Book chapter progress

I think I am making some progress on my book chapter. I'm looking at challenges for librarianship, and I told them I would write about technology.

I've been looking at bloglines skimming about 29 feeds, to see what I can see (for the past 4-5 months), and I am starting to sort through all the things, and I am seeing some patterns.

I have identified some challenges, and some reactions to "library 2.0" Maybe I'll put some here someday.

Plagiarism
I'm also working with Tiana French on something for plagiarism, and that includes probably making a web site, and probably writing something for somewhere. I am taking a research methods class, and I am using a "find out whether first year college students understand what plagiarism is" as my topic. The class does not require you do a live survey, but I'm thinking that I might as well try.

Student success
I'm also working on a way to help students realize where they are in the semester, and to remind them of the appropriate bits of orientation at the appropriate times.

"Good" folder

Seeing this post http://www.librarystuff.net/2006/06/hundred-dollar-folder.html, I'm reminded that there are so many little good ideas out there. I started a "good boy" folder back at Bradley University in 1991, when I started my first professional job. Now I just call it "good", and this year, I added the innovation of calling it "good 2006" so I don't have to go through the whole folder when annual review time comes up.

From the Kept-Up Academic Librarian - http://keptup.typepad.com/academic/2006/06/dependence_on_t.html

An article complaining that students are becoming too dependent on text communication. Wasn't the worry less than 10 years ago, since students were always watching TV, that they would be unable to communicate in print? Which way do you want it?

Or, do worries about young people always sell more newspapers? Or, did the worried stories sell newspapers back when people had to pay for them?

This smacks to me, having not read the article, in good blogger fashion, of people from one paradigm looking incorrectly at people in the new paradigm. Okay, I went and read it, and I still think the same thing. A few anecdotes from a few people (including, of course, Lindsey Lohan) make a disturbing new trend.

I was on vacation for a couple of days, and I'm trying to read through everything that accumulated in blogspot.

I was struck by two contradictory articles (to which I do not have the links). One looked at economics Ph.D. graduates, and attempted to determine if an academic career was based more on the student's own intellectual prowess, or the luck of what the job market held that year. Guess what? It's the luck of the draw: graduate in a good year if you can.

The other article was also looking, I believe, at business and finance students, and was remarking that a person's institution no longer mattered as much. The Internet had flattened out patterns of collaboration, and now people from less well regarded schools could co-author with others from high-prestige schools.

So, that's the view from the dismal science: timing is everything, geography no longer matters.