This paper summarizes results from a national survey of 4,678 respondents, representing 119 institutions of higher education in the United States regarding their use of digital resources for scholarly purposes. This paper presents the following results: (1) demographics commonly used in higher education to categorize populations such as institution type or level of teaching experience could not reliably predict use of online digital resources, (2) valuing online digital resources corresponds with only higher levels of use for certain types of digital resources, (3) lack of time was a significant barrier to use of materials while, paradoxically, respondents indicated that they used them because they save time, (4) respondents did not tend to intentionally look to the Internet as a trusted resource for learning about teaching.

The human brain and skull are three dimensional (3D) anatomical structures with complex surfaces. However, medical images are often two dimensional (2D) and provide incomplete visualization of structural morphology. To overcome this loss in dimension, we developed and validated a freely available, semi-automated pathway to build 3D virtual reality (VR) and hand-held, stereolithograph models. To evaluate whether surface visualization in 3D was more informative than in 2D, undergraduate students (n = 50) used the Gillespie scale to rate 3D VR and physical models of both a living patient-volunteer's brain and the skull of Phineas Gage, a historically famous railroad worker whose misfortune with a projectile tamping iron provided the first evidence of a structure-function relationship in brain. Using our processing pathway, we successfully fabricated human brain and skull replicas and validated that the stereolithograph model preserved the scale of the VR model. Based on the Gillespie ratings, students indicated that the biological utility and quality of visual information at the surface of VR and stereolithograph models were greater than the 2D images from which they were derived. The method we developed is useful to create VR and stereolithograph 3D models from medical images and can be used to model hard or soft tissue in living or preserved specimens. Compared to 2D images, VR and stereolithograph models provide an extra dimension that enhances both the quality of visual information and utility of surface visualization in neuroscience and medicine.

In this paper, we describe the results of a national survey of higher education faculty concerning their use of digital resources and collections of these resources. We explore the differences in resource use by discipline groups and suggest implications for development of discipline specific libraries and faculty development practices.

In this paper, we report on the results of a national Survey of faculty members concerning their use of digital resources (DRs), collections of resources and digital libraries (DLs). The research reported here explored issues such as: value of DRs, motivation for using DRs and barriers to use of these resources in teaching. The results have implications for how DLs might develop education and outreach efforts to increase visibility and use of their collections.

Steve Krogull, DoIT Academic Technology, UW-Madison. Jim Muehlenberg, DoIT Academic Technology, UW-Madison.

A course entitled effective teaching with technology (ETT) has been taught to PhD candidates and postdoctoral students in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) during the Spring semester of 2004, 2005, and 2006, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The course is supported by the NSF-sponsored Center for Integration of Research, Teaching, and Learning (CIRTL). The course employs the three CIRTL pillars of teaching-as-research, learning-through-diversity, and learning communities as its basis. The ETT course introduces students to the idea that they critically evaluate technology options with the overarching goal of improved student learning. In this paper we describe: (1) development of this unique course, (2) operational experiences, and (3) student outcomes and effectiveness of the teaching-as-research approach to motivate future faculty (i.e. graduate students) to view teaching and the classroom with the same critical eye and scientific method that they use in their own research

Knowledge about how users use digital libraries and their contents is inextricably tied to a library's ability to sustain itself, grow its services and meet the needs of its users. This paper reports on the preliminary results of a study of how science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) instructors perceive and use digital libraries. Preliminary findings indicate that: they do not differentiate between digital libraries and other kinds of content that comes from the web, they seek content to supplement traditional teaching methods and their reliance on Google and personal networks impedes their ability to recall the primary sources of useful content.

We studied the phylogeny, taxonomy, and historical ecology of emydine turtles (genera Clemmys, Emydoidea, Emys, and Terrapene) using a wide range of behavioral, morphological, life history, and ribosomal DNA characters. Results of parsimony analyses of the 77 informative characters yielded two minimum length trees, differing within Terrapene but agreeing with the hypothesis: ((((C. insculpta, C. muhlenbergii) C. guttata) C. marmorata) (Emys, Emydoidea) Terrapene). This result suggests that, contrary to a recent analysis of the rDNA data alone, Emys, Emydoidea, and Terrapene form a monophyletic clade, and also, contrary to most previous hypotheses, Clemmys is paraphyletic. These results have implications for studies of the evolution of the mode of sex determination, terrestriality, and mechanisms of plastal closing in this group.

Electric fields produced by coplanar point charges have often been represented by field line diagrams that depict two-dimensional slices of the three-dimensional field. Serious problems with these ‘‘conventional’’ field line diagrams (CFLDs) have been overlooked. Two of these problems, ‘‘equatorial clumping’’ and ‘‘false monopole moment,’’ occur because a two-dimensional slice lacks information vital to the accurate representation of an inherently three-dimensional field. Equatorial clumping causes most CFLDs to exhibit unphysical behavior such as irregular spacing between field lines terminating on negative charges. CFLDs can also mistakenly indicate that a neutral charge distribution has a significant monopole moment. Such phenomena make the visual estimation of local field strengths impossible and render CFLDs of little utility for representing three-dimensional fields. While these ‘‘projection’’ problems can be avoided by using two-dimensional field line diagrams to represent two-dimensional (1/r) electric fields, or by using three-dimensional field line diagrams to represent three-dimensional fields, other forms of distortion generally remain.