Yesterday, the Williams Library invited speaker Dr. Thom Flamboe read from his recently self-published book Can You Fix Him? Adventures in Child Therapy.   He read many piognant and funny stories from his career in child therapy.   It appears he will used almost any tactic to get a child to tell his/her story.  He normally asks his 100 “dumb questions,” but has many conventional and unconventional methods.  His various methods include; having a child talking about her dreams, complimenting a child that is supposedly different (e.g. dressed in all black with a mohawk), using a juvenile response to a child’s juvenile act, and many have responded to his stories about his family.

The article, “Buried Seed Vault Opens in Arctic,” in today’s New York Times covers the recently built Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway.   Accord to the SGSV site the vault is “designed to store duplicates of seeds from seed collections from around the globe … If seeds are lost, e.g. as a result of natural disasters, war or simply a lack of resources, the seed collections may be reestablished using seeds from Svalbard.”  The article also discusses one noteworthy perspective.  The group disagrees with the creation of the SGSV. “The group worries that such moves take away intellectual property rights to crop varieties from the farming communities that developed them and provide a false sense of confidence that safe storage, on its own, can sustain agricultural diversity.”  In seems this group’s argument is similar to arguments against Google Books and other Western-based online and print book collections.  Are these projects leading to a world monoculture?  Is the group’s argument accurate?  I do not have the answers, but it is an interesting area to investigate.

In the last few weeks I have taught a couple classes about the tools are useful in researching a company.  Of course students want to know which is the best site or source.  The only thing I can say, you cannot rely on one source, one resource.  You need to gather information from many sources to get an overall view.  I found out that Tim Horton’s, the Canadian institution, was bought by Wendy’s in 1995 and became a separately traded company in 2006.  If you are ever in Canada stop at a Tim Horton’s for good fast food meal.  If there are other fast food joints nearby, Horton’s will be the only one with a line.

Proprietary databases to start researching a company:

• Business Source Complete  - company profiles (Datamonitor Reports) and articles about a company and its industry.
• Factiva - similar to Business Source Complete, but also included are key financial data and stock price comparison
• Lexis-Nexis Academic - company profiles, Hoover’s Reports, and news from around the globe.  The new Company Profile is probably the best feature of the new LN Academic interface.

Free places to find quality information:

• Corporate Sites - Annual Report (if public) and other government required documents.  Watch out for the public relations info on these sites.
• Blogs - These may be useful in getting an inside view of a company, but take the information with a grain of salt.
• Sec.gov - find any government required file here
• NYTimes.com Markets
• Yahoo Finance
• Google Finance

Last week I attended a workshop on Quantitative Reasoning at the Collaboration conference on critical thinking.  QR boils down to teaching students how to properly use quantitative information in their papers and projects.  Some assignments do not require numeric data and students may or may not use quantitative data for this type of assignment.  Other assignments require the use of graphics and data, while others are data-driven research assignments.  The discussion centered on how to create QR across the curriculum, similar and writing across the curriculum or information literacy across the curriculum.   From the presenters research, it seems many students do not know how to properly incorporate statistics and/or create graphic representations of statistics to back their arguments.   This site from Western Washington University provides a good overview of QR.

EBSCOhost has recently updated it Visual Search, for the better. It now is Flash-based and no longer uses Grokker or those awful circles. The visual search is more user friendly, but I do not think it makes the quality or relevance review of articles any easier or faster. I think one might be more quick to dismiss an article in the visual search interface versus the normal list interface (I see a study on the horizon). Plus, one is not able to search a specific field unless he knows the field codes (e.g. SO = Journal). I am now contemplating how to teach this search interface during my instruction. View EBSCO’s Flash demo of the new Visual Search and try it yourself.

The 2008 EDUCAUSE Horizon Report was recently released and it provides quality information to help institutions, faculty, and students to better understand trends in technology and higher education.  The report discusses six emerging technologies, critical challenges to higher education institutions, and significant trends.  Some of the report restates what is already known, but places the information in context and provides a time line for adoption.  This report is always worth the time to read.