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Hayrick's Blog Explorations (5 unread)

Commonwealth of Learning – Education for a Digital World

Posted: September 3rd, 2009, 6:28pm EDT by rickdude
I neglected to mention this when it came out, but here's a link to Education for a Digital World, the book from Commonwealth of Learning that I was involved with, coauthoring 3 chapters and acting as a contributing editor.
- Commonwealth of Learning - Education for a Digital World
  
  tags: educational, technology, edutech, education
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here. And here is my (still very short) list of edutech-related books.
DSpace

Posted: July 19th, 2009, 3:42pm EDT by rickdude

I've just been checking out the DSpace introductory video. It looks like a great way to make an institution's research searchable at low cost. It's popular worldwide, with many sites in Japan, including Kyushu University and Nagasaki University. For open access content, note that the DSpace foundation recommends that it should also be listed in the ROAR registry.

I notice that I wrote about Open Access repositories before.
Open Access Repositories

Posted: August 7th, 2008, 7:10pm EDT by rickdude

Stephen Downes links to a list of Australian Open Access repositories and asks for a similar thing for Canada, which leads to a comment pointing to a list of such repositories from all over the world. I'm sure there must be some very useful stuff hidden away in some of the repositories listed.
Wordle of WinK blogs, 2008 1st semester (July 30, 2008)

Posted: July 30th, 2008, 9:44pm EDT by rickdude

I tried out the Wordle service today, having come across a recommendation in the Edublogger. It gives a graphic display of the most frequently occurring words in any feed or chunk of text. I fed it our WinK student blogs mega-feed.I suspect that it might only be handling recent posts, as words like summer, swim, and beach figure quite prominently. That's an argument for doing this on a monthly basis.
Plagiarism and appropriation of genres

Posted: July 30th, 2008, 8:42pm EDT by rickdude

I recently obtained Dialogue with Bakhtin on Second and Foreign Language Learning, edited by Hall, Vitanova, and Marchenkova. One of the chapters*, written by Karen Braxley, has some interesting things to say about appropriation of genres, and its relationship to plagiarism. The students whose experiences and views form the main subject of the study generally felt that the literature review was the most difficult part of a research paper to write, and one stated that she felt the expectations of the genre caused her to feel as if she were “stealing” others' ideas:

“Put all the quotes together but not quote, just put in my own words. I feel like I'm creating something I'm not supposed to. I feel like I'm stealing. You know, people say, you have to use your own words, but I have to use someone else's academic writing pattern anyway, so it's not really my own words—I'm just copying people anyway.” (p.26)

*Mastering Academic English: International Graduate Students' Use of Dialogue and Speech Genres to Meet the Writing Demands of Graduate School, pp. 11-32