Shawne Miksa said: "One of my doctoral students is an Outreach Librarian here at UNT and she has had to create a special class to educate incoming Masters and PhD students across many disciplines on how to use resources in the library."
I suppose that could just as easily be attributed to the complexity of using library resources as it could be attributed to the lack of preparedness of the students.
There's an interesting chart (Figure 4-12) in the ECAR report that lets us see how "using the Internet to effectively and efficiently search for information" compares to "using the college/university library website".
This chart breaks down responses by "technology adoption tendencies", i.e., the student's self assessment of where he or she stands as far as adopting technology. There are five categories: innovators, early adopters, mainstream adopters, late adopters, and laggards.
Figure 4-12 shows that:
* 91.5% of the innovators/early adopters considered themselves very skilled or expert at using the Internet to effectively and efficiently search for information.
* 56.3% of the innovators/early adopters considered themselves very skilled or expert at using the college/university library website.
* 77.2% of the mainstream adopters considered themselves very skilled or expert at using the Internet to effectively and efficiently search for information.
* 41.2% of the mainstream adopters considered themselves very skilled or expert at using the college/university library website.
* 59.1% of the late adopters/laggards considered themselves very skilled or expert at using the Internet to effectively and efficiently search for information.
* 31.3% of the late adopters/laggards considered themselves very skilled or expert at using the college/university library website.
By the way, here's the source for the study:
http://www.educause.edu/Resources/TheECARStudyofUndergraduateStu/187215
Bernie Sloan
Received on Mon Oct 26 2009 - 12:52:01 EDT