Psychology eBooks

Through PASCAL (Partnership Among South Carolina Academic Libraries), the Library now has access to 336 eBooks in Psychology from Oxford University Press Scholarship Online (UPSO). The purchase was made possible with lottery funds and is a statewide one-time purchase including perpetual access. Some of these eBooks are Academic Motivation and the Culture of School in Childhood and Adolescence, Animal Innovation, The Cognitive Neuropsychiatry of Parkinson's Disease, Discovering the Musical Mind, Understanding Other Minds, and The Emotional Power of Music.

These titles can be accessed at http://library.tctc.edu/PsycheBooks.

Learning a language is fun, free AND easy via the library

Mango Languages provides an engaging and immersive language and culture learning experience that students, staff, faculty, and alumni will love. Rich curricula and authentic content provide various educational levels for numerous languages.

·         Mango Conversations teaches through native-speaker dialogue, cultural insights, and critical thinking exercises. Memorable patterns and a conversation-based methodology empower learners to construct phrases and sentences on their own. English courses (ESL/ELL) feature navigation and phonetics in the user’s native language to make the learning easier.

·         TCTC offers 11 languages: Spanish (Latin American), French, Italian, German, Russian, Thai, Chinese (Mandarin), Irish, Japanese, Korean, Armenian, and ESL for Spanish Speakers.  The website is at http://library.tctc.edu/Mango

Mango Languages is a fun resource that serves everyone at TCTC: perfect for international studies, ESL/ELL, study abroad programs, student clubs, faculty/alumni associations, or any language enthusiast. Plus, Mango’s course content aligns with, and compliments foreign language curriculums, improving novice language fluency levels to intermediate and advanced.   There is even a Mango app.


Studies have shown that many companies take language skills into account when recruiting, with a third of companies recruiting people specifically for their language skills. Multilingual employees earn up to 20 percent more than their monolingual counterparts in certain jobs, while students who study foreign languages for four or more years outperform their classmates.

Copyright

On Wednesday, July 30, 2014 a few members of the TCTC Library faculty/staff attended the USC Upstate Library’s Educator’s and Librarian Workshops Day! The workshop featured many great topics that we (as academics) must stay abreast of in order to effective in the classroom. The topics covered were as follows; copyright, plagiarism, digital citizenship & social media, emerging technology and apps, as well as public communication.

The copyright workshop was especially eye-opening because many educators are infringing on copyright laws in the classroom by showing films, listening to music or using photographs, works of art, etc. that are not licensed by their school. I would ask that we make ourselves aware of the intricacies of copyright laws before using such materials or seek out those who are purchasing for your department to ensure that you are not inadvertently breaking the law. Some instructors consider themselves as falling under the “Fair Use” umbrella, yet there are many instances were fair use does not apply. USC Upstate has an awesome workshop Libguide that may be helpful for those who choose to research copyright (or any of the other topics covered) at: http://uscupstate.libguides.com/Workshops.

By, Alydia Sims