News Literacy: Teaching Students to Be Informed Citizens

Presentation at the Quasicon 2017 Conference, University of Michigan School of Information, Ann Arbor, MINews literacy is at the forefront of libraries; truth and “fake news” are also being debated in popular media. To address this need for information literacy on news at Washtenaw Community College (WCC) Library, librarians are collaborating to create a LibGuide about news in the winter 2017 semester. Based on literature, research on similar guides at other colleges and universities, and input from colleagues, we are building the new online guide, which will be published in January or February 2017. In my presentation, I will describe work completed, the new guide’s current state and use, and next steps for this guide, as well as discuss news literacy with attendees. This topic relates to QuasiCon’s theme of “Accessibility and Information” by demonstrating a project that supports library patrons’ understanding of and access to information.https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/146729/1/QuasiCon2017-NewsLiteracy.pdfDescription of QuasiCon2017-NewsLiteracy.pdf : Slide

Manipulating Data in Spreadsheets

Book chapter in Creating Data Literate Students, available here: http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/mpub.9873254https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/146731/1/Chapter_5_Stuit.pdf-1Description of Chapter_5_Stuit.pdf : Chapte

Test Track Low Frequency Vibrations Reducing Measure Near Oosthuizen

At the railway line north of Amsterdam the substructure of the track has been reconstructed to reduce vibrations at lower frequencies. Such a measure is sought for in the western Holland area where people are annoyed by railway traffic vibrations. Over a length of 300 m a 0.45 m thick concrete slab has been installed directly under the ballast layer. The thickness of the concrete plate has been determined by numerical calculations. To be able to compare the effect of the concrete slap a existing track with heavy passenger train traffic a representative weak soil profile has been chosen for a test site, which was found at the Oosthuizen. At this test site an extensive set of vibration measurements have been conducted to determine the effect of the taken measure and to validate the used numerical procedure to predict the vibrations

Plaasfeminism in Ronelda S. Kamfer’s Kompoun (2021)

This review article explores how Ronelda S. Kamfer’s novel Kompoun (2021) deconstructs and diversifies the white patriarchal space of the plaas (farm) by reinscribing it with a highly situated ‘plaasfeminism’ emerging from the female characters in the novel. This critical reinscription through the lives of the McKinney women from the Overberg is necessary, but certainly not triumphant. For Nadia, the protagonist, the idyll of the plaas consists of her admiration of and longing for her maternal forebears and thus provides a source of strength and personhood, but the plaas is also quite literally the scene of a crime from which her family fails to protect her. Kompoun complicates mainstream notions of feminist resistance by charting the internal contradictions of female subjectivity and highlighting the vulnerable position of the McKinney children, who grow up in a community where both adult men and women pose a threat of emotional and physical abandonment and abuse. Yet, in times of need, Nadia manages to mobilise her personal image of the plaas’s beauty as motherly and the women who live there as tough as coping strategies that suspend her imprisonment in the harmful dynamics around her