Fostering Student Engagement and Collaboration with the Library: Student Creation of LibGuides as a Research Assignment

This article describes a project using a student-created LibGuide in conjunction with a literature review assignment for a research course. This collaborative project between a librarian and a professor of International Education was designed and implemented as an avenue for teaching information literacy and to encourage use of library resources. The methodology for the assignment is presented, and the results of the project are discussed in terms of the final products and student reviews. Implications for the use of student-created LibGuides in academic institutions and future directions for this project are presented.     

A framework for gender justice: Evaluating the transformative capacities of three key Australian schooling initiatives

Through a feminist agenda that seeks to redress gender inequities through remedies of redistribution and recognition, this paper draws on Fraser’s work (1997) to articulate a framework of transformative justice. In moving beyond the competing logics underpinning such remedies, this framework adopts a transformative theory and politics in problematising and seeking to restructure the inequitable gender differentiation of political-economic structures and social patterns of representation, interpretation and communication. This framework of gender justice is presented as useful in evaluating the ideologies and practices of particular schooling initiatives and thus is drawn on to critically assess three initiatives that currently seek to address issues of social/gender equity in education within Australia: The New Basics Project, The Productive Pedagogies Framework and the Success for Boys initiative. In particular, the paper critically explores these initiatives in terms of their capacities for enabling or constraining a transformative redistributive and cultural gender justice.     

Information for trained nurses in remote areas: do electronically networked resources provide an answer?

This paper reports on a research project which examined the potential ofthe Internet, and other networked information resources, to improve access to information fortrained nurses working in remote areas. This paper provides a review of current literature in thefield. It describes the research carried out, presents a summary of the research findings anddiscusses the implications of these findings. The paper concludes that the Internet and networkedresources do have considerable potential to improve access to information for nurses working inremote and rural areas. However, information skills, along with professional guidance, are alsorequired.     

DNA capture-probe based separation of double-stranded polymerase chain reaction amplification products in poly(dimethylsiloxane) microfluidic channels

Herein, we describe the development of a novel primer system that allows for the capture of double-stranded polymerase chain reaction (PCR) amplification products onto a microfluidic channel without any preliminary purification stages. We show that specially designed PCR primers consisting of the main primer sequence and an additional “tag sequence” linked through a poly(ethylene glycol) molecule can be used to generate ds-PCR amplification products tailed with ss-oligonucleotides of two forensically relevant genes (amelogenin and human c-fms (macrophage colony-stimulating factor) proto-oncogene for the CSF-1 receptor (CSF1PO). Furthermore, with a view to enriching and eluting the ds-PCR products of amplification on a capillary electrophoretic-based microfluidic device we describe the capture of the target ds-PCR products onto poly(dimethylsiloxane) microchannels modified with ss-oligonucleotide capture probes.     

Social networking and Web 2.0 in information literacy

This paper discusses free online and Internet tools that can be adapted by librarians for use with library instruction and information literacy training, with a focus on social media and Web 2.0 technologies, including social networking websites Facebook and Twitter, blogs, RSS, wikis, and video sharing. Many students already use these technologies and are readily engaged with the library when the technologies are incorporated into library websites and classes. There are challenges in using these technologies, especially in countries with oppressive governments. This paper is based, in part, on a presentation the authors gave at the UNESCO Training the Trainers in Information Literacy Workshop at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Alexandria, Egypt in November 2008.     

Using autobiographical queer life narratives of teachers to connect personal,political and pedagogical spaces

Autobiographical queer life narratives are communicative spaces where queer teachers take up personal issues of being, becoming, and belonging in contextual and relational analyses of their situated experiences. In this work w/e consider the challenges and risks involved in this research, which, when shared and probed in classroom spaces, is a dangerous exposition of the queer self. With these challenges and risks in mind, w/e examine how our narratives provide fugitive knowledge to inform a pedagogy of ‘resist-stance’ that recognizes, respects, and engages queer identity, difference, history and culture. W/e provide examples of this pedagogy, discussing teaching strategies currently being used to connect the personal, the political and the pedagogical in classroom spaces. W/e also speak of the difficulties of living out this pedagogy as transformative teaching to transgress queer erasure in hetero-normative educational practice.