Gender Roles in Technology Product Advertisements in Library Trade Magazines

Several studies on the depiction of gender roles in high tech product advertisements have concluded that women frequently are portrayed as passive users of technology while men are shown as masters of technological innovations. I examined ten issues from each of four library and information science trade magazines published in 2007-2008 to discover if advertisements for high tech products in them contain gender role stereotypes or if they more accurately reflect the use of technology by women librarians. Two titles – Library Journal and American Libraries – are more traditional library magazines, while Computers in Libraries and Online are newer publications that focus on the use of technologies in libraries and information science. A content analysis of the technology product advertisements revealed that women and men appeared in the ads with similar frequency and that both genders are portrayed as working with technology at comparable rates. The presentation included a description of the methodology and results, a selection of sample advertisements, and a discussion of the implications and questions raised by the study

Student works in the institutional repository: An analysis of interest and impact

Eastern Michigan University has highlighted student work in its institutional repository since 2009. Starting with graduate theses and dissertations, the repository’s student presence has grown with the addition of other works, such as honors theses, student journals, and capstone projects. Including student work in our repository fulfills many goals. It allows EMU to showcase and preserve the excellent scholarship produced by our students, and then make these works available to users around the world. These collections serve as recruitment tools to demonstrate what prospective students may achieve through the opportunities EMU offers. The repository provides our students with a space where they can promote their accomplishments and archive their works, and also affords faculty advisors and mentors a means of appraising their roles in student scholarship. One method of determining if student work in the repository is meeting these goals is through investigating their usage. This presentation will examine usage of all student work in our institutional repository –theses and dissertations, articles in student journals, and other items. Download rates, citations to these works in scholarly literature, and social media mentions will be used to explore the impact of and interest in student-authored works in Eastern Michigan University’s institutional repository

Effectiveness of small-group learning pedagogies in engineering and technology education: A meta-analysis

This study reports the results of a meta-analysis synthesizing the available literature on the effectiveness of various forms of small-group learning methods on the academic achievement of college students in undergraduate engineering and technology classrooms. The meta-analytic results showed that cooperative learning, collaborative learning, problem-based learning, and peer-led team learning pedagogies were studied in college technology and engineering classrooms. The results also revealed that most of the primary studies supported the effectiveness of the small-group learning methods in improving students’ academic achievement with an overall positive weighted average effect size of 0.45 in standard deviation units favoring small-group learning methods. The findings might help engineering and technology instructors and educators by providing guidance in identifying the conditions under which various forms of innovative small-group pedagogies are more effective than the traditional lecture-based teaching and individualized instruction