Posts tagged education
iowa has the nicest rest stops.
This is actually true. The rest areas on I-80 just east of of Iowa City (at Tiffin) are themed to reflect education and literature. One direction includes architectural details featuring books, and the other includes calligraphic and typographic details, as well as pen and pencil sculpture.
(via fuckyeahiowa)
January 9, 2013 – New York, NY – JSTOR, the not-for-profit digital library of thousands of academic journals and other content, announced today that the archives of more than 1,200 journals are now available for limited reading by the public. This is part of a major expansion of JSTOR’s experimental program Register & Read, in which people can sign up for a JSTOR account and, every two weeks, read up to three articles online for free.
(via thelifeguardlibrarian)
This is a great resource for history students, archivists, and researchers!
Check out the other online courses from the Institute of Historical Research as well - tons of useful stuff!
How cool!
Mmm, paleography.
Oooh, stay tuned:
OwnShelf is a cloud based solution to save and share ebook files across devices. Friends can browse each other’s shelves, and borrow one another’s books. Just like the bookshelf in your home, it is a way to show off and share your taste in books online. It is a friend to friend way to discover and read great books.
We are still in development and will have a Beta test soon. Talk to Rick about helping to test, or for any other reason via rick AT ownshelf dot.com
But I do wonder how this can happen without ruffling all the same feathers currently being ruffled between libraries and publishers?
Cornell brings nature inside libraries | The Ithaca Journal
“The grass is always greener, and now so are two of Cornell University’s libraries.Students from the Department of Design and Environmental Analysis have installed small lawns in the lobbies of Olin and Mann libraries, as well as Duffield Hall and the Physical Sciences Building. The grass is surrounded by potted plants and chairs and, in at least one spot, a plastic caution sign warning students to beware of snakes.”
It isn’t necessary or possible to read every book that your students read or a popular author writes. Select the first books in series, the touchstone works by notable authors, or the hot book seven kids in third period are reading. Balance your reading life with adult books and professional titles, as well as children’s literature. Show your students what a well-rounded reader looks like through your example.
(via fuckyeahreading)
It was 1963, and 16-year-old Bruce McAllister was sick of symbol-hunting in English class. Rather than quarrel with his teacher, he went straight to the source: McAllister mailed a crude, four-question survey to 150 novelists, asking if they intentionally planted symbolism in their work. Seventy-five authors responded. Here’s what they had to say.
IT DOESN’T MATTER IF THE AUTHOR PUT IT THERE INTENTIONALLY OR NOT. That is not the point. Reading is not a game of Clue; books are not a mystery that you have to solve by putting all the pieces together. That’s not the point. Find the meaning you want to find in it. That’s what we do with books because that’s what we do in life.
What Margaret said. If the point of reading is merely to understand precisely what the author intended, then reading is just this miserable one-sided conversation in which an author is droning on to you page after page after page and the reader just sits there receiving a monologue.
That’s not reading. That’s listening.
Reading is the active co-creation of a story, complete with all its symbols and abstractions.
To read well, you have to understand that sometimes an oligarchic pig is not just an oligarchic pig. Maybe Orwell intended Animal Farm to be about how dangerous pigs can be. Maybe he had a personal vendetta against pigs. It doesn’t matter. Animal Farm happens to say a lot about how humans organize themselves, and how power and social status shape our understanding of justice. It happens to capture the limits of human empathy, and how those limitations can lead to structural inequality.
I don’t see how it matters at all whether Orwell intended his book to be as good as it turned out to be. So when the story above says that a 16-year-old went “straight to the source,” the article is dead wrong, because every story has two sources: writer and reader.
I think the problem is not “symbol-hunting,” it’s the implication that there is one right interpretation, whether it’s the one the author intends or the English teacher intends. Books can mean different things to different people!
(via fuckyeahreading)
The information hub provides several different lesson plans (with a Creative Commons CC-BY license) for use in the classroom:
(via LISNews)
