This summer, PBS is on a quest to find out what novel is America’s favorite. They’ve surveyed Americans of all ages, races, genders, and backgrounds, and put together a list of our 100 favorite books for The Great American Read. You can vote for your favorite at PBS.org.
Meanwhile, at Reynolds libraries, we’ve selected 52 titles from PBS’ list and we’re putting it to a vote! Drop by at any of our campus locations, find the white board, and vote for your favorites. There will be new books to vote on almost every day! We’re calling it The Great Reynolds Read. Stop by today to help us decide!
The Reynolds Libraries are pleased to present our fourth annual Student Expo! The Expo is a showcase of student work across our academic programs. Student work(s) must be entered by faculty. Students and faculty/staff are encouraged to attend.
The Expo will be held from 12-2pm at all three campuses and food will be served.
Tuesday, April 17th: Downtown Library, Room 230
Wednesday, April 18th: Goochland Library, Room 200
Thursday, April 19th: Parham Road Library, Massey LTC
Check out the Reynolds Student Expo 2017to view the dazzling exhibits by our students across many different curriculums from last year.
There will be a People’s Choice winner at each campus expo. We look forward to seeing all the great exhibits!
April 2nd is International Fact-Checking Day. Check out the resources below. You can also participate in the global conversation on Twitter by following: @factchecknet, #FactcheckingDay and #FactCheckIt
Reynolds librarians, Lynn Riggs and Denise Woetzel, recently attended the annual Open Education Conference right here in Richmond. Open education advocates gathered from around the world to learn about the latest research, development, advocacy, design, and other work relating to open education including: tools and technologies supporting open education; collaborations between teaching faculty and librarians in support of open education; models supporting the adoption, use, and sustaining of OER in higher education; and the role of librarians, faculty and students in advocating for, supporting, and sustaining OER adoption and use.
Lynn and Denise attended a wide variety of sessions on everything from open textbook publishing to open pedagogy. Several sessions that got Denise and Lynn most excited and inspired were:
Free + Freedom: The Role of Open Pedagogy in the Open Education Movement, presented by Rajiv Jhangiani from Kwantlen Polytechnic University, Vancouver and Robin DeRosa from Plymouth State University, New Hampshire. Professors Jhangiani and DeRosa explained the What, Why and How of open pedagogy. Open education is broader than open textbooks and savings. It is empowering students to make decisions about the courses they are taking as well as developing content for the course that is both meaningful and valuable to the rest of the higher education community. A fitting quote by John W. Gardner referred to during the session – “All too often we are giving young people cut flowers when we should be teaching them how to grow their own plants.” Some open pedagogy examples identified were: students writing and editing wiki articles; a student-created first-year seminar at Plymouth State University where students were also involved in developing the attendance policy and grading policy. Some of the questions posed during the session were: Why have students answer questions when they can write them? What inspires teachers and students to learn, change, care? How can OER be part of a larger mission related to access and empowerment?
It’s Not About the Books: Let’s Think About Open Pedagogy, presented by Christie Fierro, Instructional Designer and OER Coordinator at Tacoma Community College. Ms. Fierro defined open pedagogy as student-created content released with an open license which gives value to the world. Some examples of open pedagogy student projects at Tacoma Community College included: a presentation to the local town council on banning plastic bags; a video promoting and discussing the importance of a local food drive; students writing and modifying chapters for open history textbooks; and students collaborating with the library archivist to create a LibGuide on the history of Tacoma Community College.
The Faces of OER: Student Reflections on the Z Degree Experience, this panel discussion included business professor, Linda Williams and four students from Tidewater Community College. Professor Williams began the session by asking, “Whose course are you teaching? McGraw-Hill’s or yours?” Several students reflected that the instructors for their Z degree courses were more engaged with the topics that were taught, and that they themselves felt more connected to these classes than to ones using only traditional textbooks. Students reflected that Z degree courses had a richer bank of resources for them to learn from that just one publisher.
Establishing Actual Costs of Textbooks Across Curricula: Data from the Virginia Community College System, presented by Jamison Miller, Kim Grewe, and Amanda Carpenter-Horning. The College Board in its Annual Survey of Colleges estimates the cost per year for books and supplies is $1200.00. This group of doctoral students sought to find out how much the average costs for books are for first year students at the VCCS colleges. They compiled a list of college level, general education, first year courses at each school and checked these against the bookstores’ prices at each college. The estimated average cost of books for these two semesters in the VCCS is $1,110.50 which is less than but close to the national average. Estimated costs for a fall semester’s worth of books at Reynolds is just over $600. For a fall semester at Central Virginia Community College the cost is under $100.
Other session highlights included:
A open writing resource project at VCU. Focused Inquiry faculty developed both APA and MLA citation guide material using WordPress. This open resource should be made available to the public sometime early next year.
Jan Neuman of the North Rhine-Westphalian Library Service Centre discussed phase III of the OER World Map project, a growing collection of worldwide data on experts and activities in the field of open education. The map includes elements of a social networking platform, business information system, geoinformation system, and OER library catalog.
Kiri Dali, librarian at Lord Fairfax Community College, discussed the Knowledge to Work (K2W) program funded by the U.S. Dept. of Labor. Students enrolled in Health Information Management, Information Technology and Administrative Support Technology courses use the HigherEd.org portal to assess their competencies, create personalized learning plans and create journal entries about their learning experiences and goals.
In his session, Next Gen Learning: Are Faculty and Administrators Prepared? Joshua Moe discussed the opportunities that next generation learning present including: student engagement, better outcomes and retention, personalized student-centric learning experiences, and inquiry based discovery.
Creative Commons Open Business Models. Paul Stacey, Director of Global Learning at Creative Commons, discussed his project funded by a Kickstarter campaign to create a book on open business models made using Creative Commons. 24 businesses, creators and organizations with exemplary open business models were interviewed. An OER book on this project will be made available in spring 2017.
Open Practice as a Tool for Educational Change, presented by Quill West, Open Education Project Manager at Pierce College. Ms. Quill discussed the importance of focusing not only on textbook cost savings but also moving towards the implementation of open pedagogy practices that incorporate high-value learning experiences.
In his presentation, All the Words of Wisdom Sound the Same: Open Research in a Closed World, David Kernohan discussed how scholarly citation metrics and discovery tool algorithms dictate what articles and other publications are valuable and exclude great research papers written by people living in other areas of the world that don’t have as much money to get research grants, access databases, attend conferences or publish. Kernohan presented the idea of open citation and stated that “we can’t let the citation capital govern the value of published works.”
What Libraries are Doing Regarding OER and Affordable Course Content: A Summary of Findings from ARL SPEC Kit 351, presented by Anita Walz, Open Education / Copyright & Scholarly Communications Librarian from Virginia Tech. Anita presented findings from an Association of Research Libraries (ARL) study to determine the degree to which members institutions are engaged with OER and affordable course content (ACC) initiatives including: librarian staffing, roles and services in these initiatives; governance; funding; faculty participation; and types of content being developed.
If you would like to talk to Lynn or Denise about the Open Education Conference or discuss possible OER collaborations with the library, you can contact them by email or phone:
Technically, yes, you can already vote (absentee) for president here in Virginia!
In case you missed it, the Parham Road Campus Library has put up a display all about this up-coming election, with a little information about the good old electoral college. Stop by to take a closer look at the display while you mull over the decision ahead.
In the meantime, here are some important links that you may want to check out before the big day.
What’s even on my ballot anyway? I’m sure this isn’t your first time hearing this, but POTUS is not the only thing that you’ll be voting on come November 8th! Find out everything that will be on your ballot by entering your address at the link above.
Where exactly is my polling place? Not sure where to go? Fill in your address at the link provided to find out! Remember, you have to vote at the polling place that correlates to the address where you’re REGISTERED to vote!
Do I need I.D.? Yes! Some forms of ID are as simple as a valid Driver’s License or a Virginia Voter Photo Identification card. Check here for a list of all acceptable forms of ID. If you don’t have one, you can get the aforementioned VA Voter Photo ID by visiting any general registrar’s office. Do it quickly! (More information is available at the link!)
“Just to be clear, Adam. You do realize that it’s for me alone to decide what’s in your best interests. If I were to rule that the hospital may legally transfuse you against your wishes, what will you think?”
He was sitting up, breathing hard, and seemed to sag a little at the question, but he smiled. ‘I’d think My Lady was an interfering busybody.” (Ian McEwan, The Children Act, 117-118).
Around the World through Books’ upcoming program on Thursday, November 10, will be framed by the events of The Children’s Act by Ian McEwan. Paralegal Studies program head Susan Brewer will lead the discussion, a challenging task because:
Not everyone will have read the book, and that’s okay.(But all three Reynolds Libraries have copies to lend.)
Though this program is sponsored by the Multicultural Enrichment Council, it is not particularly multicultural—at least not in the sense of ethnic diversity. It is set in London, England, and the main characters are white middle-class folk of decent background and intelligence, with nobody particularly harassing them.
Susan Brewer (not Fiona Maye)
This is a book without much action or plot, and almost everybody in it wants what’s best for the others. Almost everybody. Yet it has a sense of urgency and is literally about life and death decisions.
This is a book about searching for truth, and it’s a book about judging. Fiona Maye is a high court judge who must decide whether a young man with leukemia, Adam Henry, a Jehovah’s Witness, must have the blood transfusion which he wants to refuse, but without which his treatment will surely fail. Adam is seventeen and three-quarters, still technically a minor, but well over the sixteen years at which a child’s wishes are usually considered in legal matters. His parents support his choice. The hospital has brought it to court—the doctors want to save this charming, intelligent young man. The Henrys believe that Biblical injunctions to abstain from eating blood also preclude accepting blood products into the body. Adam is prepared to die rather than disobey God.
What’s multicultural about all that? What does this book have to do with diversity and inclusion? Here are three answers; perhaps you can supply more. Or perhaps the program will give us a chance to develop other ideas—come to LTC 220 from 7-8:30 on Thursday, Nov. 10 and see.
Religious convictions (or anti-convictions) are part of each person’s cultural identity. They help define our understanding of right and wrong and how things ought to be, which in turn affects how we treat each other.
Even reasoned, critical thinking based on law (The Children Act is the British child protective services law, to oversimplify it), logic, and the best of intentions is affected by the context of cultural conventions, parental and social influences, and, perhaps, life’s momentous distractions. Fiona is childless and her husband is behaving badly.
Fiona’s husband is behaving badly. It is accurate to say he’s being really stupid and selfish, but that sounds so judgmental. Society today has a “Don’t judge!” mantra. “Judge not, that ye be not judged (Matthew 7:1),” is quoted frequently. But what does that really mean? How can we be inclusive, kind, and respectful, and still be true to our own convictions about right and wrong?
he hospital may legally transfuse you against your wishes, what will you think?”
