Social web services catalog users' activities across the Internet, aggregating, analyzing, and selling a vast array of user data to be used largely for consumer profiling and target marketing. This article interrogates the tacit agreements and terms-of-use policies that govern who owns user data, how it circulates, and how it can be used. Relying…

The past decade has seen increased testing of students and the concomitant proliferation of computer-based systems to store, manage, analyze, and report the data that comes from these tests. The research to date on teacher use of these data has mostly been qualitative and has mostly focused on the conditions that are necessary (but not necessarily…

Information use patterns by doctoral students are studied for selected years in the pre-web (1990-1993) and post-web (2003-2006) time periods. Over 55,000 citations from dissertations in ten disciplines were analyzed. The results show that there was some increase in journal use in most of the disciplines in the post-web era, and that the use of…

EDUCAUSE, a nonprofit association dedicated to advancing higher education by promoting the efficient and effective use of information technology, recently released the annual "ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology" (Smith and Caruso 2010). The purpose of this annual study is to illuminate the roles technology plays in the…

This article presents student perceptions about different types of web-based activities used to seek information for French language learning. Group interviews were conducted with 71 students in five Canadian universities to elicit data on their use of the Internet for information-seeking activities. These students use the Web for three main…

This paper discusses the following four changes in how we use sources of information or representations of knowledge: (1) from tangible to intangible media--how sources of information and representations of knowledge are manifested or packaged on the Internet; (2) from books and journals to services and databases--how such knowledge packages are…

Discusses copyright issues pertaining to information use on the Internet. Topics include digital copyright interpretations; court rulings on copyright infringement; copyright advice from the Copyright Clearance Center; rights management models; technology as a solution; and developing corporate copyright policies. (LRW)

Studies how technical communicators use the Internet. Finds that the Internet plays a significant role in the work practices of technical communicators--respondents find the Internet helpful for contacting customers, obtaining updated technical information, and publishing online documentation, but they encounter company resistance and are…

Academic libraries in South Africa are increasingly under pressure to provide Internet-based information services. Due to the historical background (i.e., apartheid policies), however, some postsecondary institutions were better endowed than others in terms of financial resources, library personnel, material resources, and with respect to Internet…

Reviews past trends regarding electronic resources and publishing on the Internet, analyzes critical issues involving electronic resources, and makes predictions for the years 2000 through 2005. Examines important developments on a year-to-year basis from 1991 through 1998-99. Identifies archiving, usage, utility, and copyright as key issues,…

Internet-oriented courses and teaching materials tend to focus on technology. A typical approach covers the basic services (terminal emulation, file transfer, gopher, etc.) and how to use the programs which support them. The development of integrated browsers which adapt to the different protocols of the Internet without the need for user…