Chemical Compositions, Spring 2014

The newsletter of the Department of Chemistry, published once or twice a year, highlights people, events, and facilities. Content includes brief articles on new faculty hires, faculty and staff retirements, obituaries, major facilities and equipment upgrades, scholarship and award recipients, historical features, alumni updates, news from the Mallet Library, and a message from the Chair.Chemistr

Development of Online Course System and an Open Access Online Repository

This Project was divided in to two phases: the first phase comprising of development of an online course system for the institute with the help of moodle. Moodle( modular object oriented dynamic learning environment) is an open source software package for producing internet-based courses and web sites. It's an ongoing development project designed to support a social Constructionist framework of education. Moodle is provided freely as Open Source software (under the GNU Public License). Basically this means Moodle is copyrighted, but that we have additional freedoms of improvising the source code. The 2nd Phase of the project was that of deployment of an open access online repository system using E-prints. EPrints is an open source software package for building open access repositories that are compliant with the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting. It shares many of the features commonly seen in Document Management systems, but is primarily used for institutional repositories and scientific journals. EPrints has been developed at the University of Southampton School of Electronics and Computer Science and released under a GPL license

Like, share, vote

This report explores the potential for social media to support efforts to get out the vote. Overview Across Europe, low voter turnout in European and national elections is a growing concern. Many citizens are disengaged from the political process, threatening the health of our democracies. At the same time, the increasingly prominent role that social media plays in our lives and its function as a new digital public space offers new opportunities to reengage non-voters. This report explores the potential for social media to support efforts to get out the vote. It lays out which groups need to be the focus of voter mobilisation efforts, and makes the case for using social media campaigning as a core part of our voter mobilisation efforts. The research draws on a series of social media voter mobilisation workshops run by Demos with small third sector organisations in six target countries across Europe, as well as expert interviews, literature review and social media analysis. Having affirmed the need for and utility of social media voter turnout efforts, Like, Share, Vote establishes key principles and techniques for a successful social media campaign: how to listen to the digital discourse of your audience, how to use quizzes and interactive approaches, how to micro-target specific groups and how to coordinate offline events with online campaigns. This report concludes that, with more of our social and political lives taking place online than ever before, failing to use social media to reinvigorate our democracy would be a real missed opportunity

Using a Technology Integration Content Plan to Align Course Components for Enhanced Student Learning

In education, students simply consuming technology is not sufficient. Rather, we as educators want students to become effective producers of technology. That takes planning. Writing a plan that integrates the right technology to align with course components can assist instructors to design lessons that would encourage and challenge students cognitively. In this article, instructors are guided on constructing lessons that comprise a unit in which a lesson has a technology anchor. A list of free or less expensive tech tools that instructors and students could use is also available

An audience perspective on the second screen phenomenon

Second screen applications are among the latest of the TV industry’s innovations to retain the TV viewer’s attention in a challenging multi-screen environment. These applications can be regarded as an extension of TV content consumed on a TV set towards lightweight portable devices such as tablets. While numerous commercial instances are available internationally and the existing literature on the topic from a technical perspective is extensive, the audience side of this phenomenon has been paid far less attention to. Moreover, in the case of Flanders, the successful commercial implementation of second screen applications remains limited. In this research, we aim to elicit what TV viewers’ expectations and preferences are regarding second screen functionalities. By applying means-end theory and a laddering approach we were able to discern how these preferences subsequently relate to the TV show itself, the consequences for the viewing experience, as well as how second screen applications and usages are expected to fit in the viewer’s everyday life

Company History: Corporate Archives\u27 Public Outreach on Fortune 100 Company Websites

Just before commercialization of the Internet, corporate archives communicated with the public via museums and exhibits, books and articles, educational curricula, television, anniversary publications, and nostalgic packaged goods. By 1996, as growing numbers of companies experimented with their first Web sites, corporate archivists such as Philip F. Mooney at Coca-Cola found a new, “unparalleled opportunity for outreach.” Mooney and his colleagues at Chevron, Ford Motor, J.C. Penney, Levi Strauss, Texas Instruments, and Wells Fargo were among those contributing early content to company Web sites, such as the J.C. Penney “History Page,” with its illustrated timeline, founder’s biography,video clip, and museum/archives contact information. A decade later, Company History sections of one or more Web pages are common—only seventeen of the Fortune 100 companies of 2008 did not have one on their Web sites—and maturing, as content and design refresh to engage repeat visitors and incorporate changing technology. If a company has an archives program, its Company History section often extends beyond a timeline to share legacy collections, activities, and communications with the public. This outreach on company Web sites is little discussed in archival literature, as studies of corporate archives and technology tend to focus inward on serving clients within the company

HIS 104: United States History Since 1865 Syllabus

In the summer of 2021, Profs. Jennifer Black, Allan Austin, and Mary Kay Kimelewski were awarded a grant from the Pennsylvania Department of Education (PA Goal program) to rework Misericordia\u27s introductory US History courses to use open-access texts in lieu of costly textbooks. Their goal was to make learning more affordable for their students, while increasing the range of voices represented in the US History survey courses. The attached teaching resources represent the fruits of their labors. This syllabus was created by Jennifer Black, Allan Austin, and Mary Kay Kimelewski (Misericordia University History Department) in the summer of 2021. Support for the project was generously provided by the Pennsylvania Grants for Open and Affordable Learning (PA GOAL) program, Grant #1