The road not taken

The annual Janet Doe Lecture was established in l966 to honor Janet Doe, emerita librarian of the New York Academy of Medicine. The lecture focuses on either the history or philosophy of health sciences librarianship. This lecture addresses three fundamental values of the field, highlighting basic beliefs of the profession that are at risk: privacy, intellectual property rights, and access to quality information. It calls upon readers to make the everyday choices required to keep the value system of health sciences librarianship in place. Robert Frost''s poignant poem ”The Road Not Taken” provides the metaphor for examining choices in an information economy.

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
Robert Frost [1]

These charming pastoral words evoke a not so subtle hint at the importance of choices made and opportunities unexplored. When Frost wrote these words in Vermont more than a century ago, he had no intimation of the myriad choices that overwhelm our senses today. The rhythm of the crafted stone fences of New England marked the boundaries of the land. The disruption of the interstate highway with its unrelenting straight lines had not yet cleaved the fences one from another. The stillness of the woods was not yet pierced by jet-propelled aircraft and, yet, Robert Frost knew then of roads not taken.

“And I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence”

We, too, know of choices forced upon us with dizzying pace, choices made with adrenaline and exhilaration, agonizingly belabored, or often ignored. Choices surrounding our fundamental beliefs in an age of disruptive technologies and value-changing economies are the theme of this paper. Walk down a path with me that examines choices around privacy, intellectual property rights, and access to quality information, core values that medical librarians support and rely upon every day of the year.     

Third-Grade Students Investigate and Represent Data

Results of a collaborative project between two mathematics education faculty, a third-grade teacher, and her beginning third-grade students are presented. The purpose of this project was to collect information from these students as they thought through how to ask, collect, and then answer their own data-driven questions. These young students exhibited a growing understanding, sophistication, and comfort with the use and application of data and data terminology as they developed their strategies for collecting, analyzing, and presenting their results.     

Clinical appraisal of spelling ability and its relationship to phonemic awareness (blending,segmenting, elision,and reversal), phonological memory,and reading in reading disabled,ADHD, and normal children

Seventy-eight 8-to-12-year-old children (34 ReadingDisabled; 31 Attention-Deficit-Hyperactivity-Disordered; and 13diagnosed normal controls) were given a battery oftests including cognitive, linguistic, academic,phonemic awareness, and memory tests. As part of theacademic battery an 8-point spelling rating scale wasdeveloped (Rating Scale) that resulted in threedifferent scores which reliably discriminated amongthe three groups. Relationships between phonemicawareness, phonological memory, reading and spellingwere explored. Zero-order and second-ordercorrelations were completed with indications thatphonemic awareness tasks (elision, blending, reversal,and segmenting) and phonological memory (WISC-IIIDigit Span) are significantly correlated with readingdecoding and spelling measures with slightly highercorrelations with the Rating Scale. Regressionanalyses resulted in a large proportion of thevariance on reading and spelling tasks accounted forby phonemic awareness (particularly elision andreversal) and phonological memory. The ReadingDisabled group was found to produce more errors thatwere phonetically inaccurate than the other twogroups. The demand of spelling ten ``error' wordsbeyond the RD students' achievement level appeared toelicit greater weaknesses in their phonologicalrecoding abilities than in those of the ADHD ornormally achieving students.     

秦始皇兵马俑博物馆室内含硫颗粒物的SEM-EDX研究

本文对秦始皇兵马俑博物馆室内采集的长短期降尘、大气悬浮颗粒物和彩绘漆层进行了SEM-EDX研究,在大气悬浮颗粒、短期和长期降尘中,含硫颗粒的粒径分别为0.9～22.8μm、1.0～29.0μm和1.2～37.7μm,多为石膏与粘土或石英以内部混合的状态存在。降尘中的附着型絮状硫酸钙多于大气悬浮颗粒物中,显示降尘和大气中的二氧化硫发生了累进的化学反应。彩绘漆层表面的坑和裂隙附近观察到原位生长的硫酸钙晶体,显示漆层材料或降尘颗粒物与大气二氧化硫之间的酸化学反应,可能是彩绘漆层表面受侵蚀形成微小坑和裂隙的原因之一。     

Beginning primary science teaching: Entryways to different worlds

This paper reports on a longitudinal interpretive case study of the transtion from preservice to inservice science teaching. We describe four sets of overlapping worlds that provide vantagepoints for the study. Three sets describe the experiences of Katie, the participating teacher. These are the world of the person who is good at science and the world of the person who is not, the world of the student teacher and the world of the novice teacher, and the world of the primary science classroom and the world of the primary classroom during other subjects. The final set describes our development as researchers during this period—the world of the specialist science teacher and the world of the generalist teacher. In our analysis of the transition experience, we employ the term entryways to describe understandings and strategies that helped the teacher and ourselves to move between contrasting perspectives.     

Interdisciplinary dialogues as a site for reflexive exploration of conceptual understandings of teaching–learning relationships

This study examines what the members of an interdisciplinary research alliance, at the intersection of Engineering and Education Ethnography, learned through ongoing dialogues among members (2012–2014). The analyses make visible how, and for what purpose(s), this interdisciplinary research alliance was constructed, including the theoretical/conceptual roots of perspectives guiding the members of the alliance, and how these orienting perspectives served as anchors for exploring points where differences in understandings became visible to members. By tracing responses that members had to differences in understandings, we examine how the differences became resources for members to (re)examine their initial assumptions and understandings of particular teaching–learning processes, and how these differences supported members, individually and collectively, in extending and (re)formulating their understandings of the relationship between and among teaching and learning processes that constituted no distance education processes. Through the presentation of three telling cases, we make visible how the dialogues led to different levels of ethnographic analysis (cases 1 and 2). Each was undertaken to develop an understanding of what counted as the no distance education process, both at the design and institutional level across national institutions as well as in the course across times and events. The third telling case explores transformations in understanding particular aspects of teaching–learning relationships that the members reported were related to the ongoing dialogues and ethnographic research.     

Negotiating the challenge of collaborative writing: learning from one writing group's mutiny

With continuing pressure to publish or perish, interventions such as writing groups are increasingly part of the academic landscape. In this paper, we discuss our writing group's experiment with collaborative writing, which came unstuck as simmering concerns led to a mutiny within the group. The mutiny provided insights into tensions that are inevitably present in writing groups and collaborative writing exercises but are seldom written about. We explore these tensions via a collaborative autoethnography, drawing on published literature on writing groups and collaborative writing. The mutiny revealed three key dynamics. Experienced voices can have an important role to play but these voices need to be moderated so that other voices might be recognised and valued. Pleasure and productivity are two necessary components for sustaining writing groups and writing collaborations. Finally, hierarchies in the academic context are inescapable but they can be renegotiated so that more enabling power relations can be generated.