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Meandering through dyslexia
Nature Neuroscience 11, 121 (2008). doi:10.1038/nn0208-121
Author: Richard Wise (Source: Nature Neuroscience)
Written by Nature Neuroscience · Filed Under Dyslexia | Comments Off
K-NFB Reading Technology, Inc., a company combining the research and development efforts of the National Federation of the Blind and Kurzweil Technologies, Inc., unveils an exciting product line that will revolutionize access to print for anyone who has difficulty seeing or reading print, including the blind and learning disabled.
Written by Dyslexia News From Medical News Today · Filed Under Dyslexia | Comments Off
Steven just remarked on the Educause training toolkit for information literacy that somehow missed the fact that libraries have been working on it for some time. D’oh! This presentation on an Annenberg School-sponsored media survey also struck me as a place where “library” as a source of information is noticeably absent. (So are books.) Admittedly, the focus is on how media can recapture people’s attention as a trusted source of information, and it’s really focused on “how do we get consumers to pay attention to our advertising so we can recover that revenue stream.” But still … the survey asked about where people turn to find trusted information. The library is not one of the options. (See especially slides 20 and 24.)
The survey focused entirely on sources of information that can be optimized for advertising dollars - and how to drive the public toward news media for purchasing decisions - so they may have just decided libraries don’t belong on the list. But when they ask about “where you go for information” and libraries aren’t there, it suggests value is only attached to information sources that exist to generate advertising dollars and stock dividends.
The study reports that people are increasingly skeptical about mass media and that “word of mouth” is more important than being told what to read through PR and marketing. In other words, you PR flaks have shot yourselves in the foot and are now trying to learn how to talk like a human.
Maybe our users need to get a little more outspoken. Libraries have net assets worth billions! You can claim your dividend every time you use them! You can use them online with no pay wall! And no harvesting of personal information or annoying banner ads!
I think we have an edge, here, if only we were able to get the word out. (Source: ACRLog)
Written by LibWorm Query: literacy · Filed Under Literacy | Comments Off
Purpose: Under immediate supervision, performs basic bibliographic, reference, readers' advisory, and program work, with an increasing acceptance of responsibility.
Essential Duties: Under supervision, Librarians I participate in a full range of librarian activities including reference service, community service, outreach, programming, basic collection development, readers' advisory service and a variety of related tasks. Emphasis is placed upon developing a comprehensive background in all phases of librarianship throughout the library system and will include children's, young adult, and/or adult services. A promotional program exists that provides qualified individuals with an opportunity to continue their development by assuming higher level responsibilities commensurate with their abilities and the needs of the system.
The Milwaukee Public Library is committed to providing the highest quality of service to internal and external customers. In meeting this commitment, employees are expected to be knowledgeable, competent, dependable and courteous in the performance of their job responsibilities, and to work cooperatively as part of a team.
Reasonable accommodations requested by qualified individuals with disabilities will be made in accordance with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990.
Minimum Requirements:
1. Master's Degree in Library and Information Studies or equivalent from a library school accredited at the graduate level by the American Library Association (ALA). Proof must be shown at time of appointment.
NOTE: Applicants having current academic status as graduate students in such schools will be allowed to participate in this examination if they possess at least 24 credits in the MLIS program. Regardless of their position on the eligible list, candidates will not be certified and referred for interviews until after they have graduated.
Residence in the City of Milwaukee within six months of appointment and throughout employment. ...
Written by LibWorm Query: literacy · Filed Under Literacy | Comments Off
Next Saturday, from 10am-2pm PST, young adult authors Marc Aronson, Barry Lyga, and Carol Baldwin will be interacting as avatars with teens from all over the world on Teen Second Life. Exhibits put together with TeachingBooks.net will also be part of the festival. For more information on how to involve your teens, visit the Chicago Public Schools Dept. of Library and Information Services blog post.
Posted by Kelly Czarnecki (Source: YALSA)
Written by LibWorm Query: literacy · Filed Under Literacy | Comments Off
I *am* going to write about the library, though. Maybe that will count. The Ottawa Public Library Web presence is split in two: the libarary catalogu (Source: pligg - all)
Written by LibWorm Query: literacy · Filed Under Literacy | Comments Off
A nice tip from Greg Sheaf on the lis-infoliteracy discussion list for saving search histories (useful if you want students to present evidence of their searches, and/or analyse what they have done) Apparently if you use the Firefox browser the history is saved in a file called history.dat, which is stored in a "profiles" folder. Greg provides useful links: http://support.mozilla.com/kb/Profiles#Profile_folder_locations and http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/mozilla_history_view.htmlPhoto by Sheila Webber: my orchid has bloomed again! (Source: Information Literacy Weblog)
Written by LibWorm Query: literacy · Filed Under Literacy | Comments Off
Crowding-An essential bottleneck for object recognition: A mini-review.
Vision Res. 2008 Jan 26;
Authors: Levi DM
Crowding, generally defined as the deleterious influence of nearby contours on visual discrimination, is ubiquitous in spatial vision. Crowding impairs the ability to recognize objects in clutter. It has been extensively studied over the last 80 years or so, and much of the renewed interest is the hope that studying crowding may lead to a better understanding of the processes involved in object recognition. Crowding also has important clinical implications for patients with macular degeneration, amblyopia and dyslexia. There is no shortage of theories for crowding-from low-level receptive field models to high-level attention. The current picture is that crowding represents an essential bottleneck for object perception, impairing object perception in peripheral, amblyopic and possibly developing vision. Crowding is neither masking nor surround suppression. We can localize crowding to the cortex, perhaps as early as V1; however, there is a growing consensus for a two-stage model of crowding in which the first stage involves the detection of simple features (perhaps in V1), and a second stage is required for the integration or interpretation of the features as an object beyond V1. There is evidence for top-down effects in crowding, but the role of attention in this process remains unclear. The strong effect of learning in shrinking the spatial extent of crowding places strong constraints on possible models for crowding and for object recognition. The goal of this review is to try to provide a broad, balanced and succinct review that organizes and summarizes the diverse and scattered studies of crowding, and also helps to explain it to the non-specialist. A full understanding of crowding may allow us to understand this bottleneck to object recognition and the rules that govern the integration of features into objects.
PMID: 18226828 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]
(Source: Vision Research)
Written by Vision Research · Filed Under Dyslexia | Comments Off
Mishra, Champeswar and Maharana, Bulu (2007) A survey of digital information literacy of Faculty at Sambalpur University. Library Philosophy and Practice 9(2). (Source: E-LIS)
Written by LibWorm Query: literacy · Filed Under Literacy | Comments Off
The January issue of College & Research Libraries has a nice article up by Paul Waelchli. It is titled Librarians' sport of choice: Teaching information literacy through fantasy football. This is a great article and my congratulations to Paul for connecting these two important concepts (football and information literacy) so well. (And as an aside, I was fortunate to be in a librarian fantasy football league with Paul last fall. I came in third!)From the article:Librarians want students to effectively identify and evaluate information and make decisions based upon what they discover. These are just some of the skills that an information literate student successfully applies. These are the same skills that more than 19 million people use on a daily or weekly basis playing fantasy sports.1 As the NFL football season comes to a close, millions of Americans, some as young as 12 years old, have spent the past few months connected to information literacy. They just don’t know it.The challenge for librarians is to connect fantasy sports skills to information literacy and create building blocks for academic applications of the same concepts. One library, University of Dubuque, did just this by teaching fantasy football research to incoming student athletes. Through the lesson, students engaged in discussions of creditability, validity, timeliness, and search strategies to find and evaluate fantasy football information. The assessment of these instruction sessions showed incoming students successfully identifying evaluation criteria and reporting positive changes in how they viewed research and libraries. (Source: The Information Literacy Land of Confusion)
Written by LibWorm Query: literacy · Filed Under Literacy | Comments Off
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