Inside outreach: a challenge for health sciences librarians.

OBJECTIVE: Like medical and health sciences libraries throughout the country, the Lamar Soutter Library (LSL) at the University of Massachusetts Medical School is dealing with ever-increasing outreach needs in times of diminishing funding. With the goal of reshaping the library's outreach program to better serve our patron groups, the Outreach Study Group was formed to investigate existing models of outreach. METHODS: The group initially examined the current literature and subsequently conducted a nationwide survey of medical and health sciences libraries to identify trends in outreach. This article details the methods used for the survey, including establishing criteria for selecting participants, determining the focus, and developing and conducting the survey. RESULTS: Of the 40 libraries invited to participate, 63% completed the survey. An analysis of the data revealed successes, problems, and trends. The group's conclusions led to recommendations for the LSL's future outreach efforts. CONCLUSIONS: Analysis of the data revealed key findings in the areas of strategic planning, funding, and evaluation. A thoughtful definition of outreach ensures that outreach activities are expressions of the library's mission. Funding shifts require flexible programs. Evaluation provides data necessary to create new programs, sustain successful ones, and avoid repeating mistakes.     

Measuring knowledge of natural selection: A comparison of the CINS,an open‐response instrument,and an oral interview

Growing recognition of the central importance of fostering an in‐depth understanding of natural selection has, surprisingly, failed to stimulate work on the development and rigorous evaluation of instruments that measure knowledge of it. We used three different methodological tools, the Conceptual Inventory of Natural Selection (CINS), a modified version of Bishop and Anderson's (Bishop and Anderson [1990] Journal of Research in Science Teaching 27: 415–427) open‐response test that we call the Open Response Instrument (ORI), and an oral interview derived from both instruments, to measure biology majors' understanding of and alternative conceptions about natural selection. We explored how these instruments differentially inform science educators about the knowledge and alternative conceptions their students harbor. Overall, both the CINS and ORI provided excellent replacements for the time‐consuming process of oral interviews and produced comparable measures of key concept diversity and, to a lesser extent, key concept frequency. In contrast, the ORI and CINS produced significantly different measures of both alternative conception diversity and frequency, with the ORI results completely concordant with oral interview results. Our study indicated that revisions of both the CINS and ORI are necessary because of numerous instrument items characterized by low discriminability, high and/or overlapping difficulty, and mismatches with the sample. While our results revealed that both instruments are valid and generally reliable measures of knowledge and alternative conceptions about natural selection, a test combining particular components of both instruments—a modified version of the CINS to test for key concepts, and a modified version of the ORI to assess student alternative conceptions—should be used until a more approprite instrument is developed and rigorously evaluated. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 45: 1131–1160, 2008     

The evolution of FM radio: 1941–1946

The following verbatim extracts from FCC Annual, Reports are part of a continuing series published in the Journal of Broadcasting that includes: “The Evolution of Television: 1927–1943” (Summer, 1960); “The Evolution of Television: 1944–1948” (Winter, 1960–61); and “The Evolution of FM Radio: 1935–1940” (Spring, 1961).     

Seeing Ourselves as Others See Us: Egyptian teachers’ views of science education in secondary schools in London,UK

Small differences in working patterns and social relationships can be indicators of deeper cultural differences. It is these non‐educational issues which point to the serious difficulty of making cross‐cultural comparisons. Data collected from Egyptian science teachers who have visited science classes in London are reported here. UK teachers may be habituated, or unaware of features of school life that are quite striking to the Egyptians as new observers. These include well resourced laboratories, considerable practical work done in small groups and a wide variety of classroom activities. However, it is the professionalism and the good interpersonal relationships that they see in the UK that the Egyptian teachers come to appreciate even more on their return to Egypt. Such a feature of UK teachers’ work cannot be identified by international test score comparisons.     

Teacher-student discourse in active learning lectures: case studies from undergraduate physics

In this paper we develop knowledge of the discourse that takes place between teacher and students in two large undergraduate classes which use a flipped, active learning approach. In flipped classes students encounter the content through pre-class resources, freeing up class time for more active engagement with the material. This results in increased opportunities for teacher-student interactions which may be beneficial for learning. Our aim here is to explore the nature and purposes of these dialogues. Two case studies from introductory physics classes at the University of Edinburgh are analysed through a sociocultural perspective. Three main purposes of dialogues are observed: (1) Involving students in sense-making, (2) Guided expert modelling and (3) Wonderment questions. We found that the dialogues predominantly use a triadic Initiation, Response, Feedback (IRF) format and are authoritative in nature, but work together to create an interactive learning environment that can be described as ‘ideologically dialogic’     

Going dark: anonymising technology in cyberspace

Anonymising technologies are cyber-tools that protect people from online surveillance, hiding who they are, what information they have stored and what websites they are looking at. Whether it is anonymising online activity through ‘TOR’ and its onion routing, 256-bit encryption on communications sent or smart phone auto-deletes, the user’s identity and activity is protected from the watchful eyes of the intelligence community. This represents a clear challenge to intelligence actors as it prevents them access to information that many would argue plays a vital part in locating and preventing threats from being realised. Moreover, such technology offers more than ordinary information protections as it erects ‘warrant-proof’ spaces, technological black boxes that no matter what some authority might deem as being legitimately searchable is protected to the extent that there are very limited or non-existent means of forcing oneself in. However, it will be argued here that not only is using such anonymising technology and its extra layer of protection people’s right, but that it is ethically mandatory. That is, due to the en masse surveillance—from both governments and corporations—coupled with people’s limited awareness and ability to comprehend such data collections, anonymising technology should be built into the fabric of cyberspace to provide a minimal set of protections over people’s information, and in doing so force the intelligence community to develop more targeted forms of data collection.