Author: Rebecca Tull

With the popularity of social media, we are all used to expressing our opinions quickly, sometimes thoughtlessly, to the world — or at least everyone on our friend list. In the wake of the Newtown tragedy, we are all hurting, but it is also likely we have strong opinions about how to keep our society… Continue reading (Hand)Write to Your Elected Officials

As the presidential candidates battle it out these last weeks before the election, the media is filled with predictions. In a recent New York Times piece, economics doctoral candidate Seth Stephens-Davidowitz discusses his unique use of aggregated anonymous Google data to make predictions about who will win the election. At the heart of his research… Continue reading Google as seer?

Healthy lifestyles, fast-paced lifestyles, celebrity lifestyles… always in the news, right? Well, a recent piece in The Atlantic Wire spotlights the perhaps less-frequently covered ‘reading lifestyle.’ Find out where you fall on the reader spectrum in “What Kind of Book Reader Are You? A Diagnostics Guide.” Don’t see yourself there? Read the tongue-in-cheek follow-up, “Many… Continue reading Reading as a Lifestyle

WBEZ aired a conversation on news literacy earlier this week. How unbiased is the news you consume? Does critical thinking about the news come naturally to you? How does it vary among generations? We talk about these questions all the time in the library, especially when it comes to choosing and evaluating resources. This is… Continue reading Choosing News Wisely

Did the Changing Gears piece on student debt (see March 5th post on this blog) have you wondering about options for paying for your college education? If so, the Foundation Center’s Grant Space has an extensive set of links to financial aid and scholarship search options that may be worth checking out. Their Knowledge Base… Continue reading Paying for College

A $34.5 million health and wellness center may be on the horizon for Moraine Valley. An article in last week’s Reporter Online, outlines the college’s partnership with Power Wellness in proposing a new 115,000 square-foot facility that would include a multipurpose field house, fitness center, and health care area. Primary care and rehabilitation services, sports… Continue reading Health and Wellness and MVCC

It’s that time of year again… Announcements for the 2011 Word of the Year are coming in from numerous sources. NPR’s resident linguist Geoff Nunberg gave the honors to ‘occupy,’ while the lexicographers over at Oxford opted for ‘squeezed middle.’ Mobile users might be interested to know that Dictionary.com‘s choice is tergiversate (you’ll have to… Continue reading Winning Words

Steve Jobs, Apple founder and chairman, died of pancreatic cancer today at age 56. With the man behind the revolutionary iPhone, iPod, iPad, and iMac computers gone, will personal computing/communicating/entertainment (and more!) be the same? And what exactly will happen to Apple’s cool factor, not to mention its technology innovations, with its visionary-in-chief gone?  Learn… Continue reading Steve Jobs Dies

The creator of Turnitin, a popular plagiarism-detection service, recently released the results of a new study that examined 40 million papers from high school and college students for “matched content.” According to an April 28th Chronicle of Higher Education article, the report “found that social and user-generated Web sites are the most popular sources for… Continue reading The Many Sources of “Matched Content”

Thursday, April 14th is Poem in Your Pocket Day! To celebrate National Poetry Month, choose a poem – or two or three – you love and share it with friends, family, or co-workers. Guaranteed to please! Don’t have a favorite poem? No worries, check out one of these titles from Moraine’s collection for classic or… Continue reading Pick a Poem or Two…