The Role of the Library in Achieving Co-curricular Activities in Civic Engagement on College Campuses

Recent trends in higher education highlight the value of intentionality in pedagogical approaches to civic learning. Student success and retention in the first year of college is particularly important in setting the foundation for the rest of the college experience, and evidence is mounting that First Year Learning Communities that are involved in civic and service learning projects tend to produce higher rates of retention and graduation. The Library can play a vital role in achieving co-curricular activities. This role may include creating, sponsoring and promoting intellectual, cultural, and social activities that emphasize library, classroom, campus, community, and civic connectivity, as well as developing, implementing, and channeling technologies that can showcase relevant resources and innovations. This requires, however, that librarians establish collaborations with key groups and actors involved in civic learning, and that libraries be willing to experiment with new ideas and technologies. Discussion points will explore potential barriers and bridges for librarians to engage campus learning communities in developing co-curriculum activities and civic engagement projects. Examples might be strategies for working with Learning Community faculty and with Residential Life to reach students where they live; residential life programs may be involved in providing housing for Freshman Interest Groups by floor, for instance; libraries may be involved in grant-related activities such as NEA’s Big Read initiative to promote campus reading celebrations among student groups. This presentation and discussion will address the fundamental question of what libraries can do to define themselves as places for civic learning on college and university campuses

The Begetting of Information Literacy Tutorials: Third-Wave Tutorials for the iPod Generation

Two southern Indiana instruction librarians will share their collaborative efforts to incorporate some of the latest technologies in the creation of online tutorials for their users. The tools and technologies to be discussed will range from free to expensive, low tech to high tech, and easy-to-use to relatively complex. The first part of the presentation will include a brief discussion of Camtasia and Flash, but focus primarily on Macromedia\u27s Breeze Presenter software, which works in conjunction with Microsoft PowerPoint. The content and design of Pennsylvania State University\u27s tutorial, The Information Cycle, will be used to measure the success of employing the more user-friendly Breeze software in place of Macromedia\u27s more sophisticated and expensive suite, including Flash, Fireworks and Dreamweaver. The second part of the presentation will trace the succeeding generations of online library instruction tutorials (TILT to Searchpath to inflite) and focus on how each tutorial has responded to evolving web standards, research on learning styles, and HTML editing shortcuts. The presenters will discuss issues of design, content, length, and interactivity, while highlighting accessibility, customization, assessment and usability issues. Librarians face a challenge in determining which technologies to learn and which technologies to disregard, because technology is a moving target that is constantly changing. After attending this session, you will be inspired by the tools and tutorials available to help non-techies (or tech-lites) reach students, wherever they are

Dread and latency impacts on a VSL for cancer risk reduction

We propose a structural relationship between the value of preventing a statistical cancer fatality and the value of statistical life (VSL) for risks of an instantaneous road accident fatality. This relationship incorporates a context effect reflecting both the illness or ‘morbidity’ associated with cancer fatality and the ‘dread’ or horror associated with the prospect of eventual death from cancer, as well as a latency effect that captures the discounting likely to arise because the onset of the symptoms of cancer typically occurs after some delay. We use a Risk-Risk trade-off study to validate this model by directly estimating the influence of context and latency effects upon the relative size of the VSL for cancer and for road accidents, confirming that both effects are significant and estimating their size using regression analysis. We show that morbidity accounts for the majority of the context premium. We use the elicited coefficients to reconstruct VSL estimates for a range of cancers characterised by their latency and morbidity periods

Young and Older Adults’ Reading of Distracters

Eye-tracking technology was employed to examine young and older adults' performance in the reading with distraction paradigm. Distracters of 1, 2, and 4 words that formed meaningful phrases were used. There were marked age differences in fixation patterns. Young adults' fixations to the distracters and targets increased with distracter length. This suggests that they were attempting to integrate the distracters with the sentence and had more and more difficulty doing so as the distracters increased in length. Young adults did have better comprehension of the sentences than older adults, and they also had better recognition memory for target words and distracters

A New Approach to Environmental Valuation for New Zealand

New Zealand’s Resource Management Act is frequently criticised for the costs and delays it imposes on activities, but less attention is given to the consistency of values it applies to environmental effects through its decisions. The wide variety of parties who exercise decision roles under the act lack guidance on the economic value of the environment, and non-market valuation studies are too costly to be widely used and too few and varied to infer reliable generic values. Drawing on experience in estimating the public value of safety improvements, this article proposes an alternative approach that measures people’s aversion to the risk of environmental impacts of different scales and severity which could yield values sufficiently generic to be widely used, and outlines its uses both within and beyond the RMA applications

Single Cell Analysis of Transcriptional Activation Dynamics

Gene activation is thought to occur through a series of temporally defined regulatory steps. However, this process has not been completely evaluated in single living mammalian cells.To investigate the timing and coordination of gene activation events, we tracked the recruitment of GCN5 (histone acetyltransferase), RNA polymerase II, Brd2 and Brd4 (acetyl-lysine binding proteins), in relation to a VP16-transcriptional activator, to a transcription site that can be visualized in single living cells. All accumulated rapidly with the VP16 activator as did the transcribed RNA. RNA was also detected at significantly more transcription sites in cells expressing the VP16-activator compared to a p53-activator. After alpha-amanitin pre-treatment, the VP16-activator, GCN5, and Brd2 are still recruited to the transcription site but the chromatin does not decondense.This study demonstrates that a strong activator can rapidly overcome the condensed chromatin structure of an inactive transcription site and supercede the expected requirement for regulatory events to proceed in a temporally defined order. Additionally, activator strength determines the number of cells in which transcription is induced as well as the extent of chromatin decondensation. As chromatin decondensation is significantly reduced after alpha-amanitin pre-treatment, despite the recruitment of transcriptional activation factors, this provides further evidence that transcription drives large-scale chromatin decondensation