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…
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…
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…
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…
Don’t write the sentence “There has been very little research done on games” in any more papers or articles or theses and essays UNLESS you also have a full bibliography that cites those few existing works. I don’t care how many authorities you cite who may have written those words quite recently. Because yes, gamestudies…
Turning to a few student samples we can see this concept exemplified even more. Below is a quote from one of Dennis Jerz’s students. This is one of the student’s first postings, and you can see his/her enthusiasm about designing and creating a blog. September 08, 2004: LOOK AT ME, I HAVE A BLOG! I…
—MLA citation style: quick guide (PDF) (Cal State University, San Marcos LIbrary) A handy two-page reference sheet. I was pleasantly surprised to see what example this guide uses for how to cite a website. Perhaps there’s a text-adventure fan on the CSUSM staff. Similar:The Story of Rolf and the Viking Bow: Icelandic bromance, with weapons, secret…
Researchers unveiled a prototype of a $100 hand-cranked laptop computer on Wednesday and said they hoped to place them in the hands of millions of schoolchildren around the globe. About the size of a textbook, the lime-green machines will be able to set up their own wireless networks and operate in areas without a reliable…
I have a Strunk and White. I like having it. And it’s clarity has helped me. Not because I necessarily followed the advice or even agree with it now, but because at a more formative time in my writing life, it gave me a simple place to depart from. It made me feel like a…
Teenagers are ten times more likely to use non-standard English in written exams than in 1980, using colloquial words, informal phrases and text-messaging shorthand — such as m8 for ‘mate’, 2 instead of ‘too’ and u for ‘you’. Despite this, the two-year study found that today’s teenagers are using far more complex sentence structures, a…
Here’s where it gets fun: after students’ small groups put some thoughts up on the board, we read through the Writing Program’s Statement on Plagiarism out loud, and discuss it, making sure everything’s clear about the policy. And then I hold a plagiarism contest. —Mike Vitia —Let’s Plagiarize! (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) I’m home in Greensburg, still…
One sunny day shortly after the start of the fall term, Robert M. Dawley was preparing to spend the afternoon tutoring two students on how to measure the DNA content in the cells of tadpoles. But first he walked briskly out of his building and over to a small lounge with white cinder-block walls, stretched…
Serious Games Summit DC 2005, Day 2A Debate Between Jan Cannon-Bowers and Marc Prensky (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) Do we need instructional design in serious games, or is making a good game enough? This debate is part of an ongoing turf battle within the serious games movement. As is generally the case with conference liveblogging, these are…
I finished a three-hour binge of racing, clicked off my Playstation 2, and … it was over. My compulsion had vanished. I still enjoyed the game, and had plenty more challenges to complete. But I didn’t need to play it any more. For some mysterious reason, Burnout had suddenly released me from its talons. This…
—Teaching Carnival II is here! (Scribblingwoman) A great collection of teaching links, highlighting what teachers who happen to blog are saying about their work. Similar:Awesome 1935 Soviet Movie Deploys Saxophone-Controlled Robots to Crush Tophat- and Bowler-…I wish I understood Russian, so that I c…AestheticsThe Most Awesome 450 Page Presentation Everhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bt9F7tKc…AestheticsComments on: A vane Osama bin Laden…
Google is dumb: it places so much trust on its relevance ranking in its presentation of search results as a simple list of Web sites. Users don’t have access to suggestions of alternate concepts or terms or all the tools that other search engines provide. Our clients are placing too much reliance on the first…
Jacobs decided to craft an article about Wikipedia, complete with a series of intentional mistakes and typos, and post it on the site. The hope was that the community itself would be able to fix the errors and create a clean version that would be ready for publication in Esquire’s December issue. The original version…
During the 1990’s, Lorin Anderson (a former student of Benjamin Bloom) led a team of cognitive psychologists in revisiting the taxonomy with the view to examining the relevance of the taxonomy as we enter the twenty-first century. REMEMBERING Recognise, list, describe, identify retrieve, name ?. Can the student RECALL information? UNDERSTANDING Interpret, exemplify, summarise, infer,…
Leaving a comment on someone‘sweblog is like walking into their living room and joining in on a conversation. As in real life, online there are some people who are a pleasure to converse with, and some who are not. Good blog commenters add to the discussion and are known as knowledgeable, informative, friendly and engaged.…
Even if you’re squeaky clean, an employer still could find dirt attached to your name — if someone with the same name is out there ranting on Nazi-type sites or proposing odd activities with orangutans. —Patricia Kitchen —Expect recruiters to Google you for ”digital dirt” (Newsday|Seattle Times) Thanks, Katie, for suggesting this story. Similar:The Offspring (StarTrek:TNG…