Q&A — Robyn Colls

Many thanks to Robyn Colls for being latest Q&A subject.  Robyn is the English coordinator for Foundation studies.

What are your teaching/research interests?
As an English and ESL teacher in Foundation Studies (FS) I have a broad interest in teaching and research. The FS program is for international students preparing for academic study in a range of disciplines -media & communication, art, design & architecture, business and science. Students therefore need development in English language, general knowledge and knowledge specific to their academic field.

Website/online resource you regard as indispensable?
 - ABC, The Age, Guardian Weekly,  Factiva, onestop english, google scholar….

How do you find out about newly published research?
Through colleagues, journals, and professional organisations

Describe your personal library.
I live in a house full of books.  My personal library includes fiction, history, travel, children’s literature and others such as poetry, classics, short stories.  There are quite a few piles of books around the shelves either waiting to be read or to be put back on the shelves or returned to a friend.  

Wikipedia or Encyclopedia Britannica?
Both.  Wikipedia is useful for a quick overview but as I say to my students it is not acceptable as an academic source.

Something you’d like your students to know and understand about the Library?
I would like my students to value the library, to use it more.  Even sitting around reading the newspapers.  I’d like them to borrow more books and dvd’s. I know the students who use the research tutorial on the Foundation Studies library guide extremely helpful.  I’d like them all to use it

Something you’d like to change about the Library?
I would like more recent books and dvd’s and more copies of books and dvd’s in high demand.  But I’m more than happy with the friendly and helpful library staff. The library is an extremely valuable adjunct to the FS English course.

Endnote classes

There will be Endnote classes over the next couple of weeks for School of Education students at both the Bundoora and Swanston campuses. These include the standard Endnote class, which takes you from some basic functions to more advanced features. There will be also the “expert” session, which assumes familiarity with Endnote and covers features needed when undertaking a large project, eg editing styles, merging documents and so on. See the schedule below for times and email me to secure a place in the class. Keep in mind that sessions without bookings will be cancelled.

Endnote sessions

Date	Place	Time
Weds 1st Oct	Bundoora Library Seminar Rm Three	11.00-12.30pm
Thu 9th Oct	Swanston Library Seminar Rm Two	4.00-5.30pm

Expert Endnote sessions

Date	Place	Time
Fri 3rd Oct	Bundoora Library Seminar Rm Three	10.00-11.30am
Fri 10th Oct	Swanston Library Seminar Rm Two	4.00-5.30pm

Facebook for academics

An article from the latest Chronicle of Higher Education on a new social networking site set up by Oxford University research fellow, Richard Price. As it says:

So far, Mr. Price says, about 2,300 researchers from about 15 disciplines have set up profiles on the site. He says the service was born out of his own frustration finding peers to talk to while he was finishing his dissertation on philosophy and human perception. “I couldn’t find anyone else in the world who was really working on it,” he says. It was only after three years that he finally bumped into someone at an academic conference with similar research interests.

The News

An article today on Google’s intention to archive and make freely available a database of the world’s newspapers. However, as the article states, there are no plans at the moment to include Australian newspapers. To search back issues of selected North American newspapers go to the Google News archive.

Factiva is our main source of newspaper articles currently. It allows you to browse the last two weeks worth of newspapers by region. It also allows you to search newspapers from all over the world on particular topics. It can be limited easily to searching the main Australian newspapers.

The Foundation Studies turorial has a page on how to search Factiva.

New education books

As mentioned previously, the catalogue now allows you to identify new education books. Here are some book covers for selected titles arriving in the last little while:

    

Rate Your Uni

Rate Your Uni seems to be a new site by the publishers of The Good Universities Guide.  Students are asked to rate their universities on numerous issues on a scale of 1 to 5. Ratings so far are not based on a large enough sample but it could be an interesting resource as it develops.  You can compare where a particular university stands in comparison to other universities. You can also see the individual student responses and filter those responses according to individual School.

The Australian National Dictionary

Oxford University Press has been publishing in Australia since 1908 and, in recognition of this milestone and as a symbol of gratitude to the Australian people, The Australian National Dictionary has been made available online, free.