The Effect of Personal and Academic Variables on Student Adoption of Twitter as an Information Source

ABSTRACT

This study investigated the use of Twitter in terms of personal and academic variables of students. These included gender, grade point average (GPA), and year level. Data were collected from undergraduate students at the College of Social Sciences at Kuwait University. A structured questionnaire was used as the data collection instrument. The findings show that the majority of respondents use social media, 42.8% use Twitter “sometimes,” and 44.4% use it “always.” There is no significant difference between males and females, except for social influence (SI). There is a statistically significant difference in the use of Twitter as an information source among students for different academic year levels, with the highest mean for senior students. However, no significant differences were found by students' GPA scores. Further investigation focusing on variables such as students' level of confidence and skills of using Twitter, such as the effect of course content, etc., would provide more insight into the use of social media platforms in higher education.     

Bridging Generations

Abstract

Since 1994, undergraduate students at Rutgers University have had the opportunity to explore broad issues in the history of women's higher education by examining issues surrounding single-sex and coeducation at their own institution, with specific concentration on social issues and student culture. Four distinct seminars and projects, two of which incorporate oral history, and all four involving historical research in archival sources, have contributed to the historical literature and have added valuable documentation on the history of women at Rutgers University. This article presents an overview of these specific courses. It further provides an assessment from the particular perspective of a university archivist who attempts to document the history of the institution, promote the use of that documentary record by a diverse audience of users, including undergraduate students, and who has had the opportunity to teach two seminars on the history of women's higher education, using Rutgers as a case study. The courses to be discussed are: “Rutgers Women: A Living History” (1993-1995), a research seminar incorporating oral history of the first women students to enter the previously all-male Rutgers College in 1972; the Rutgers Oral History Archives of World War II (1994 to present), an ongoing project recording the memories of Rutgers men and women and their wartime experiences; the Douglass College Scholar's Program seminar on psychobiography (1998), a seminar which explored the life of Mary Clara Kangler, a 1938 graduate of the New Jersey College for Women whose tragic life ended in suicide; and the Douglass College Scholar's Program seminar on the history of the Douglass College and its role in the history of women's higher education in the United States (1999-2002), a research seminar based on archival research which explored the experiences of women and the controversial issues surrounding women's education at Rutgers.     

Finding and Evaluating Health Sources on the Internet

Summary

Librarians and patrons searching for reliable health information are fortunate in that this subject area is one for which many reliable, in-depth sites exist. Government, education, and organization sites are, in particular, good sources of information and provide links to other Web pages. It is important, however, for both librarians and their clients to know how to access this information and, especially, how to evaluate the worthiness and usefulness of the information contained therein.     

Critical Information Literacy Beyond the University: Lessons From Service in a Women's Health Interest Group

Library instruction methods most frequently focus on teaching students searching skills to navigate the maze of library databases to locate appropriate research materials. The current theory of critical information literacy instruction calls on librarians to spend more of their time in the classroom focused on understanding the social, political, and cultural construction of knowledge. In this article, the author provides a case study of the information environment in the National Women's Health Network, a women's health interest group, to help librarians facilitate nuanced discussions with students on the applicability of interest group literature inside and outside of the university classroom.     

Cultural Diversity in Brazil: A Guide to Reference Sources

ABSTRACT

Brazil is a unique and vibrant country. Researching the diverse cultures of Brazil, although a fascinating pursuit for many individuals, is made difficult by the vast amount of information available for this topic, published in many different languages. In an effort to bring together materials from various sources, assess their quality, and provide a listing of high quality titles, this bibliography presents a compilation of relevant materials from a wide variety of resources.     

Student Employment in Academic Libraries:

No abstract available for this article.     

A Graphic Interface to Online Reference Sources

Librarians at the Arnold Bernhard Library of Quinnipiac University were at a crossroads with electronic reference books. At first they had added the titles to the library's web page, generated records to individual titles in the online catalog, and even established links to their content using the link resolver in the online catalog. It was still felt that the collection was not living up to its potential. In 2007, the automation librarian began a project to add one more level of access to these titles – a graphic interface that simulated the process of walking into a reference room and picking out a title – all of this done with no programming beyond basic HTML. Early usage reports beginning in the Fall of 2007 prove that the concept has found an audience.     

Don’t Quote me: Effects of Named,Quoted, and Partisan News Sources

ABSTRACT

Many news organizations have developed policies on the use of named and unnamed sources, including whether the latter can be directly quoted or paraphrased in news stories. In this experiment, we test how audience members respond to these policy dictates by measuring news credibility in a political story that manipulated whether the source was named, whether that source was directly quoted, and the source’s political connection to the story. We found that while each of these manipulations had little or no main effects, they combined to trigger a discernible change in credibility in the eyes of the audience.     

Partners in Power

This historical analysis examines the relationship between investigative journalists and official sources through the prism of Pulitzer Prize archive materials from 1917 through 1960. Most prize research has focused on the content of winning stories, but this study provides a fuller picture of the process of newsmaking—and policymaking—through an exploration of deliberative material created by prize juries. While the role of the press in these decades and beyond has been conceptualized alternately as a passive lapdog or an aggressive watchdog, this essay offers a more nuanced view of newspapers that are fully entangled with power in society—sometimes collaborating with a faction of power, sometimes confronting a faction, and, often, both at once. Detailed jury notes on the nominations tell the stories behind the investigations, revealing a press that sometimes leads and other times takes the lead from those in positions of official power. The paper adds to the literature on policy and media agenda building, arguing that through investigative reporting, journalists have often been active rather than passive partners in systems of community standard maintenance.