Today media centers provide students the opportunity to learn and explore subjects of their interest in depth. The media center is the largest classroom in the school providing service to every student and every teacher in all curricular areas. The library should be a place to encourage students' interests and a place to broaden their horizons by…

Frank Christ is the founder and co-director of the Winter Institutes for Learning Assistance Professionals and has been actively involved with learning assistance and learning centers for the past 40 years. In this interview, Christ talks about how learning centers today differ from those with which he was associated at the beginning of his…

Secret spaces serve as mirrors in which children can explore themselves and play with identities, while at the same time they act as windows to the real world through which children develop an understanding of social interactions and societal norms and expectations. The understanding of secret spaces has important implications for the physical…

Game-design programs are relatively new in the world of academia, as the author of this article discovered when she worked as Brown College's librarian and learning resource center coordinator. With that newness comes the challenge of determining a "core" collection of materials to support the discipline. This kind of core collection is…

Emphasizing the intersection of policy and politics, this paper uses Theda Skocpol's polity-centered approach (1992) to analyze two key moments in the history of the 21st Century Community Learning Centers (CCLC) program: (1) 1998, when the program's budget grew from $40 million to $200 million; and (2) 2003, when President Bush attempted to cut…

Background and Rationale: Student withdrawal and non-completion in institutions have been an issue of considerable concern. The lack of mathematical ability has been identified as a factor resulting to non-completion in higher institutions. Several students in higher education approach mathematics with a lot of anxiety. This has created the need…

This article is the second part of a two-part article on a learning project developed through the Independent Learning Centre (ILC) program at Concordia Lutheran College. The first part of this article can be found in the January 2009 issue of this journal and discusses how the applications of the "AASL Standards for the 21st-Century Learner"…

In this article, the authors present the outcomes of a project they implemented to increase library use by their adolescent males, a population at their school that avoided the library like the plague. They conducted a survey to know what their male students wished they would find in their media center. Their students suggested manga as a genre,…

Digital-humanities centers have sprung up on many campuses, and the field has already launched many careers--but not always smoothly. A panel at the Modern Language Association conference in December focused on a particular subset of work that the organizers described as "literary geospaces." Two of the featured projects--Janelle…

The Language Resource Centers (LRC) program provides grants to institutions of higher education to establish, strengthen, and operate resource centers that serve to improve the nation's capacity to teach and learn foreign languages. Eligible applicants are institutions of higher education. Duration of the grant is four years. Center activities…

Between recent threats by a Florida pastor to burn the Quran, the nation's ongoing presence in Afghanistan, and protests at the planned site for Park 51, an Islamic community center and mosque set to be built two blocks from the World Trade Center site, the topic of Islam is a tricky one, especially in K-12 schools, say many educators. For…

As a strategy to promote the Arapahoe Community College Library's collections and services, the Library undertook to brand itself as a math resource center. In promoting one area of expertise, math was selected to help address the problem of a large portion of high school graduates' inability to work at college-level math. A "Math…

The composition of the university campus is founded on the provision of formal education and the classrooms this has required. Traditionally, informal learning has been of secondary importance, and much less attention has been paid to the development of the campus to support this activity. This article traces the development of three key types of…

The purpose of this study was to assess the readiness of South Carolina secondary school library media specialists to prepare students to meet the "AASL Standards for the 21st Century Learner" (American Association of School Librarians, 2009b) by investigating the availability of 21st century technology tools, the confidence level of…

The ability to do problem solving is an important concept that educators need to teach their students because that's what they do in the corporate world. When they're sitting in collaborative groups, they have the opportunity to bounce ideas off of each other, complete tasks, and work together effectively. That's the same idea that educators need…