From a data and CRM point of view, computers have drastically changed college admission. No longer are the days of 10 people crammed into an office built for one person, looking at a screen with a green blinking key, typing in thousands of characters an hour. Rows and rows of filing cabinets have been reduced, and putting students on hold to go…

Michael Gove has correctly lambasted the current curriculum for information and communication technology (ICT): his proposed solution is as wrong as the current curriculum, as findings from the Penceil Research Project on how to engage non-users of ICTs demonstrate. Learning how to use a word processor and a spreadsheet is a useful low-level…

In a scant three years at ProQuest, Marty Kahn, CEO, has moved a company coming out of a financial morass back onto solid ground. He came on board after the purchase of ProQuest Information and Learning by the (mostly) privately owned Cambridge Information Group in late 2006 and the merger of ProQuest and CSA to form ProQuest CSA. (It's now just…

Complying with, and teaching young people about, copyright in an educational setting often feels burdensome. That's because copyright laws were not designed to facilitate the sort of sharing and collaborating that has become widespread in the digital age. The innovative nonprofit organization Creative Commons turns the process around, making the…

A curious amount of unease surrounds Google's initiative to scan thousands of books in major research libraries and make them available online. Google's initiative will not make books obsolete; it will make the information in them more widely available. Search engines are the new subject indexes to virtually infinite amounts of information on the…

Media literacy is making a comeback, spurred by students' access to unlimited information on the Internet. Can schools provide the skills students need to become media literate in a digital world? Researchers find that reading for understanding online requires the same skills as offline reading, including using prior knowledge and making…

Formulaic speech has been notoriously difficult to define and identify despite its crucial importance to native-like fluency and idiomaticity. In this article, I introduce a way of identifying phraseological units in a running text. I am interested in recurrent fragments like "charged with crimes against humanity" in texts which involve multiple…

The article "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" in last Summer's "Atlantic Monthly," raised a number of provocative, and indeed worrisome, questions about computer usage and cognitive development. For instance, persons with considerable experience of reading for the sake of pleasure report that, after a couple of years using computers a great deal, they…

How has GOOGLE shaped knowledge? How has it shaped those who use it? This article considers the impact of online knowledge upon the content of knowledge and upon the people who seek it and create it. The authors suggest that 1. Google-ization is reshaping knowledge. 2. Google-ization is changing how knowledge counts as important. 3. Google-ization…

Google at times is a librarian's best friend--quickly locating lots of helpful information for the students libraries serve. Other times, it is a librarian's worst enemy, since many kids believe that they can find everything they need by simply using one search engine. It is important to remind kids that it is also important to look in the…

This article explores personalized search technologies showing that various vendors are trying a variety of approaches. Brief descriptions are given of some of beta projects in effort to assist librarians seeking to offer services that meet their patrons' individual needs by exploring how personal search technologies are being used on the Web in…