Weekly Reader

From NASCAR Slides to "Any Questions?": 8 Kinds of Slides to Delete Right Now
"Lately, I've been coaching several speakers getting ready for industry conferences--hired either by their companies, or the conference organizers. As a result, I've spent an enormous amount of time telling speakers to ditch slide after slide after slide." -- Denise Graveline, The Eloquent Woman, 4/23/14

As Researchers Turn to Google, Libraries Navigate the Messy World of Discovery Tools
"Many professors and students gravitate to Google as a gateway to research. Libraries want to offer them a comparably simple and broad experience for searching academic content. As a result, a major change is under way in how libraries organize information. Instead of bewildering users with a bevy of specialized databases—books here, articles there—many libraries are bulldozing their digital silos. They now offer one-stop search boxes that comb entire collections, Google style." -- Marc Parry, Technology: Chronicle, 4/21/14

Multimedia Assignments: Not Just for Film Majors Anymore
"Millennials are often called "digital natives" because their familiarity with new technology seems to be in their DNA. Whether we like it or not, the "screen age" is here to stay—and with it has come a much more media-rich information ecosystem. Students are exposed to thousands of images a day. They share their own visual content via social-networking sites on their mobile devices, and orchestrate their own daily soundtracks with a portable music player and headphones. Yet too often their scholastic output more closely resembles that of their parents’ generation: a series of written words on a page." -- Danny Ledonne, The Digital Campus, 4/21/14

Confronting the Myth of the 'Digital Native'
"When Kaitlin Jennrich first walked into her communications seminar last fall, she had no idea that the professor already knew of her affinity for pink cars and Olive Garden breadsticks­—and that she planned to share that knowledge with the class. It hadn’t taken much sleuthing on the professor’s part to uncover those inane nuggets. The 18-year-old freshman at Northwestern University had herself lobbed them into the public sphere, via Twitter." -- Megan O'Neil, The Digital Campus, 4/21/14