Latest PIL report released

Lessons Learned: How College Students Find Information in the Digital Age was released today, Dec. 1.

As many of you know, Harvard has been involved in phase 1 (focus group) and phase 2 (online survey). We're also on board for phase 3 (content analysis of research assignments); Alison Head, the PI, is currently collecting this data from faculty in the College.

More info about the project, including past reports, videos, and supplementary information, is available at the PIL site.

New on Google Scholar: Legal Opinions

You'll see this yourselves before too long, but as of this week, Google Scholar now contains legal materials.

Read all about it: Finding the Laws that Govern Us. And here's the coverage note:

Currently, Google Scholar allows you to search and read opinions for US state appellate and supreme court cases since 1950, US federal district, appellate, tax and bankruptcy courts since 1923 and US Supreme Court cases since 1791 (please check back periodically for updates to coverage information). In addition, it includes citations for cases cited by indexed opinions or journal articles which allows you to find influential cases (usually older or international) which are not yet online or publicly available. Legal opinions in Google Scholar are provided for informational purposes only and should not be relied on as a substitute for legal advice from a licensed lawyer. Google does not warrant that the information is complete or accurate.

Reviews from the legal community, including assessments of how Westlaw and LexisNexis might be affected, are linked to the post.

New finding: "Search engines are sources of learning"

The summary of work by Penn State researcher Bernard J. Jannsen, et al. is here.

The article, "Using the Taxonomy of Cognitive Learning to Model Online Searching," appears in Information Processing and Management, 45 (2009): 643-663. You can view it via Citation Linker.

You say you want a revolution . . . .

In the tradition of Michael Wesch, who brought us The Machine is Us/Using Us comes this YouTube video, called the Social Media Revolution. The author, Eric Qualman, produced the video as part of the rollout of a new book, Socialnomics, published by Wiley. To read his blog or to see his statistical sources (and the discussions they've produced), go here.

Enjoy!

2009 Horizon Report

. . . is on the horizon. Read it here.

Six Ways to Identify Top Blogs in Any Niche

An interesting post that identifies (and evaluates) options for locating high-impact blogs. Since blogs -- like other new media -- are in the process of becoming legitimate primary or secondary source material for some research projects, it's good to have a guide to finding them.

Berkman Media Re: Public Site

The Berkman Center for Internet & Society today announced "a major research release": Media Re:public: News and Information as Digital Media Come of Age. This series of papers explores the potential and the challenges of the emerging networked digital media environment -- an environment that impacts what we do at the desk, in classes, and in our work with users. It's worth a look!

"The Media Re:public series was put together over the course of a year of examining the news media in the U.S., engaging with journalists, bloggers, citizen journalists, public broadcasters, publishers, advertising networks, researchers, technologists, and many others. It builds on previous discussions, such as the 2005 Blogging, Journalism & Credibility conference, and highlights the need for a new public conversation about reinventing journalism in the public interest."

From the project main page, the conversation is being continued via the project blog.

Zoetrope: looking backward on the Internet

is about to take a great leap forward!

View the video

The MIT Technology Review has an interesting article on this soon-to-be-released software as well.

Another view of Wikipedia

Wikirage

This site keeps up-to-the-minute statistics on the entries that are being most heavily edited, on entries with most unique edits, most vandalism and undos, etc. The site allows you to view by different category and according to different time parameters (last hour, day, week, etc.).

The site perhaps has interesting implications(and applications) for our work with students. Beyond that, Wikirage offers a fascinating glimpse into current cultural and social phenomena (and fads).

Compare it to the Wikipedia map of edits.

ECAR Survey 2008

The Educause Center for Applied Research (ECAR) has released its 2008 Study of Undergraduate Students and Technology.

In distilled form, these results and implications of the study are presented here.

Reading on Collaboration and Collaboration Tools

An August 2008 Educause Learning Initiative (ELI) paper.

Harvard College Thesis Repository

The Harvard College Free Culture group has created an online repository of full-text undergraduate theses. It's small (but growing) and well-worth promoting among students (and faculty) when you can.

2008 Horizon Report

The 36 page report is linked from here.

Because it forecasts trends in teaching, learning, and technologies, it makes interesting reading as we all think about a Lamont of the future.