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Tag: academia

  • JSTOR Opens Up Its Archive, Kinda Sorta

    JSTOR Opens Up Its Archive, Kinda Sorta

    Anyone in academia or who has had a brush with academia knows about JSTOR, the nearly two-decades old digital library of academic journals. God knows this longtime student is quite familiar with it. It’s notoriously closed off and expensive for those in academia to access, but its launching a new program to try to fix that. A little.

    JSTOR is opening up their Register & Read program to the public after nearly a year-long pilot program which saw 150,000 participants.

    Register & Read allows anyone (truly anyone) to gain access to JSTOR’s archive – but in a limited fashion. Subscribers are allowed to read up to three articles every two weeks for free. Note I said read, not download or copy.

    As of today, the Register & Read program contains approximately 1,200 journals from over 700 publishers. “his includes content from the first volume and issue published for these journals through a recent year (generally 3-5 years ago),” says JSTOR

    “Register & Read Beta…offers free, read-online access to individual scholars and researchers who register for a MyJSTOR account. Register & Read follows the release of the Early Journal Content as the next step in our efforts to find sustainable ways to extend access to JSTOR, specifically to those not affiliated with participating institutions.”

    You’ll have to give up some personal info to signup for Register & Read (the ‘register’ part), including institutional affiliations and fields of study – data the publishers could find tasty.

    “The fact that we’re able to gather data and help to understand who might be using the content and where interest might be can help [publishers] identify opportunities for building subscribers or membership or reaching new authors,” said Heidi McGregor, VP of marketing for the nonprofit that runs JSTOR told Inside Higher Ed.

    [Inside Higher Ed via The Verge]

  • Facebook Is Not Making You A Crappy Student

    How many of you would agree with this statement:

    “The more time you spend on Facebook, the less time you’re going to spend studying.”

    I’m sure that a large majority of people would think that’s true – it’s rather intuitive. But according to a study by Lock Haven University professor Reynol Junco, that’s not the case at all.

    It seems like every week some report comes out that definitively states that Facebook and other social media (but predominantly Facebook) is turning our children into idiots, drug addicts, anti-social jerks, homicidal maniacs – or all of the above. The collective hand-wringing over the modern age’s addiction to social media never fails to create a boogeyman for the ills of society.

    Back in August, research was presented at an America Psychological Association that discussed how Facebook is affecting today’s youth. The study concluded that teens that use Facebook more often were likely to show narcissistic tendencies and signs of other psychological disorders like antisocial behavior and aggressive tendencies.

    Another part of that study looked at the impact of Facebook use on learning and found that middle school, high school and college students that checked Facebook once during a study period achieved lower grades.

    This new study by Dr. Junco seems to contradict those findings. His sample size was 1,839 students. Here is how he says his study is different from previous studies on the same subject:

    This is the first one to : 1. Use a large sample, 2. Include better estimates of Facebook use (time spent on Facebook, number of times students checked Facebook, and frequency of engaging in Facebook activities), 3. Connect survey data to actual grades, and 4. Use high school GPA as a control variable in order to parse out the variance attributable to pre-existing differences in academic ability and to place other predictors in context.

    What he found was that Facebook use did affect overall GPA, but so little as to be negligible. Every hour and a half increase in Facebook usage from the mean only decreased GPA by .12 points.

    The study also found no link between time spent on Facebook and time spent studying. When a student spends more time checking their news feed, it looks like the time is coming out of some other activity, not their schoolwork.

    The way grades were affected has to do with the type of Facebook activity in which the student is engaging. For instance, sharing links was related to a boost in GPA, while posting status updates was tied to a net GPA loss.

    Also, Facebook use was an indicator of higher participation in extracurricular activities.

    There’s no real way to make a definitive statement about how social media use will affect you or your kid individually, but this study suggests that Facebook is not creating a generation of idiots.

    That doesn’t mean that it isn’t turning them into drunken stoners, though.