Theses, Projects, and Africana Materials Management in Nigerian Academic Libraries: The Case of Hezekiah Oluwasanmi Library

This is a survey of the procurement, organization and use of unpublished projects, theses, and Africana mateials in Hezekiah Oluwasanmi Library, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Nigeria. The Africana section conserves knowledge, preserves cultural heritage, provides information, and supports education and research. This paper the location, mode of processing, circulation, and terms of availability of these materials. Recommendations are made on how to manage Africana materials in academic libraries where they constitute a vital component of collections.

Positively Impacting the Retention Rates and Performance for Students-of-Color

This session reports on a first-year program designed to assist students-of-color in adjusting to higher education. Session participants will have the opportunity to view the overall structure of the program, including training components, academic tracking methodology, assessment and technology, enhancement programs, and additional services that S.T.A.R.S. provides.

Promoting Higher Education: The Latino Achievement Mentoring Program (LAMP)

Statistics suggest that Latino youths are at risk for academic underachievement and withdrawal. Culturally sensitive approaches to supporting school achievement based on the needs of Latino youth and their families must be developed. In response to these needs, the Latino Research Initiative (LRI), a collaborative group with members from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) and the Hispanic Community Center (HCC) created the Latino Achievement Mentoring Program (LAMP). LAMP is a culturally appropriate mentoring program designed to promote school success and post-secondary opportunities for Latino youths. This program provides Latino youths with positive role models and information and guidance about academic life and future school success. Finally, because of the cultural significance of family members among many Latinos, LAMP activities are developed and implemented such that the mentees' family members are involved. This presentation will report the first-year activities of the initial mentor and men tee pairs, with particular emphasis on educational outreach and academic development of the program. Evaluation data will be presented for the first cohort of mentees, including academic information, teacher reports and self-measure findings. LAMP activities aimed at promoting academic success will also be presented. Finally, the experiences of the mentors will briefly be reported.

"AFRICAN AMERICAN IDENTITY ISSUES AND ACADEMIC CLASSROOM PRACTICE"

"What my research revealed was that African American students who do not identify with the academic community do not see it as real; rather, they view their academic education as only a means to an end."

Quantitation of malondialdehyde in gingival crevicular fluid by a high-performance liquid chromatography-based method

Lipid peroxidation (LPO) has been associated with periodontal disease, and the evaluation of malondialdehyde (MDA) in the gingival crevicular fluid (GCF), an inflammatory exudate from the surrounding tissue of the periodontium, may be useful to clarify the role of LPO in the pathogenesis of periodontal disease. We describe the validation of a method to measure MDA in the GCF using high-performance liquid chromatography. MDA calibration curves were prepared with phosphate-buffered solution spiked with increasing known concentrations of MDA. Healthy and diseased GCF samples were collected from the same patient to avoid interindividual variability. MDA response was linear in the range measured, and excellent agreement was observed between added and detected concentrations of MDA. Samples' intra- and interday coefficients of variation were below 6.3% and 12.4%, respectively. The limit of quantitation (signal/noise = 5) was 0.03 mu M. When the validated method was applied to the GCF, excellent agreement was observed in the MDA quantitation from healthy and diseased sites, and diseased sites presented more MDA than healthy sites (P < 0.05). In this study, a validated method for MDA quantitation in GCF was established with satisfactory sensitivity, precision, and accuracy. (C) 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Academic and clinical preparation in speech-language pathology and audiology: a global training consortium

ABSTRACT: Purpose: To describe a research-based global curriculum in speech-language pathology and audiology that is part of a funded cross-linguistic consortium among 2 U.S. and 2 Brazilian universities. Method: The need for a global curriculum in speechlanguage pathology and audiology is outlined, and different funding sources are identified to support development of a global curriculum. The U.S. Department of Education’s Fund for the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education (FIPSE), in conjunction with the Brazilian Ministry of Education (Fundacao Coordenacao de Aperfeicoamento de Pessoal de Nivel Superior; CAPES), funded the establishment of a shared research curriculum project, “Consortium for Promoting Cross-Linguistic Understanding of Communication Disabilities in Children” for East Tennessee State University and the University of Northern Iowa and 2 Brazilian universities (Universidade Federal de Santa Maria and Universidade de São Paulo-Baurú). Results: The goals and objectives of the research-based global curriculum are summarized, and a description of an Internet-based course, “Different Languages, One World,” is provided Conclusion: Partnerships such as the FIPSE–CAPES consortium provide a foundation for training future generations of globally and research-prepared practitioners in speechlanguage pathology and audiology.

Fidelity and game-based technology in management education

This study explores educational technology and management education by analyzing fidelity in game-based management education interventions. A sample of 31 MBA students was selected to help answer the research question: To what extent do MBA students tend to recognize specific game-based academic experiences, in terms of fidelity, as relevant to their managerial performance? Two distinct game-based interventions (BG1 and BG2) with key differences in fidelity levels were explored: BG1 presented higher physical and functional fidelity levels and lower psychological fidelity levels. Hypotheses were tested with data from the participants, collected shortly after their experiences, related to the overall perceived quality of game-based interventions. The findings reveal a higher overall perception of quality towards BG1: (a) better for testing strategies, (b) offering better business and market models, (c) based on a pace that better stimulates learning, and (d) presenting a fidelity level that better supports real world performance. This study fosters the conclusion that MBA students tend to recognize, to a large extent, that specific game-based academic experiences are relevant and meaningful to their managerial development, mostly with heightened fidelity levels of adopted artifacts. Agents must be ready and motivated to explore the new, to try and err, and to learn collaboratively in order to perform.

Essays on the political economy of European integration

Recently, a rising interest in political and economic integration/disintegration issues has been developed in the political economy field. This growing strand of literature partly draws on traditional issues of fiscal federalism and optimum public good provision and focuses on a trade-off between the benefits of centralization, arising from economies of scale or externalities, and the costs of harmonizing policies as a consequence of the increased heterogeneity of individual preferences in an international union or in a country composed of at least two regions. This thesis stems from this strand of literature and aims to shed some light on two highly relevant aspects of the political economy of European integration. The first concerns the role of public opinion in the integration process; more precisely, how economic benefits and costs of integration shape citizens' support for European Union (EU) membership. The second is the allocation of policy competences among different levels of government: European, national and regional. Chapter 1 introduces the topics developed in this thesis by reviewing the main recent theoretical developments in the political economy analysis of integration processes. It is structured as follows. First, it briefly surveys a few relevant articles on economic theories of integration and disintegration processes (Alesina and Spolaore 1997, Bolton and Roland 1997, Alesina et al. 2000, Casella and Feinstein 2002) and discusses their relevance for the study of the impact of economic benefits and costs on public opinion attitude towards the EU. Subsequently, it explores the links existing between such political economy literature and theories of fiscal federalism, especially with regard to normative considerations concerning the optimal allocation of competences in a union. Chapter 2 firstly proposes a model of citizens’ support for membership of international unions, with explicit reference to the EU; subsequently it tests the model on a panel of EU countries. What are the factors that influence public opinion support for the European Union (EU)? In international relations theory, the idea that citizens' support for the EU depends on material benefits deriving from integration, i.e. whether European integration makes individuals economically better off (utilitarian support), has been common since the 1970s, but has never been the subject of a formal treatment (Hix 2005). A small number of studies in the 1990s have investigated econometrically the link between national economic performance and mass support for European integration (Eichenberg and Dalton 1993; Anderson and Kalthenthaler 1996), but only making informal assumptions. The main aim of Chapter 2 is thus to propose and test our model with a view to providing a more complete and theoretically grounded picture of public support for the EU. Following theories of utilitarian support, we assume that citizens are in favour of membership if they receive economic benefits from it. To develop this idea, we propose a simple political economic model drawing on the recent economic literature on integration and disintegration processes. The basic element is the existence of a trade-off between the benefits of centralisation and the costs of harmonising policies in presence of heterogeneous preferences among countries. The approach we follow is that of the recent literature on the political economy of international unions and the unification or break-up of nations (Bolton and Roland 1997, Alesina and Wacziarg 1999, Alesina et al. 2001, 2005a, to mention only the relevant). The general perspective is that unification provides returns to scale in the provision of public goods, but reduces each member state’s ability to determine its most favoured bundle of public goods. In the simple model presented in Chapter 2, support for membership of the union is increasing in the union’s average income and in the loss of efficiency stemming from being outside the union, and decreasing in a country’s average income, while increasing heterogeneity of preferences among countries points to a reduced scope of the union. Afterwards we empirically test the model with data on the EU; more precisely, we perform an econometric analysis employing a panel of member countries over time. The second part of Chapter 2 thus tries to answer the following question: does public opinion support for the EU really depend on economic factors? The findings are broadly consistent with our theoretical expectations: the conditions of the national economy, differences in income among member states and heterogeneity of preferences shape citizens’ attitude towards their country’s membership of the EU. Consequently, this analysis offers some interesting policy implications for the present debate about ratification of the European Constitution and, more generally, about how the EU could act in order to gain more support from the European public. Citizens in many member states are called to express their opinion in national referenda, which may well end up in rejection of the Constitution, as recently happened in France and the Netherlands, triggering a European-wide political crisis. These events show that nowadays understanding public attitude towards the EU is not only of academic interest, but has a strong relevance for policy-making too. Chapter 3 empirically investigates the link between European integration and regional autonomy in Italy. Over the last few decades, the double tendency towards supranationalism and regional autonomy, which has characterised some European States, has taken a very interesting form in this country, because Italy, besides being one of the founding members of the EU, also implemented a process of decentralisation during the 1970s, further strengthened by a constitutional reform in 2001. Moreover, the issue of the allocation of competences among the EU, the Member States and the regions is now especially topical. The process leading to the drafting of European Constitution (even if then it has not come into force) has attracted much attention from a constitutional political economy perspective both on a normative and positive point of view (Breuss and Eller 2004, Mueller 2005). The Italian parliament has recently passed a new thorough constitutional reform, still to be approved by citizens in a referendum, which includes, among other things, the so called “devolution”, i.e. granting the regions exclusive competence in public health care, education and local police. Following and extending the methodology proposed in a recent influential article by Alesina et al. (2005b), which only concentrated on the EU activity (treaties, legislation, and European Court of Justice’s rulings), we develop a set of quantitative indicators measuring the intensity of the legislative activity of the Italian State, the EU and the Italian regions from 1973 to 2005 in a large number of policy categories. By doing so, we seek to answer the following broad questions. Are European and regional legislations substitutes for state laws? To what extent are the competences attributed by the European treaties or the Italian Constitution actually exerted in the various policy areas? Is their exertion consistent with the normative recommendations from the economic literature about their optimum allocation among different levels of government? The main results show that, first, there seems to be a certain substitutability between EU and national legislations (even if not a very strong one), but not between regional and national ones. Second, the EU concentrates its legislative activity mainly in international trade and agriculture, whilst social policy is where the regions and the State (which is also the main actor in foreign policy) are more active. Third, at least two levels of government (in some cases all of them) are significantly involved in the legislative activity in many sectors, even where the rationale for that is, at best, very questionable, indicating that they actually share a larger number of policy tasks than that suggested by the economic theory. It appears therefore that an excessive number of competences are actually shared among different levels of government. From an economic perspective, it may well be recommended that some competences be shared, but only when the balance between scale or spillover effects and heterogeneity of preferences suggests so. When, on the contrary, too many levels of government are involved in a certain policy area, the distinction between their different responsibilities easily becomes unnecessarily blurred. This may not only leads to a slower and inefficient policy-making process, but also risks to make it too complicate to understand for citizens, who, on the contrary, should be able to know who is really responsible for a certain policy when they vote in national,local or European elections or in referenda on national or European constitutional issues.

Percorsi di gender performance: fotografia tra arte e moda dagli anni Novanta ad oggi

My project explores and compares different forms of gender performance in contemporary art and visual culture according to a perspective centered on photography. Thanks to its attesting power this medium can work as a ready-made. In fact during the 20th century it played a key role in the cultural emancipation of the body which (using a Michel Foucault’s expression) has now become «the zero point of the world». Through performance the body proves to be a living material of expression and communication while photography ensures the recording of any ephemeral event that happens in time and space. My questioning approach considers the gender constructed imagery from the 1990s to the present in order to investigate how photography’s strong aura of realism promotes and allows fantasies of transformation. The contemporary fascination with gender (especially for art and fashion) represents a crucial issue in the global context of postmodernity and is manifested in a variety of visual media, from photography to video and film. Moreover the internet along with its digital transmission of images has deeply affected our world (from culture to everyday life) leading to a postmodern preference for performativity over the more traditional and linear forms of narrativity. As a consequence individual borders get redefined by the skin itself which (dissected through instant vision) turns into a ductile material of mutation and hybridation in the service of identity. My critical assumptions are taken from the most relevant changes occurred in philosophy during the last two decades as a result of the contributions by Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze who developed a cross-disciplinary and comparative approach to interpret the crisis of modernity. They have profoundly influenced feminist studies so that the category of gender has been reassessed in contrast with sex (as a biological connotation) and in relation to history, culture, society. The ideal starting point of my research is the year 1990. I chose it as the approximate historical moment when the intersection of race, class and gender were placed at the forefront of international artistic production concerned with identity, diversity and globalization. Such issues had been explored throughout the 1970s but it was only from the mid-1980s onward that they began to be articulated more consistently. Published in 1990, the book "Gender trouble: feminism and the subversion of identity" by Judith Butler marked an important breakthrough by linking gender to performance as well as investigating the intricate connections between theory and practice, embodiment and representation. It inspired subsequent research in a variety of disciplines, art history included. In the same year Teresa de Lauretis launched the definition of queer theory to challenge the academic perspective in gay and lesbian studies. In the meantime the rise of Third Wave Feminism in the US introduced a racially and sexually inclusive vision over the global situation in order to reflect on subjectivity, new technologies and popular culture in connection with gender representation. These conceptual tools have enabled prolific readings of contemporary cultural production whether fine arts or mass media. After discussing the appropriate framework of my project and taking into account the postmodern globalization of the visual, I have turned to photography to map gender representation both in art and in fashion. Therefore I have been creating an archive of images around specific topics. I decided to include fashion photography because in the 1990s this genre moved away from the paradigm of an idealized and classical beauty toward a new vernacular allied with lifestyles, art practices, pop and youth culture; as one might expect the dominant narrative modes in fashion photography are now mainly influenced by cinema and snapshot. These strategies originate story lines and interrupted narratives using models’ performance to convey a particular imagery where identity issues emerge as an essential part of fashion spectacle. Focusing on the intersections of gender identities with socially and culturally produced identities, my approach intends to underline how the fashion world has turned to current trends in art photography and in some case turned to the artists themselves. The growing fluidity of the categories that distinguish art from fashion photography represents a particularly fruitful moment of visual exchange. Varying over time the dialogue between these two fields has always been vital; nowadays it can be studied as a result of this close relationship between contemporary art world and consumer culture. Due to the saturation of postmodern imagery the feedback between art and fashion has become much more immediate and then increasingly significant for anyone who wants to investigate the construction of gender identity through performance. In addition to that a lot of magazines founded in the 1990s bridged the worlds of art and fashion because some of their designers and even editors were art-school graduates encouraging innovation. The inclusion of art within such magazines aimed at validating them as a form of art in themselves supporting a dynamic intersection for music, fashion, design and youth culture: an intersection that also contributed to create and spread different gender stereotypes. This general interest in fashion produced many exhibitions of and about fashion itself at major international venues such as the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. Since then this celebrated success of fashion has been regarded as a typical element of postmodern culture. Owing to that I have also based my analysis on some important exhibitions dealing with gender performance like "Féminin-Masculin" at the Centre Pompidou of Paris (1995), "Rrose is a Rrose is a Rrose. Gender performance in photography" at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum of New York (1997), "Global Feminisms" at the Brooklyn Museum (2007), "Female Trouble" at the Pinakothek der Moderne in München together with the workshops dedicated to "Performance: gender and identity" in June 2005 at the Tate Modern of London. Since 2003 in Italy we have had Gender Bender - an international festival held annually in Bologna - to explore the gender imagery stemming from contemporary culture. In few days this festival offers a series of events ranging from visual arts, performance, cinema, literature to conferences and music. Being aware that any method of research is neither race nor gender neutral I have traced these critical paths to question gender identity in a multicultural perspective taking account of the political implications too. In fact, if visibility may be equated with exposure, we can also read these images as points of intersection of visibility with social power. Since gender assignations rely so heavily on the visual, the postmodern dismantling of gender certainty through performance has wide-ranging effects that need to be analyzed. In some sense this practice can even contest the dominance of visual within postmodernism. My visual map in contemporary art and fashion photography includes artists like Nan Goldin, Cindy Sherman, Hellen van Meene, Rineke Dijkstra, Ed Templeton, Ryan McGinley, Anne Daems, Miwa Yanagi, Tracey Moffat, Catherine Opie, Tomoko Sawada, Vanessa Beecroft, Yasumasa Morimura, Collier Schorr among others.

Bitext alignment: building and evaluating a bilingual corpus and translation memory of academic course descriptions

Following the internationalization of contemporary higher education, academic institutions based in non-English speaking countries are increasingly urged to produce contents in English to address international prospective students and personnel, as well as to increase their attractiveness. The demand for English translations in the institutional academic domain is consequently increasing at a rate exceeding the capacity of the translation profession. Resources for assisting non-native authors and translators in the production of appropriate texts in L2 are therefore required in order to help academic institutions and professionals streamline their translation workload. Some of these resources include: (i) parallel corpora to train machine translation systems and multilingual authoring tools; and (ii) translation memories for computer-aided tools. The purpose of this study is to create and evaluate reference resources like the ones mentioned in (i) and (ii) through the automatic sentence alignment of a large set of Italian and English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) institutional academic texts given as equivalent but not necessarily parallel (i.e. translated). In this framework, a set of aligning algorithms and alignment tools is examined in order to identify the most profitable one(s) in terms of accuracy and time- and cost-effectiveness. In order to determine the text pairs to align, a sample is selected according to document length similarity (characters) and subsequently evaluated in terms of extent of noisiness/parallelism, alignment accuracy and content leverageability. The results of these analyses serve as the basis for the creation of an aligned bilingual corpus of academic course descriptions, which is eventually used to create a translation memory in TMX format.

Investigating strategies and indicators for sustainable campus: Comparison and synergies between University of Bologna and Delft University of Technology

Sustainable development is one of the biggest challenges of the twenty fist-century. Various university has begun the debate about the content of this concept and the ways in which to integrate it into their policy, organization and activities. Universities have a special responsibility to take over a leading position by demonstrating best practices that sustain and educate a sustainable society. For that reason universities have the opportunity to create the culture of sustainability for today’s student, and to set their expectations for how the world should be. This thesis aim at analyzing how Delft University of Technology and University of Bologna face the challenge of becoming a sustainable campus. In this context, both universities have been studied and analyzed following the International Sustainable Campus Network (ISCN) methodology that provides a common framework to formalize commitments and goals at campus level. In particular this work has been aimed to highlight which key performance indicators are essential to reach sustainability as a consequence the following aspects has been taken into consideration: energy use, water use, solid waste and recycling, carbon emission. Subsequently, in order to provide a better understanding of the current state of sustainability on University of Bologna and Delft University of Technology, and potential strategies to achieve the stated objective, a SWOT Analysis has been undertaken. Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats have been shown to understand how the two universities can implement a synergy to improve each other. In the direction of framing a “Sustainable SWOT” has been considered the model proposed by People and Planet, so it has been necessary to evaluate important matters as for instance policy, investment, management, education and engagement. Regarding this, it has been fundamental to involve the main sustainability coordinators of the two universities, this has been achieved through a brainstorming session. Partnerships are key to the achievement of sustainability. The creation of a bridge between two universities aims to join forces and to create a new generation of talent. As a result, people can become able to support universities in the exchange of information, ideas, and best practices for achieving sustainable campus operations and integrating sustainability in research and teaching. For this purpose the project "SUCCESS" has been presented, the project aims to create an interactive European campus network that can be considered a strategic key player for sustainable campus innovation in Europe. Specifically, the main key performance indicators have been analyzed and the importance they have for the two universities and their strategic impact have been highlighted. For this reason, a survey was conducted with people who play crucial roles for sustainability within the two universities and they were asked to evaluate the KPIs of the project. This assessment has been relevant because has represented the foundation to develop a strategy to create a true collaboration.

Everything You Have Always Wanted to Know About Academic Advising (Well, Almost...)

Answering the question “what occurs in an academic advising interaction” is not as easy as one might think. Many factors contribute to the academic advising process, and no two advising interactions are the same. This article discusses the different factors involved in an academic advising interaction, emphasizing the need for psychological counselors to become familiar with the specific aspects of the advising processes that occur at their respective institutions.

The Clearing Storm: A Re-Assessment of the Climate for Collaboration between Academic and Student Affairs

There is increasing recognition among those in higher education that it is no longer adequate to train students in a specific field or industry. Instead, the push is more towards producing well-rounded students. In order to do so, all of a university’s resources must come together and the climate on campus must be one that supportscollaboration. This report is a re-examination of the climate for collaboration on the campus of a private liberal arts university in the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States. It is a follow up to a similar investigation conducted on the same campus by Victor Arcelus(2008) five years earlier. In the interim, the university had re-configured its organizational structure, combining separate academic and student affairs divisions into a single unit overseen by the Provost. Additionally, the university had experienced turnover in several key leadership positions, including those of the President and the chief academic and student affairs officers. The purpose of this investigation, therefore, was to gauge the immediate impact of these changes on conditions for collaboration, which when present, advance student learning and development. Through interviews with six men and women, information was collected on the perceived climate for collaboration between academic and student affairs personnel.Analysis of the interview transcripts revealed that, depending on the position of the interviewee within the university, conditions on campus were seen as either improved or largely unchanged as a result of the transition in leadership and the structural merger of the two divisions.

AAC&U's Integrative Liberal Learning and the CAS Standards: Advising for a 21st Century Liberal Education

The Association of American Colleges and Universities presented and promoted integrative liberal learning as a collaborative goal that all institutions of higher education must strive to achieve. The similarities between the goals of integrative liberal learning and the Standards for Academic Advising by the Council for the Advancement of Standards in Higher Education are discussed with emphasis placed on the critical role that academic advising plays in support of an integrative liberal learning education, and in turn, future success for all students.

Academic Intelligence is not Enough! WICS: An Expanded Model for Effective Practice in School and in Later Life

Is there a psychological basis for teaching and learning in the context of a liberal education, and if so, what might such a psychological basis look like? Traditional teaching and assessment often emphasize remembering facts and, to some extent, analyzing ideas. Such skills are important, but they leave out of the aspects of thinking that are most important not only in liberal education, but in life, in general. In this article, I propose a theory called WICS, which is an acronym for wisdom, intelligence, and creativity, synthesized. The basic idea underlying this theory is that, through liberal education, students need to acquire creative skills and attitudes to generate new ideas about how to adapt flexibly to a rapidly changing world, analytical skills and attitudes to ascertain whether these new ideas are good ones, practical skills and attitudes to implement the new ideas and convince others of their value, and wisdom-based skills and attitudes in order to ensure that the new ideas help to achieve a common good through the infusion of positive ethical values.