Farewell to Gail Morong
To paraphrase Gail’s retirement speech: “Work will come and work will go; what matters in the end is to love each other and treat each other right.“
Student Cafe as Interculturalization of the Curriculum
Our online courses often include the Student Cafe, which is an ungraded discussion area intended to encourage peer-to-peer interactions, foster or enhance student engagement, and build a learning community. Sounds great, but I wonder sometimes how many students post to the Student Cafe? Do they find it useful? Open Learning students often start a course at…
Course Developer Credentials
*** UPDATED July 2021: This list is constantly changing, and will be maintained in the future by Danielle Collins on her OneTRU OLEditor page at one.tru.ca. We list course developers on the copyright pages of courses. OL style was updated in May 2018 to: Do not use periods between letters in degree acronyms. Include the…
Assessment Editing
I recommend this excellent “Assessment Editing” blog post at the ACES website. Evelyn Mellone and David Pisano are language proficiency test editors at the U.S. Defense Language Institute. They presented a workshop on editing assessments to ACES members, and their PowerPoint notes offer best practices and areas of concern that will be useful for anyone editing…
Self-Care for Editors
Self-care is a concept taught in our CYMH courses, which can be beneficial for editors as well. Self-care refers to activities we choose to do to improve our mood, enhance our physical and mental health, and avoid burn-out. Regularly doing self-care reduces stress, and promotes mindfulness and work/life balance. So what, exactly, does self-care mean…
What’s Our Opposite Job?
“The [U.S.] Labor Department keeps detailed and at times delightfully odd records on the skills and tasks required for each job. Some of them are physical: trunk strength, speed of limb movement, the ability to stay upright. Others are more knowledge-based: economics and accounting, physics, programming. Together, they capture the essence of what makes a job distinctive….
and/or
Instead of: Try: a and/or b a or b or both Source: http://www.plainlanguage.gov/howto/wordsuggestions/simplewords.cfm
DOIs: APA Style Update (March 2017)
APA issued an update to their style guide in March 2017: http://blog.apastyle.org/apastyle/2017/03/doi-display-guidelines-update-march-2017.html. The new recommendation is to use a live link to the DOI instead of just listing the numbers. We can still use the old style while we gradually move to the new recommendation. So, for example, here’s the old style: Fred, H. L., &…
Fun with Adjectives
Last year’s team goal is historical. That cool thing we did today may be historic. Historic (adj) “famous or important in history” Historical ( adj) “of or concerning history” or “belonging to the past” The textbook is instructional. Failing the assignment may be instructive. Instructive (adj) “something that conveys knowledge, information, a lesson” Instructional (adj)…
Searching for a Singular, Nonbinary-Gendered Reflexive Pronoun
A recent human service (HUMS) course has a lesson about using critical reflection to uncover and deconstruct assumptions. The lesson explores how language is changing to acknowledge nonbinary-gendered people through pronouns. For example, a writer might choose “they” as a singular pronoun instead of “he” or “she”. Using “they” as both singular and plural pronouns shouldn’t seem that…