Just a minute video - Teaching Practice Collection

A new just a minute video is available to watch about the Teaching Practice Collection at Polhill Library, Bedford.

Take refuge in the Teaching Practice room

Polhill Library is cold today (there is a problem with the heating) but the Teaching Practice room on the 3rd floor is the warmest spot in the building. It has space for laptops and an interactive whiteboard so, if you are too cold in the Silent Study area, there is a cosy, quiet spot up top.

A complicated world

Systematic reviews of education research

The Campbell Collection has systematic reviews on education, crime and justice, and social welfare topics. This international collaborative research network aims to help people make well-informed decisions by preparing, maintaining and disseminating systematic reviews.  

For more information see this leaflet.   It is clearly trying to emulate the renowned Cochrane Collaboration which has been at the forefront of evidence-based medicine innovations.

Journal survey at Polhill

If you have a few minutes to spare could you complete our survey about the current journals on display in Polhill Library. We are trying to establish whether these journals are well known and whether they do get used.

The survey is available online here

Ebooks - the findings of the JISC National Ebooks Observatory project

The findings of the year long National Ebooks Observatory Project are now available to read online.

The project made 36 e-course texts available across four subject areas (Medicine, Business, Engineering and Media Studies) to 127 UK universities. This is the largest study of its kind, and involved observing the behaviours of over 50,000 participants to see how they use a selection of academic electronic textbooks.

I would recommend listening to a very interesting podcast (only 13 minutes) featuring Caren Milloy and Ian Rowlands who discuss the project and the findings. To briefly summarise they found that people consume these ebooks differently - fact checking, power browsing and average time spent reading an ebook is 13 to 14 minutes. Ian Rowlands makes the interesting point that we don't really know much about student behaviour regarding print copies (in terms of how long they read, what pages they look at etc).