Guardienne of the Tomes

You don't even have to have your finger on the pulse of academic news to have heard about the Lacour and Green research debacle. It's been bouncing around in my brain since it's related to the way we maneuver in a world of information, and it is relevant to my work as a librarian and as a researcher. In a drama-filled nerdly nutshell (with links to further reading for the details), the situation: Brief Unofficial Timeline of the Study, and Discovery of Possible Misconduct an important study on persuasion coauthored by a UCLA political science graduate student (Lacour) and a big-name political scientist at Columbia University (Green) was published in (and then retracted from) the peer-reviewed journal  Science; the large-N study indicated that attitudes about same-sex marriage could be significantly changed long-term by brief exposure to someone who was gay; because this would be huge news, it was picked up by NPR's This American Life ; because the conclusions g...

Spring 2015 started with a bang, and the reference and instruction folks have been swamped with very full teaching schedules. I hear rave reviews from discipline faculty about how those sessions go, which is heartening. Maybe even better, I hear rave reviews from our students who stop by the reference desk! Our recent program review by outside parties, a regular requirement of all programs here at CSUCI, also went very well and it was good to hear what our faculty and students thought about our strengths and weaknesses. In all the hubbub, I also wanted to point out some upcoming professional development excitement: I've been selected to be a Spring 2015 Project ISLAS (Institutionalizing Student Learning, Access and Success) Faculty Fellow. This means I'll be attending various faculty-taught workshops on best practices in areas such as: teaching and engaging first generation and underrepresented students; research-based innovations in learning to learn; cross-campus collaborat...