The Pitiful Bellringer: The Implications of Representations of Disability in Media & Literature

This project investigates how throughout history, those who were different or atypical were often relegated to a marginalized life; this perspective was indicative in literature of previous eras as well as in historical documentation. As indicated in this research, even though literature and media has moved away from personifying disability in an overwhelmingly negative light, it has consequently moved toward characterizing people with disabilities as the antihero worthy of pity. The unintentional, prejudicial view of people with disabilities in popular culture perpetuates the idea that disability is something that must be overcome. This disconnect hinders student awareness and acceptance, and therefore negates many positive attempts, and perhaps even inclusion measures, made by educational professionals. This project highlights a one-week unit plan that aims to empower students to counter the prevailing hegemony by encouraging students to reflect, explore, analyze, and discuss antiquated and modern depictions of disability in literature and media (including non-fiction sources). Throughout the suggested lesson plans, all of which are aligned with objectives and the common core standards, students will uncover a deeper understanding of the tragic view of disability and subsequently develop greater sensitivity regarding their own unintentional bias

The Cybernetics Thought Collective: A History of Science and Technology Portal Project White Paper

This White Paper discusses the Cybernetics Thought Collective (CTC) team’s specific work to digitize a select portion of archival materials; investigate and experiment with natural language processing, named entity extraction, and machine learning software; begin investigating access interfaces for the portal; and ingest the digitized materials and machine-extracted metadata into the University of Illinois Library’s preservation repository and digital library. The pilot grant project enabled us to explore emerging methods for creating access to archival materials, which resulted in promising outcomes. In May 2018, the CTC team launched the prototype portal: ​https://archives.library.illinois.edu/thought-collective/​.National Endowment for the Humanities PW-253912-17Ope

Edukacja muzyczna w kształceniu nauczycieli wczesnej edukacji w kontekście systemu reprezentacji Jerome’a Brunera. Jej celowość oraz modyfikacja metodyki nauczania do pracy zdalnej

Artykuł składa się z dwóch części. W pierwszej przedstawione zostają implikacje dla kształcenia nauczycieli wczesnej edukacji z zakresu edukacji muzycznej wynikające z teorii psychologii roz- wojowej dotyczącej systemu reprezentacji Jerome’a Brunera. Autor stara się zwrócić uwagę, iż właściwe ich rozumienie wydaje się kluczowe dla budowania dobrego podłoża dydaktycznego w pracy ze studentami kierunków wczesnej edukacji. W drugiej części artykułu w odniesieniu do przedstawionej teorii ukazana zostaje modyfikacja wybranych metod prowadzenia edukacji muzycznej na wskazanym etapie kształcenia, w odniesieniu do wyzwań związanych z koniecznością pracy zdalnej. Autor szczegółowo omawia wybrane przykłady metodyczne i proponuje ich modyfikacje. Celem zabiegu jest ukazanie możliwości zachowania praktycznego charakteru działań edukacyjnych mimo niesprzyjających warunków, jakie niesie za sobą konieczność izolacji i pracy online.The article consists of two parts. The first presents the implications for training early childhood music education teachers which arise from the theory of developmental psychology concerning Jerome Bruner’s system of representations. The author strives to point out that their proper understanding appears to be essential to building a good teaching foundation for working with early childhood education students. With reference to the theory in question, the second part of the article discusses a modification of selected methods of conducting music education at the indicated stage of education in relation to the challenges connected with the necessity to work remotely. The author discusses examples of methodology in detail and suggests modifications. The aim of such treatment of the matter is to demonstrate that it is possible to retain the practical nature of educational efforts in spite of the unfavourable conditions that stem from the need to be isolated and work online

Information Discovery Insights Gained from MultiPAC, a Prototype Library Discovery System

At the University of Nevada Las Vegas Libraries, as in most libraries, resources are dispersed into a number of closed “silos” with an organization-centric, rather than patron-centric, layout. Patrons frequently have trouble navigating and discovering the dozens of disparate interfaces, and any attempt at a global overview of our information offerings is at the same time incomplete and highly complex. While consolidation of interfaces is widely considered to be desirable, certain challenges have made it elusive in practice

The Library moves to serverless AWS technology to deliver high-resolution images online

The Illinois Digital Library went live with over 130,000 images in AWS S3 storage in February 2019. The Digital Library uses home-grown dynamic image server software to drive a feature-rich web interface for viewing and manipulating these images. This underlying technology has recently been migrated to AWS’s ECS Fargate serverless platform, which enables the Library to provide strong and scalable performance while minimizing compute and storage costs. This presentation will begin with a brief background on web image delivery techniques, and then discuss our situation at the Library before and after the transition to AWS. The bulk of the presentation will be a technical description of how we are using Fargate to serve a large collection of high-resolution images, with the goal of providing a "template" for other AWS serverless projects.Ope