) to interrogate issues of social justice, diversity, and marginalization in their academic environments. Our experiences provide a critical examination of the supports needed for diverse women faculty who engage in critical dialogues that challenge traditional institutional structures while on the tenure path.     

Discourses of Danger and the Computer Hacker

This article argues that the hacker is constructed as an information deviant and that this image is helpful in providing rules for appropriate behavior in an information society. The hacker accounts in this article are designed to give the reader an understanding of the types of things being said about hackers. What is more important, however, is how these narratives are used to support a specific notion of property ownership and government secrecy. In making this argument, this article traces the development of the narrative about the hacker from harmless computer nerd to terrorist.     

University students＇ conceptions of good teaching across different faculties

Quality of teaching in higher education has been widely discussed. It clearly underlines the importance of undertaking a multidimensional view about the teaching/learning process as well as involving the main actors of university life according to a participative model, in order to elicit their opinions about important quality issues. Moreover, some studies suggested that the importance of differentiating between the various disciplinary contexts determines which aspects are specific and which are transversal to faculties. On the basis of these assumptions, the aim of this study is to involve the students of various faculties in the identification of what constitutes ＂good teaching＂. Furthermore, the concept of ＂good teaching＂ is strongly linked to teaching evaluation, for this reason, it was considered important to verify differences in the attribution of importance of the various dimensions by students from different faculties, in order to understand if teaching evaluation in the university can take place without distinctions, or whether it should provide methodologies and instruments covering commonalties and differences for each disciplinary area. The results legitimize a complex approach to the issue and a diversified framework of competencies when considering different teaching contexts.     

Dinosaurs in a Jetson world: A dozen ways to revitalize your microforms collection

Microforms collections are at a crossroads and how effective libraries are in increasing the visibility and usability of these collections will determine whether they endure. In the last decade many libraries have made significant changes in how they process, catalog, and provide access to their traditional book and journal collections, even in how they view their library's physical spaces and the role of library services in providing support for their collections. This article will suggest changes libraries will need to make if they expect to mainstream the most useful and valuable parts of their microforms collections by applying some of the same innovative and change-oriented approaches they have used in other areas of their libraries.     

Facilitating Student Learning,the Assessment of Learning,and Curricular Improvement Through a Graduate Social Work Integrative Seminar

Social work programs undertake to educate competent professionals and to promote critical thinking among students who are expected to become lifelong learners. In addition, programs are called on to develop reliable and valid measures for assessing student learning outcomes and to use assessment results to reflect upon and strengthen curriculum. This study explores the use of a graduate integrative seminar to accomplish these goals. The authors describe the learning and assessment processes of the seminar. The authors used a mixed-method research design to analyze data from students over a 3-year period regarding the effectiveness of the seminar as well as from graduate faculty regarding student achievement of curricular objectives. Results indicate that formative assessment processes promote student learning in a manner that mobilizes students to strive for excellence, and that an embedded measure of learning outcomes in the form of a final integrative project may serve as a rigorous assessment tool.     

Overlap among College and University Library Collections

Analysis of twenty-six college and university libraries' monographic holdings in WorldCat shows that university libraries hold radically more rare titles and their collections are seven times larger than college libraries. Language and Literature (Library of Congress [LC] class P) accounts for 30% of university and 27% of college holdings. The number of books held declines and the number owned by only one library increases after the 2000 publication year. Since then, total library budgets have barely kept pace with inflation and book budgets have declined as a percentage of library expenditures. These changes align with current emphasis on priorities other than book collections.