ADR-4a: Live homework help

Oops, make that 4b as well.

1. Using Student Center, get real time help from a tutor with one question from one of these articles...

Mostly this made me curious about tutor.com and how they deal with pretty basic factual questions--do they walk you through finding the answer? Or how do they approach this? I'm procrastinating working on this project because I really don't want to download the software to my laptop (does this bug anybody else?--this isn't specific to this particular project, just anything web-based that makes me download something I don't immediately recognize or know who wrote it...) So this will wait for the Anchorage gathering on Saturday.

2. Using the Job Center, upload your resume or a recent cover letter for review and feedback. Remember to remove personal info from your document. (You should not share any personal information with your tutors, including your email address, full name, phone number, or anything else that could be used to identify you.) Or: Using the Proof Point Writing Center upload a recent report or essay for proofreading and feedback. Remember to remove personal info from your document. (You should not share any personal information with your tutors, including your email address, full name, phone number, or anything else that could be used to identify you.)

I'm waiting on this one, too. My current curriculum vitae is about 13 pages and since I haven't applied for any jobs that request resumes of late, I don't have a shorter version of it. Plus to remove info that would identify me would be an extended process. Same too for anything I've written over the past few years--it would impossible to redact identifying information out of it. So I'm hoping for Saturday on this one, too. I have to admit, I was tempted--for all of a half-second--to upload a cover letter submitted to a recent search committee on which I served, but ethics preclude.

So on to 4b, instead.
1. Conduct an advanced search in the Teacher Reference Center to find articles about “Technology Education” and “Alaska”. How many results were returned? From the results limit your search to full text and published after 2008. Look the list (it should be less than 10 articles).Select and article from the results, using the EBSCO citation feature, copy and paste the APA citation from the article you chose into your blog post for this lesson.

46 returned. 7 results for full text and 2009-2011. (it wouldn't give me 2012 as an option.)
Manzo, K. (2009). Former Apple Executive to Lead U.S. Ed-Tech Office. Education Week, 29(11), 15-20. [by the way, I didn't copy/paste that because of the 200 lines of html coding it brought with. I retyped it because I forgot that I could copy the text into the html view of Blogger and it wouldn't carry all that code with. Also, I'm too lazy to look, but is the 29 for the volume of the journal really supposed to be italicized in APA?)

TRC looked really fun, especially after I discovered I could have articles read to me in an American accent, a Brit accent, or an Aussie accent. Turns out the Aussie accent was a woman's voice so maybe not quite as fun as I'd hoped. And apparently the reading is a computer generated amalgam of individual words and letters so all three accents sounded a bit not-too-bright, readers who were reading via phonics and no comprehension. I'd been having some vision issues today so listening to the article appeared to be a great option, but I soon tired of the lack of vocal inflection and got to wondering how desperate I'd have to be to listen to this. I'd much rather pay Sadie with her New Zealand accent to read it to me. (You reading this Sadie? You up for it? I'll buy you a pastry on Saturday in exchange.)

2. Next search ERIC for “Technology Education” and “Alaska”, how many results were returned? Refine your results to full text and published after 2008. How many results are returned? Look for a title in the results list that does not have a PDF or HTML full text link.

297 returned. 10 for 2009-2011. Clicked on the title to one that didn't have the PDF/HTML full text links. Perused on down the record til I found the link to the ERIC-hosted instance. Waited about 2 minutes for that pdf to fully load.

Since I was in a meeting today where we were talking a lot about full text and citation matchers and discovery tools and databases and such, I had to wonder. Why didn't the item have a pdf link if, in fact, it had a pdf link? Very bizarre. Sometimes I wonder about the unnecessary persistence we (global we, or possibly not we at all, but the smart guys who program these databases) expect of our users...

3. Now search Professional Development to find articles about “Technology Education” and “Alaska”. How many results were returned? From the results limit your search to full text and published after 2008. Looking at the results list are some of the titles familiar? Was there overlap from your earlier searches?

57 results, 8 for 2009-2011. I'll have to confess to not reading most of the titles in the ERIC list, but the TRC and PD database results had a lot of the same results.

4. From the EBSCO interface, click New Search (in the upper left corner) and click on choose databases, check ERIC, Professional Development and Teacher Reference Center. Conduct one last search for “Technology Education” and “Alaska”, how many results were returned? Refine your results to full text and published after 2008. How many results are returned? On your blog post for this lesson, share your thoughts about the value of searching an individual educational resource compared to searching all three databases simultaneously.

384, refined to 18. What I found fascinating was that of the 18 results, EBSCO listed them as being either from ERIC or PD. Not a one was listed as sourcing from TRC--though obviously many of the PD ones were available through that source, as well. I think for the advanced user, who knows a lot about what they want in their answers, drilling down to one database as a starting point might be helpful. It certainly reduces the number of hits you have to navigate. But for more generalized researchers, ones who might not even be sure of the search terms they're using, I'd tend to advise going with the more generalized searches. If nothing else, the volume of results may serve as a teaching moment to discover the importance of well-chosen search terms.

Oh, and by the way, I continue to have to log into all the EBSCO databases from my home connect (despite, yes, having an AK IP.) And I had to log into both TRC and ERIC and PD with the library-provided credentials despite there being a lag time of exactly 5 seconds between using TRC and going back out to the Digital Pipeline and clicking on the ERIC link and same for ERIC and PD. Why?

I wondered if it might have to do with cookies and my browser, so I conducted the same test on the Consortium Library site. I went through databases A-Z, pulled up TRC, logged in using my UAA credentials, then closed the window. Opened a new window, went back in and pulled up ERIC, and got taken right in to the EBSCO host database. So I'm beginning to think it's not entirely me.