Literacy: December 2005 Archive Page

Because so many deaf children have problems with basic language skills, they get a disproportionate number of exercises related to these "abstract little pieces." And unfortunately, that's exactly what most educational games offer--more of the same thing that's been shown not to work for these people.

So what do I propose? For one thing, I think deaf students, like everyone else, need to write and get responses to work that's relevant to them. That's where blogs come in. --Tom Wright --Literacy, the deaf, and blogs (Kairos News)

Another thought-provoking passage: "[O]nline classes provide environments in which hearing isn't relevant. So do many educational games for children, although some of the preschool-level ones are useless for deaf children, because their directions are in audio. (It always annoyed me that I couldn't help my kids with these.)"

For some volunteers, LibriVox is a way to combine their love of literature with their passion for the spoken word.

Kristen McQuillen, 39, has recorded 21 different chapters across nine different books from her home in Tokyo. For her, reading a book aloud to someone can make the work more understandable.

"I'm giving people who wouldn't have exposure to some of these classics in a way that's not so intimidating," she said. --The Web Will Read You a Story  (Wired)

I've been thinking about ways to work podcasting into my Intro to Literature course this spring. I'll probably also introduce some kind of recorded audio presentation for my Videogaming course in January.

Only eight serious errors, such as misinterpretations of important concepts, were detected in the pairs of articles reviewed, four from each encyclopaedia. But reviewers also found many factual errors, omissions or misleading statements: 162 and 123 in Wikipedia and Britannica, respectively. --Internet encyclopaedias go head to head (News @ Nature.com)

Wikipedia stood up fairly well against Encyclopedia Britannica, in a review by Nature science writers.

Update: Wikipedia's articles were, on average, longer than EB's. So it's possible to spin these findings such that the news is Wikipedia has fewer errors per byte than Encyclopedia Britannica.

Many American academic libraries have sought to provide journals in both print and electronic formats for the past 5 to 10 years. The advantages of the electronic format have been clear, so these were licensed as rapidly as possible, but it has taken time for some faculty members to grow comfortable with an exclusive dependence on the electronic format. In addition, librarians were concerned about the absence of an acceptable electronic-archiving solution, given that that their cancellation of print editions would prevent higher education from depending on print as the archival format. Eileen Gifford Fenton and Roger C. Schonfeld --The Shift Away From Print (Inside Higher Ed)

Welcome to the Rhetoric and Composition Wiki Book. This wikitext is designed for use as a textbook in first-year college composition programs. We are writing this free wikitext because we believe that while commercial textbook publishers offer excellent products, many of our students are unable to afford them. We would also like to make our knowledge available to anyone with the desire and ambition to learn rather than those few privileged enough to attend a university. Finally, we hope that readers like you will not only benefit from our work, but also contribute to its ongoing development. --Rhetoric and Composition (Wikibooks)

A wiki is a collection of user-editable web document. If you think you can explain something better, you can change it.

Several of my freshmen seemed surprised when they learned that Wikipedia -- the most famous of all wikis -- is user-editable, and that anyone in the world can work on it. Wikipedia has a devoted community of amateur fact-checkers, so that any deliberate vandalism is quickly spotted and reversed. I tell my students that Wikipedia is an acceptable resource for an informal in-class oral presentation, or if they want to consult it to inform their written responses to assigned readings.

For cutting-edge topics that involve online culture, or that require the sorting out of huge amounts of information (such as ongoing coverage of natural disasters), Wikipedia is an excellent source. If the article has been edited recently, and has been edited numerous times, its probably a fairly good representation of the common understanding of a topic. From time to time I find inaccuracies and omissions, but I try to fix them.