Teachers, instructors and faculty are facing unprecedented change, with often larger classes, more diverse students, demands from government and employers who want more accountability and the development of graduates who are workforce ready, and above all, we are all having to cope with ever changing technology. To handle change of this nature, teachers and instructors need a base of theory and knowledge that will provide a solid foundation for their teaching, no matter what changes or pressures they face

Short Description:
This modern, open-source guide to technical and professional writing explores workplace composition through theoretical and practical applications. Discussions of multiple writing genres will assist you in understanding how to apply for jobs, how to compose clear and precise business communications once the job has been acquired, and how to create documents -- such as proposals and reports -- that will be instrumental in helping to advance your career.

Long Description:
Building from strong open-source foundations, this modern guide to technical and professional writing explores workplace composition through both practical and theoretical lenses. Multidisciplinary backgrounds and decades of professional work experience–both in and outside of academia–have given the authors and editors of this text keen insight into the writing demands of professional, business environments. With an emphasis on understanding the basics of each writing genre–as well as the supplemental sections that may, for example, enhance a résumé or a strengthen a proposal–this text aims to provide clear, informed, considerate, and contemporary explanations for those wanting to optimally construct and efficiently compose résumés, cover letters, memorandums, instructional guides, proposals, and analytical and oral reports.

Word Count: 77972

(Note: This resource's metadata has been created automatically by reformatting and/or combining the information that the author initially provided as part of a bulk import process.)

What does it mean to be media literate in today’s world? How are we transformed by the many media infrastructures around us? We are immersed in a world mediated by information and communication technologies (ICTs). From hardware like smartphones, smartwatches, and home assistants to software like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat, our lives have become a complex, interconnected network of relations. Scholarship on media literacy has tended to focus on developing the skills to access, analyze, evaluate, and create media messages without considering or weighing the impact of the technological medium—how it enables and constrains both messages and media users. Additionally, there is often little attention paid to the broader context of interrelations which affect our engagement with media technologies.

This book addresses these issues by providing a transdisciplinary method that allows for both practical and theoretical analyses of media investigations. Informed by postphenomenology, media ecology, philosophical posthumanism, and complexity theory the author proposes both a framework and a pragmatic instrument for understanding the multiplicity of relations that all contribute to how we affect—and are affected by—our relations with media technology. The author argues persuasively that the increased awareness provided by this posthuman approach affords us a greater chance for reclaiming some of our agency and provides a sound foundation upon which we can then judge our media relations. This book will be an indispensable tool for educators in media literacy and media studies, as well as academics in philosophy of technology, media and communication studies, and the post-humanities.

When we come across a graph, a chart, or an infographic, how do we know if it is telling the truth? Often, numbers and data convey an authority that is hard to dispute, especially when they are arranged visually in a compelling way. Yet, data, in the ways it is gathered and shared, can be misrepresented and portray a slanted reality rather than a more accurate depiction.

This workshop introduces the concept of data literacy, or the ability to comprehend and interpret data, as a method of cultivating a critical mindset towards representations of information. Participants will learn how to discern misleading data visualizations and collaborate with others in developing strategies for analyzing data that is more accurate and useful. All consumers of information, especially undergraduate students, are encouraged to attend.

By the end of this workshop, participants will be able to:

* Understand what data is and how it is used for rhetorical, commercial, and political purposes

* Identify errors and discrepancies in how data is produced and represented

* Engage with data visualizations in multiple contexts with a healthy degree of skepticism

* Communicate their interpretations of data with their peers

A 30-page toolkit with 16 distinct teaching methods that promote open pedagogy explained. The beginning of the toolkit explains open pedagogy and its relationship to OER. There is a section at the end with additional resources and next steps if faculty want to implement some of these methods.

There are multiple weblinks and examples embedded in the document so that faculty who are interested in a particular method can use those resources for more information and to see examples of how to implement open pedagogy.

Short Description:
Social media, digital devices, and networked communication systems have become fully integrated into our everyday living experience. This e-book touches upon the human experience of contemporary trends that affect how we perceive ourselves, others, and society.

Long Description:
Authored as a companion to COMM601 Trends in Digital & Social Media, Granite State College (USNH), Concord, NH.

Word Count: 25859

(Note: This resource's metadata has been created automatically by reformatting and/or combining the information that the author initially provided as part of a bulk import process.)

UNTIL VERY RECENTLY, AUTHORS WHO wanted their works to be widely available had little
choice but to submit their works to publishers who took assignments of the authors’ copyrights and exercised them according to a proprietary “all rights reserved” model. The advent of global digital networks now provides authors who write to be read with exciting new options for communicating their ideas broadly. One of these options is open access.

Unbound publishes work that explores the interstices of digital scholarship, broadly conceived, with an emphasis on digital cultural studies; critical digital humanities; libraries, archives, and museums; the interpretive social sciences; and socially engaged computational or quantitative methods.

Dr Javiera Atenas (Suffolk), Leo Havemann (Open), Dr Caroline Kuhn (Bath Spa) and Dr Cristian Timmerman (Ulm) ran the #datapraxis project Understanding Critical Data Literacy beyond Data Skills workshop for GO-GN on Thursday 4 November 2021.

With much of the world gone digital, learning to create documents that are accessible to everyone is becoming a necessary skill. Intended for a general audience, this free resource reviews a wide range of document authoring applications, including the tools they contain for creating accessible documents, and tests them to ensure they do not contain potential barriers. Learn how to create accessible word processed documents, spreadsheets, presentation slides, and PDF documents, among others, so they are accessible to everyone.

Understanding Media and Culture: An Introduction to Mass Communication, will support an engaging and interesting course experience for students that will not only show them the powerful social, political and economic forces will affect the future of media technology, but will challenge students to do their part in shaping that future. For questions about this textbook please contact textbookuse@umn.edu

Universal Design for Learning, or UDL, is a set of learning design principles that increase access and reduce barriers for all types of learners. In short, these principles encourage a variety of ways for instructors to engage students, represent course concepts, and allow students to demonstrate what they have learned. This video series breaks down the three guiding principles of UDL (engagement, representation, and action and expression) and explains how UDL principles benefit specific student populations. The series focuses on how UDL can apply to a college setting, but also provides guiding points for other levels of education.

This guide provides resources on the topic of Using Digital Resources, as a supplement to the OERTX Digital Information Literacy Hub.

As so often is the case, the idea for this book came from a twisting path. Not long after we began collaborating and presenting together at conferences, we were invited to draft a chapter on critical race theory (CRT) in academic libraries. An invited chapter is, of course, very flattering, so we proceeded without much thought to who the publisher would be. Angela had been working on social justice issues for a while at that point, while CJ had a wealth of expertise on open educational resources (OER). We merged our two areas of expertise in drafting that chapter, discussing OER as an opportunity to not only save students money but incorporate CRT into the curriculum—both in content and in practice.

Presentation by Bridget Conneely made as part of the "Bringing Research Data to the Ecology Classroom: Opportunities, Barriers, and Next Steps” Session at the Ecological Society of American annual meeting, August 8th, 2017 Portland Oregon

(Description from author) This is an unabashedly practical guide for the student fact-checker. It supplements generic information literacy with the specific web-based techniques that can get you closer to the truth on the web more quickly.

We will show you how to use date filters to find the source of viral content, how to assess the reputation of a scientific journal in less than five seconds, and how to see if a tweet is really from the famous person you think it is or from an impostor.

We’ll show you how to find pages that have been deleted, figure out who paid for the web site you’re looking at, and whether the weather portrayed in that viral video actual matches the weather in that location on that day. We’ll show you how to check a Wikipedia page for recent vandalism, and how to search the text of almost any printed book to verify a quote. We’ll teach you to parse URLs and scan search result blurbs so that you are more likely to get to the right result on the first click. And we’ll show you how to avoid baking confirmation bias into your search terms.

An important element of open educational resources, specifically open textbooks in the B.C. Open Textbook Collection, is that they are openly licensed, but what does that mean?

Open licences enable collaboration, development, access, and inspiration from your creative works without requiring you to give up the rights (copyright) automatically granted to you for your creation.

An open licence lets you retain ownership of your work, while allowing others to use, share, and remix it, without requesting your permission. For most open licences, all that is required of the users is to attribute you for your work.

Wiki Education envisions a world in which students, scholars, scientists, archivists, librarians, and other members of academic and cultural institutions are actively engaged in sharing their knowledge with the general public through Wikipedia, Wikidata, and other open collaboration projects on the web.

Accessibility is one of the most important values underlying all of the work that we do. Now, you might already have some experience with accessibility, but other people that you work with might be new to the topic, or need methods or tools to see how to improve the accessibility of a product or service.

This page is an introduction to why accessibility matters, and we hope that you share it with your team.