CMO’s always valuable social media infographics and slideshows have been staples in my classrooms the last few years, in particular its “Social Media Landscape” series. The one for 2015, thumbnailed above, takes a bit of a new approach, focusing on “overall customer experience” and non-North American platforms. Download the 2015 guide here.
“Buffalo, New York. Swingshift workers on the sidelines at the weekly swingshift dance held at the Main-Utica ballroom.”
This photograph, shot in April 1943 by Marjorie Collins, is part of a delightful & important project in which more than 100,000 images – taken from 1935-1944 by photographers working the Farm Security Administration / Office of War Information – have been made available online. The website has an amazing interactive map that allows you to search by place *and* time. Read more about the largest photographic project every sponsored by the USA federal government.
I’m charmed by the possibility that some of the young adults in these Buffalo, NY photos became the grandparents of my running, writing, and drinking buddies decades later.
[Note to my colleagues in academia and publishing: According to the Library of Congress, “Most photographs in this collection are considered to be in the public domain; however, labels on a few images indicate that they may be restricted. Privacy and publicity rights may also apply.”]
cross-posted from basil.CA
h/t LLBM
Students who suffer under the burden of high tuition and large student loans need all the financial help the world can provide them. For my upper-level communications classes the last couple of years I have been using an excellent online textbook. Here is a list of superb resources – free textbooks and journals – for students as well as teachers and researchers.
“It was on October 16, 2012 at the annual OpenEd conference in Vancouver that then British Columbia Minister of Advanced Education, John Yap, announced the BC Open Textbook Project. with project support provided by BCcampus. The goal of the project is to make higher education more accessible by reducing student cost through the use of openly licensed textbooks. Specifically, BCcampus was asked to create a collection of open textbooks aligned with the top 40 highest-enrolled subject areas in the province. A second phase was announced in the spring of 2014 to add 20 textbooks targeting trades and skills training. Our open textbooks are openly licensed using a Creative Commons license, and are offered in various e-book formats free of charge, or print on demand books available at cost.”
The texts cover a wide range, from Anatomy and Physiology to Research Methods and Formal Logic.
“The College Open Textbooks Collaborative, a collection of twenty-nine educational non-profit and for-profit organizations, affiliated with more than 200 colleges, is focused on driving awareness and adoptions of open textbooks to more than 2000 community and other two-year colleges. This includes providing training for instructors adopting open resources, peer reviews of open textbooks, and mentoring online professional networks that support for authors opening their resources, and other services.”
The range of books is wide, addressing the arts and humanities, social sciences, and the hard sciences.
Make your own work available to students and professors alike by availing yourself of Creative Commons.
“Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization that enables the sharing and use of creativity and knowledge through free legal tools. Our free, easy-to-use copyright licenses provide a simple, standardized way to give the public permission to share and use your creative work — on conditions of your choice. CC licenses let you easily change your copyright terms from the default of ‘all rights reserved’ to “some rights reserved. Creative Commons licenses are not an alternative to copyright. They work alongside copyright and enable you to modify your copyright terms to best suit your needs.”
International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning
This organization provides an excellent list of open-source journals focusing on learning, “distant education,” and research. It also publishes sometimes highly technical articles on the classroom environment in the digital age.
Open Knowledge is an educational advocacy group.
“Open Knowledge is a worldwide non-profit network of people passionate about openness, using advocacy, technology and training to unlock information and enable people to work with it to create and share knowledge. … We want to see enlightened societies around the world, where everyone has access to key information and the ability to use it to understand and shape their lives; where powerful institutions are comprehensible and accountable; and where vital research information that can help us tackle challenges such as poverty and climate change is available to all.”
Open Textbook Library
“Open textbooks are real, complete textbooks licensed so teachers and students can freely use, adapt, and distribute the material. Open textbooks can be downloaded for no cost, or printed inexpensively. This library is a tool to help instructors find affordable, quality textbook solutions. All textbooks in this library are complete and openly licensed.”
The range of subjects is wide, from Accounting to Communications to Law to the Social Sciences.
“OpenTextBookStore was created by educators frustrated with the time involved in finding adoptable open textbooks, with the hope to make open textbook adoption easier for other faculty.
Just to be clear, we are not a publisher. This is just a listing site for publicly available open textbooks, maintained by a teacher. Print copies are made available through third party print-on-demand companies. Many of the courses have course packages available through MyOpenMath.com, which provides free online homework for several open math textbooks.”
The site specializes in math-related texts.
“Saylor Academy’s mission is sustained by the continued evolution of an open educational ecosystem, and we are dedicated partners in this movement. Saylor’s commitment to the open education ecosystem is founded not just on open educational resources and open source learning technologies, but also on open access to credentials, and ongoing open learning opportunities.”
Saylor has a long list of texts, available in multiple formats (PDF, DOCX, HTML).
Thanks to BH for the URLs.
photo by Bob Basil
From the great Language Log:
Most of the ambiguity contained in normal language use is passed over without any awareness on the audience’s part of the potential for double meanings. If one of the two intended meanings in an ad happens to be too faint, the ad must do something to fortify it and nudge it over the threshold of awareness. For instance, an ad that ran some time ago for British Airways used the tagline “Showers expected upon arrival.” To make it clear to the reader that showers could also refer to the bathing facilities that were available in the airline’s lounge at Heathrow Airport, the advertisers resorted to a fairly crude visual technique: a photo of a showerhead accompanied the tagline.
Much more sophisticated is the use of ambiguity in the following:
Are you up in the air about your future? Maybe that’s where you belong.
The ad was placed by the U.S. Air Force, whose logo appeared in the usual lower right hand corner of the print ad. I’m guessing that a typical reader response looks something like this: The idiomatic reading of “up in the air” is far more accessible in the first sentence than the literal one, and is perhaps the only meaning that the reader registers. The second sentence prompts a reanalysis, with the anaphoric where pointing to a definite spatial location, but it’s still not really clear how this second sentence fits in coherently with the first, on either the literal or idiomatic reading—until the reader’s eye lands on the logo, and voilà—the literal reading is further primed, and the identity of the sponsor now allows the reader to fit all the pieces together.
Such manipulation of context, to render meeker meanings more assertive, is part-and-parcel of the adept use of ambiguity. …
In my classes, as well as in my career as a “communications guy,” I stress the requirement that all written pieces be read by one or several people prior to submission or publication. My friend, the scholar Jonathan Mayhew, has a preference regarding *when* his bright eyes are called upon:
There are two schools of thought about this. Mine is that you should only share work that is done, in ‘penultimate’ form. Giving someone a “rough draft” verges on the insulting. Moreover, it puts the reader in an awkward position. Should I point out rather obvious lapses that the writer could easily catch herself? Or should I assume that he really needs help with some basic issues? I have to guess at what needs commentary and what doesn’t. I don’t want to waste my time with issues that the writer already knows how to fix, with the possibility of insulting him, but I don’t know which is which. Does the writer have problems with organization, or did she give me something before she bothered to organize it? You should only share with me a smooth draft.
Cover of “Treat It Gentle,” Sidney Bechet’s beautifully written autobiography
I’m not a great creative individual by any stretch, but I do respect my muse and do *not* screw with it.
My friend kat passed along this letter by musician Nick Cave, which he wrote to MTV in 1996, in which he explained that his muse was “not a horse.”
My relationship with my muse is a delicate one at the best of times and I feel that it is my duty to protect her from influences that may offend her fragile nature. She comes to me with the gift of song and in return I treat her with the respect I feel she deserves — in this case this means not subjecting her to the indignities of judgement and competition. My muse is not a horse and I am in no horse race and if indeed she was, still I would not harness her to this tumbrel — this bloody cart of severed heads and glittering prizes. My muse may spook! May bolt! May abandon me completely!
Clarinetist Sidney Bechet called his marvelous memoir “Treat It Gentle.” The “it” wasn’t his instrument, or his or another person’s heart (oh, he was rough with those!); it was his muse, the mysterious source of his musical invention. That book scared the shit out of me. I know exactly what Cave means, above.
repost from basil.ca
Although I am sure there *are* professors who have estimated how long it will take their students to complete their assigned tasks – written assignments, presentations, homework activities, project research, and textbook reading – I doubt I know any who have done so. (My brilliant sister could be the exception that proves the rule; I am afraid to ask.)
I have written and/or revised literally dozens of course outlines and syllabi, and I have served on curriculum committees. Task completion time has never come up as a topic. The closest we have ever been to such a discussion has been when a faculty member has suggested that there seems to be a little much required of students in a particular class: “You want them to learn business reasoning, case study construction, advanced marketing techniques, and research strategy … in 14 weeks? How could a student be able to learn all that? Not only that, but how could a professor *teach* all of that?”
A colleague of mine asked her third-year communications students: How many of you have done the textbook readings so far this semester? Out of 35 students, no one raised their hand. No one had done more than crack open a textbook – a good one, too – that costs upwards of $150. After I heard about this, this Spring I asked my students a few questions:
I had been aware for a long time that students aren’t often keen to read their textbooks. That’s why my midterms and final exam are usually based completely on their textbooks, in an effort to force them to read. Some do, quickly. These tests are virtually always, though, their lowest grade of the semester, not just as an average but for almost every single student.
On my to-do list: Fix this.
Reposted from basil.CA
Photo by Bob Basil
I recently finished a pretty good book, The Lexicographer’s Dilemma: The Evolution of ‘Proper’ English from Shakespeare to South Park, by Rutgers Professor Jack Lynch. It provides a helpful history of the English language dictionary (other European languages had dictionaries long before English did) as well as a lucid assessment of the debates regarding usage, grammar, and vocabulary that started almost as soon as Samuel Johnson published his founding, epic work.
In these debates Lynch finds himself, more or less, on the “descriptivist” rather than the “prescriptivist” side; that is, he believes that dictionaries and grammars ought to show how people actually use words and grammar, not how well-bred scolds believe they *should* use such things. The word “ain’t” is just fine with Lynch, for instance, as is ending sentences with prepositions, as is confusing “comprise” with “compose,” as is pronouncing “ask” as “ax” (as Chaucer sometimes did).
By and large I am with Lynch, although certain usages will always irritate me: using the word “nauseous” to mean “nauseated” rather than “nauseating,” for instance, and using “peruse” to mean “skim” rather than “to study closely.” Oh well!
No matter what your stance is in this debate, there is no question that, to be regarded as a professional in the English-speaking word, one has to have a very solid handle on traditional, modern grammar and usage as it has been prescribed in your school and as it is expected in most workplaces. You have no choice.
I’ve been an editor my entire life, and I find I still always need the big Chicago Manual of Style on my desk at home to make sure I am following the straight and narrow. But, what if I’m not near my desk – on the SkyTrain, for instance, or walking through Stanley Park with my notebooks (and iPhone)? Well, there is lots of good help online. I give you:
Very helpful, fun grammar websites:
The Oatmeal: Learning Grammar with Comics
“Chomp Chomp”: Grammar Bytes – Grammar Instruction with Attitude!
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The Guide to Grammar and Writing isn’t *quite* as fun, but it is equally helpful.
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Enjoy!
My province’s teachers have lost a big battle. From the Vancouver Sun just now:
VANCOUVER – The provincial government has scored a major victory in court, with the appeal court Thursday overturning a judgment that would have restored class size and composition rules to the teachers’ contract.
However, the B.C. Teachers’ Federation has 60 days to try to appeal the decision to the Supreme Court of Canada, a move they are likely to make.
The BC Liberals listed the case as a “main risk” to their budget when it was presented in February.
A panel of five judges ruled to hold the government appeal of Justice Susan Griffin’s decision earlier this year to restore 2002 classroom composition rules, class size rules and specialist teacher ratios to the teachers’ contract.
The judges ruled that “the legislation was constitutional. Between the consultations and the collective bargaining leading up to the legislation, teachers were afforded a meaningful process in which to advance their collective aspirations. Their freedom of association was respected.”
Universal Design for Learning Education and AI Social Media Policy Kwantlen
