The aim of this lesson is to enable students to take control of their learning in a positive way. It is the third lesson in the study skills series and is intended to support adult learners who are embarking on a course of study and need to acquire skills which will help them to be successful. The lessons are designed as a package with key skills reinforced in each subsequent lesson so that a study culture is developed over time. They can be delivered sequentially or used individually, as a whole or in part, to support other programs of study.

For advanced students who wish to build confidence and skills in spoken English. Focuses on the appropriate oral presentation of material in a variety of professional contexts: group discussions, classroom explanations and interactions, and theses/research proposals. Valuable for those who intend to teach or lecture in English. Includes language laboratory assignments. The goal of the workshop is to develop effective speaking and listening skills for academic and professional contexts.

This assessment is used in a class titled Ethical Leadership as part of a graduate level principal preparation program. The assessment has been approved by NCATE as meeting all of the stipulated ELCC standards for which it is designed (ELCC 5.1, 5.1. & 5.3). The assignment has two sections. In the first section candidates are asked to interview people in the field about a difficult decision or dilemma they had to deal with and analyze the responses. In the second section candidates interview each other about moral failures they have experienced in their own decision making and analyze the responses through the lens of two key concepts taught in class: schema theory and a moral decision-making model.

College Success takes a fresh look at what it means, in today’s world, with today’s students, to be successful in college.

Although many of the topics included—from study skills to personal health, from test-taking to managing time and money—will look familiar to those who have used student success texts that have been around for many editions, College Success takes a new approach. The focus is on realistic, practical tools for the students who need them. This is a book designed, frankly, for students who may have difficulty with traditional college texts. The style is direct and to the point. Information is presented concisely and as simply as possible. This is not a weighty tome that discusses student success—this is a manual for doing it.

College student demographics have changed considerably in recent decades. More than a third of all students enroll not directly from high school but after a delay of some years. More students are working and have families. More students come from varied ethnic and cultural backgrounds. More students are the first in their family to attend college. More students have grown up with electronic media and now read and think in ways different from the previous generation. With these and so many other cultural changes, more students are not well prepared for a college education with the study skills and life skills they need to become successful students.

For each student to get the most out of College Success and their college experience they must understand who they are as it relates to college. To that end, in every chapter students explore themselves, because success starts with recognizing your own strengths and weaknesses. Students make their own goals based on this self-assessment, determining what success in college really means for them as individuals. Interactive activities then help students learn the choices available to them and the possibilities for improving their skills. Skills are presented in step-by-step processes, tips for success in manageable highlighted displays. Most important, students always see the value of what they are reading—and how they can begin to apply it immediately in their own lives.

College Success is intended for use in Freshmen Orientation, Study Skills or Student Success courses. A 2009 study revealed that currently nationwide, 34% of college freshmen do not return to their college for their sophomore year. This book is designed to help change that.

I started this book in 2001 with a core group of doctoral students. The initial version included 12 chapters with no animations and very few images. Each semester, I ask my current students who are using this book as their required text in my class to improve on the book by either making animations, recorded presentations, graphics, editing, or various other contributions (there is no such thing as a completely free book!). It has been in HTML until May 2007 when we converted it to this Wiki. I continue to provide this book to the academic community free of charge, but now I would like all of you to contribute back by helping me to continually improve the book.

Are you teaching freshman level students? Is this one of the first college level courses your students have ever taken? Probably. That is why this English Handbook is different (and we think better).

Miles McCrimmon’s, The Flat World Knowledge Handbook for Writers is based on the understanding that writing is at the center of the college experience, not just something students do on their way to “higher-level” coursework.

The Flat World Knowledge Handbook for Writers supports the goal of acculturating entering students to the demands of college-level thinking and writing, whether that goal is being met through coursework in Composition, Student Development, or some combination of the two.

Miles shows students how to use writing as a portal for thinking and learning and for communicating with the world. Its writing prompts and exercises encourage students to do a great deal of low-stakes, exploratory writing, but also to experience gradually the rhetorical considerations of going public in a variety of genres and media. Through it all, students are asked to reflect on their writing, exploring precisely how it functions depending on the rhetorical considerations of their voice, audience and purpose.

The Flat World Knowledge Handbook for Writers is both a guide to college-level writing and thinking and a comprehensive college-level writing handbook. In Part 1, students will identify and develop habits of mind they can use for success in college and life, and in Parts 2-4 and the Appendices, they will find the tools they need to become better and more polished writers.

Dig in deeper to the organization to see what we mean:

The driving energy of Part 1 (“Composing Habits of Mind”) is the reciprocal relationship between thinking and writing. Students will use low-stakes, personal writing to identify, develop, and activate the habits of mind they need for college-level thinking, then learn how to apply those habits to their high-stakes, public writing. The first three chapters each focus on a different cluster of four related “habits of mind”, while Chapter 4 focuses on the rhetorical demands of demonstrating those habits in the presence of others.

Chapter 1 (“Writing to Think and Writing to Learn”) activates the following habits of mind: examining the status quo; posing productive questions; slowing down your thinking; and withholding judgment. Students are exposed to a variety of ways to use low-stakes writing as a gateway to deeper thinking, not so much as a stepping stone toward producing more audience-centered texts, but more as a preliminary, meditative strategy to generate further questions. Habits of mind activated:

Chapter 2 (“Becoming a Reflective Practitioner”) activates the following habits of mind: developing a “meta” sense; attending to your own role in observation; reading texts carefully and critically; and nurturing curiosity, wonder, and humor. Students cultivate the “meta” sense as a crucial habit they must acquire and develop in order to succeed as college-level writers, readers, and thinkers. They are also exposed to a variety of methods they can use to reflect productively about themselves, as well as about the texts they encounter and produce.

Chapter 3 (“Thinking through the Disciplines”) activates the following habits of mind: seeing and making connections; sustaining two ideas simultaneously; articulating multiple sides of an issue; and finding your place and purpose in the world. Students come to understand that the disciplines they encounter in college, just as the occupations they will someday assume, are socially constructed and negotiated. These disciplines have developed distinct conventions for writing, speaking, and making meaning that are under constant interrogation and revision.

Chapter 4 (“Joining the Conversation”) introduces students to what’s involved when low-stakes writing of the type produced in the first three chapters goes public and finds a medium and genre. Systematically, students will explore the rhetorical stakes of writing for an instructor, small peer groups, larger units like an entire class, and still broader audiences outside the confines of the academic setting.

The rest of Miles’ handbook has the look and feel of a comprehensive handbook, but with a few crucial differences. Parts 2-4 and Appendix A and B are consistently infused with the principles and habits of mind introduced in Part 1, with exercises designed to reinforce becoming a reflective practitioner, writing to think and learn, thinking through the disciplines, and joining the conversation. The handbook portion also maintains the personable voice of a writing guide established in Part 1, rather than taking on the dry, pedantic tone of a manual. Textboxes, graphics, web links to text, audio and video files, and samples of student work further enliven the handbook portion. Frequent cross-indexing and internal linking between Part 1 and the rest of the book strengthens The Flat World Knowledge Handbook for Writers dual function as a both a writing guide and a comprehensive handbook.

We’ve rambled on enough about this handbook, it’s time for you to take a look. Check out the table of contents in the tab above, or request a desk copy and peruse The Flat World Knowledge Handbook for Writers at your leisure.

This Handbook of Emerging Technologies for Learning (HETL) has been designed as a resource for educators planning to incorporate technologies in their teaching and learning activities.

HETL has been developed for a workshop delivered to Athabasca University faculty and reflects several years work with Peter at the Learning Technologies Centre at University of Manitoba.

Distance and online universities such as Athabasca, are well positioned to play a bridging role between tradition and emergence in transforming higher education. Universities that recognize the value of online learning and are able to "get the model right" will be well positioned to respond creatively to developing change pressures.

The goal of this course is to review grammar and develop vocabulary building strategies to refine oral and written expression. Speaking and writing assignments are designed to expand communicative competence. Assignments are based on models and materials drawn from contemporary media (newspapers and magazines, television, web). The models, materials, topics and assignments vary from semester to semester.

Students studying linguistics and other language sciences for the first time often have misconceptions about what they are about and what they can offer them. They may think that linguists are authorities on what is correct and what is incorrect in a given language. But linguistics is the science of language; it treats language and the ways people use it as phenomena to be studied much as a geologist treats the earth. Linguists want to figure out how language works. They are no more in the business of making value judgments about people's language than geologists are in the business of making value judgments about the behavior of the earth. But language is a cultural phenomenon and we all have deep-seated, cultural ideas about what it is and how we ought to use it, so knowing where to begin in studying it scientifically is not a trivial matter at all. Issues arise that would not if we were geologists figuring out how to study earthquakes or the structure of the earth's crust. For this reason, before we dive into the study of language, we will need to examine some of the biases that we all have concerning language and to set some ground rules for how we are going to proceed. Because there is more than one way to begin, it will also be useful to establish a basic stance to guide us. Finally, because human language is an enormously complex subject, the book will focus on a narrow range of topics and themes; there will be no pretense of covering the field in anything like a complete fashion. This first chapter is designed to deal with these preliminary issues. But first, you will need to know about the various conventions that I will be using in the book.

A seven-week module for high intermediate ESL students who need to develop better listening comprehension and oral skills. The workshop involves short speaking and listening assignments with extensive exercises in accurate comprehension, pronunciation, stress and intonation, and expression of ideas.

Extensive reading and discussion of case studies on educational technology that focuses on three areas: effective media design, relevant educational issues, and the existing and anticipated methods for distribution and the business concepts behind them. The primary case study is Star Festival, a multimedia curriculum about Japan that encourages users to explore issues of cultural and ethnic identity. Students expected to develop a project that shows an understanding of the types of business models that facilitate educational technology in the classroom. Graduate students are expected to explore the subject in greater depth. Taught in English.

The Process of Research Writing is a web-based research writing textbook suitable for teachers and students in research oriented composition and rhetoric classes. Instead of focusing on one research paper, I focus on the process of research writing through a series of shorter writing exercises. Students begin by having to carefully think about a topic of research for the semester and by developing a working thesis. They then write a series of shorter essays that explore that topic. All along the way, students are continuing to research and revise their working thesis so that by the end of the term, their thinking about their original topic of research has evolved. As a result, they are not only prepared to write a “traditional” research paper; they better understand what it means to conduct academic research, which I believe is the real goal of an introductory writing course.

In this on-line lesson provided by 'CELE' international students can improve their social listening skills. This lesson is part of a module developing students' listening skills in academic, social and everyday situations.

This lesson helps students understand how humour is used in conversation and how speakers cooperate and share knowledge in conversation. Students can improve their listening skills through tasks focusing on understanding the main points, listening for detail, and practicing predicting strategies. Students can work on tasks to improve their listening skills to identify weak sounds in English (difficult to hear) such as prepositions, contractions and articles. In addition, students can look up definitions of words, explore how words are used in context (including what words frequently go before or after a word), and obtain information about whether a word is commonly used in an academic context.

The listening module provides rich opportunities for students to improve their listening skills at their own pace, when they want to work, at their own level, and in any order they would like.

Campus administrators need to have a good understanding of strategies that work with diverse populations they serve. In this paper, the authors share a research-based intervention from a longitudinal randomized trial study funded by the Institute for Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education. The intervention is Story Retelling and Higher Order Thinking for English Language and Literacy Acquisition ( STELLA) which combines the following components: (a) integrated ESL strategies, (b) higher order leveled questions, (c) academic vocabulary in the content area of science which was explicitly and implicitly taught, (d) opportunities for students to practice language through retelling, and (e) training for the teachers on a biweekly basis.

Our primary goal is to provide the resources and community students need to improve their writing, particularly students enrolled in courses that require college-level writing. We aspire to be a "commons-based peer production" community. By this we mean that we hope that crowds of people--from experts such as professors and professional writers to undergraduate students--can collaborate with us to revise the pages we've already written as well as write new pages. By working collaboratively, we are hopeful that we can develop a new kind of writing textbook, a textbook not written by a single author in the old-school way but by us, by a crowd of people out there who think we need a new kind of writing text, one that is more interactive.