Digital library
Textbooks, references and open learning resources.
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Decoding the 1920s: A Reader for Advanced Learners of Russian
Nila Friedberg · Portland State University Library · 2021
The materials presented in this book were developed for an advanced-level content-based Russian language course at Portland State University entitled “Russian Literature of the Twentieth Century: The 1920s.” Literature of this period is a major part of the Russian canon, but is notoriously difficult for learners of Russian to read in the original, due both to its stylistic complexity and the relative obscurity of its historical, political, and cultural references. And yet, this decade is crucial for understanding Russia – not only in the Soviet period, but also today. This was the period, when Mikhail Zoshchenko, Isaak Babel, Mikhail Bulgakov, and Andrei Platonov meticulously documented the birth of the “New Soviet Man,” his “newspeak” and Soviet bureaucratese; when Alexandra Kollontai, a Marxist revolutionary and a diplomat, wrote essays and fiction on the “New Soviet Woman”; when numerous satirical works were created; when Babel experimented with a literary representation of dialects (e.g.,Odessa Russian or Jewish Russian). These varieties of language have not disappeared. Bureaucrats still use some form of bureaucratese. Numerous contemporary TV shows imitate the dialects that Babel described. Moreover, Bulgakov’s “Heart of a Dog” gave rise, due largely to its film adaptation, to catch-phrases that still appear throughout contemporary Russian media, satirical contexts, and everyday conversation. Thus, the Russian literature of the 1920s does not belong exclusively to the past, but has relevance and interpretive power for the present, and language learners who wish to pursue a career in humanities, media analysis, analytical translation, journalism, or international relations must understand this period and the linguistic patterns it established. The textbook is intended for adult learners, and contains language assignments that would, on the one hand, help students transition to ACTFL’s Advanced proficiency level (i.e., be able to create "narratives, descriptions
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Modern World History
Dan Allosso; Tom Williford · Minnesota Libraries Publishing Project · 2021
Welcome to Modern World History! This is the textbook for an undergraduate survey course taught at all the universities and most of the colleges in the Minnesota State system. Similar courses are taught at institutions around the United States and the world, so the authors have made the text available as an open educational resource that teachers and learners can read, adapt, and reuse to meet their needs. We’d like to hear from people who have found the text useful, and we’re always open to questions and suggestions.
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Introduction to Philosophy: Philosophy of Religion
Beau Branson; Christina Hendricks · Rebus Community · 2020
Introduction to Philosophy: Philosophy of Religion introduces some of the major traditional arguments for and against the existence of God, as well as some less well-known, but thought-provoking arguments for the existence of God, and one of the most important new challenges to religious belief from the Cognitive Science of Religion. An introductory chapter traces the connection between philosophy and religion throughout Western history, and a final chapter addresses the place of non-Western and non-monotheistic religions within contemporary philosophy of religion.
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Introduction to Philosophy: Logic
Ben Martin; Christina Hendricks · Rebus Community · 2020
Introduction to Philosophy: Logic provides students with the concepts and skills necessary to identify and evaluate arguments effectively. The chapters, all written by experts in the field, provide an overview of what arguments are, the different types of arguments one can expect to encounter in both philosophy and everyday life, and how to recognise common argumentative mistakes.
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Plato's 'Republic': An Introduction
Sean McAleer · Open Book Publishers · 2020
This book is a lucid and accessible companion to Plato’s Republic, throwing light upon the text’s arguments and main themes, placing them in the wider context of the text’s structure. In its illumination of the philosophical ideas underpinning the work, it provides readers with an understanding and appreciation of the complexity and literary artistry of Plato’s Republic. McAleer not only unpacks the key overarching questions of the text – What is justice? And Is a just life happier than an unjust life? – but also highlights some fascinating, overlooked passages which contribute to our understanding of Plato’s philosophical thought. Plato’s 'Republic': An Introduction offers a rigorous and thought-provoking analysis of the text, helping readers navigate one of the world’s most influential works of philosophy and political theory. With its approachable tone and clear presentation, it constitutes a welcome contribution to the field, and will be an indispensable resource for philosophy students and teachers, as well as general readers new to, or returning to, the text.
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A Guide to Good Reasoning: Cultivating Intellectual Virtues
David Wilson · University of Minnesota Libraries Publishing · 1999
A Guide to Good Reasoning has been described by reviewers as “far superior to any other critical reasoning text.” It shows with both wit and philosophical care how students can become good at everyday reasoning. It starts with attitude—with alertness to judgmental heuristics and with the cultivation of intellectual virtues. From there it develops a system for skillfully clarifying and evaluating arguments, according to four standards—whether the premises fit the world, whether the conclusion fits the premises, whether the argument fits the conversation, and whether it is possible to tell.
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Logical Reasoning
Bradley Dowden · Bradley H. Dowden · 2017
The goal of this book is to improve your logical-reasoning skills. These skills are also called "critical thinking skills." They are a complex weave of abilities that help you get someone's point, generate reasons for your own point, evaluate the reasons given by others, decide what or what not to do, decide what information to accept or reject, explain a complicated idea, apply conscious quality control as you think, and resist propaganda. Your most important critical thinking skill is your skill at making judgments─not snap judgments that occur in the blink of an eye, but those that require careful reasoning. This book is also available as an adaptable Word file.
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Philosophical Ethics
George Matthews · George W. Matthews · 2020
This book is an introduction to philosophical ethics intended for use in introductory college or high school level courses. It has grown out of lecture notes I shared with the first students who took my online Ethics course at the Pennsylvania College of Technology almost 20 years ago. Since then it has seen more development in a variety of forms – starting out as a pdf document, and then evolving into a static set of WordPress pages and finally now as a book written in bookdown and hosted at GitHub. This text represents my attempt to scratch a couple of itches. The first is my wanting a presentation of the major philosophical approaches to ethics that I can actually agree with and that is integrated into my overall teaching method. I tend to teach philosophy to beginners and so there is a fair amount of discussion of the tools used by philosophers and of the ways in which their approach differs from that of their colleagues in other disciplines. There are of course many good quality ethics textbooks out there, and yet none has exactly matched my way of wanting to present the material. Teaching ethics over the years has been a process of active exploration and constant revision of my approach as I have come to a more nuanced and richer appreciation of what ethical thinking and theorizing is all about, as well as some ideas about how I think the main strands of argument relate to each other. Yes this is a partisan effort, but it’s all subject to revision and refinement based on, I hope at least, the better argument. That’s what I am trying to get across here. The second itch I am trying to scratch has to do with initiatives in open education, and I’d like this text to contribute in its own small way to the much larger and more influential open source movement and philosophy of which I consider it a part. Knowledge is only ours to share. Yes of course writers, developers and publishers do hard work that deserves compensation. But intellectual property, it seems to me,
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Technical Writing @ SLCC
Department of English, Linguistics, and Writing Studies · Salt Lake Community College · 2020
What is technical writing? You can think of it as writing about specialized topics or you could also think of it as using technology to communicate your ideas. A science lab report, a specification, a change order for building construction, or patient education materials–just to name a few–are all considered technical writing. Similarly if you design a webpage or a brochure this can also be considered technical writing. Academic writing, the writing you do for school, generally is informative or persuasive writing and usually only comes in a few different genres. In technical writing, on the other hand, one is often documenting what was done (such as a science experiment or auto repair invoice). Therefore the format of the writing is often as important as the content. This leads to an emphasis on usability and accessibility for your documents. Finally, although citing your sources is important in all writing, you will find that in some fields of technical writing, such as the sciences and engineering, it is one of the more important considerations of your writing.
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Languages and Worldview
Manon Allard-Kropp · University of Missouri - St. Louis · 2020
Asking and answering questions about what culture entails and examines the fundamental properties and intertwining nature of language and culture. This text explores linguistic relativity, lexical differences among languages and intercultural communication, including high and low contexts. Changes to a variety of OER works were made by Manon Allard-Kropp in the Department of Language and Cultural Studies to tailor the text to fit the needs of the Languages and World View course at the University of Missouri–St. Louis. Materials from the original sources have been combined, reorganized, and added to by the current author, and any conceptual or typographical errors are the responsibility of the current author.
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Spanish I: Beginning Spanish Language and Culture
Matthew Dean · Humboldt State University Press · 2020
This peer-reviewed textbook is designed for the true beginner with U.S. college students in mind. It contains themed chapters, which are divided into 8 sections. Each section has its own set of learning objectives, and is further separated into three types of assignments, Para estudiar en casa (with detailed explanations), Para practicar en casa (homework exercises), and Para practicar en clase (paired and group classwork activities). The explanations and primary input are written to be easily comprehensible. The individual exercises are geared towards acquisition of form and function, and the communicative classwork exercises promote interpersonal exchanges between students. The digital copy includes some embedded audio files, and we are developing a website to house many more resources.
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Arguing Using Critical Thinking
Jim Marteney · Academic Senate for California Community Colleges · 2020
There is a quote that has been passed down many years and is most recently accounted to P.T. Barnum, “There is a sucker born every minute.” Are you that sucker? If you were, would you like to be “reborn?” The goal of this book is to help you through that “birthing” process. Critical thinking and standing up for your ideas and making decisions are important in both your personal and professional life. How good are we at making the decision to marry? According to the Centers for Disease Control, there is one divorce in America every 36 seconds. That is nearly 2,400 every day. And professionally, the Wall Street Journal predicts the average person will have 7 careers in their lifetime. Critical thinking skills are crucial. Critical thinking is a series learned skills. In each chapter of this book you will find a variety of skills that will help you improve your thinking and argumentative ability. As you improve, you will grow into a more confident person being more in charge of your world and the decisions you make.
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The Western World: Daily Readings on Geography
Joel Quam; Scott Campbell · College of DuPage · 2020
In essay format, this textbook considers examples of various sub-categories of Geography in combination with five regions of the Western World.
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Writing Unleashed: Content and Structure
Sybil Priebe; Ronda Marman; Dana Anderson · North Dakota University System · 2019
Welcome to Writing Unleashed, designed for use as a textbook in first-year college composition programs, written as an extremely brief guide for students, jam-packed with teachers’ voices, students’ voices, and engineered for fun.
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Advanced Community College ESL Composition: An Integrated Skills Approach
Edgar Perez; Sara Behseta; Jenell Rae · Academic Senate for California Community Colleges · 2020
This book has been created to provide a framework for building your skills in writing and critical thinking. It provides access to published samples from professional authors along with essay drafts from ESL students who have polished their skills in their respective writing courses. The themes in the readings will give you a variety of topics to discuss with your classmates, which may inspire your own deeper thinking and writing. Overall, we hope that as you proceed through these chapters, you will build confidence and develop your voice in the classroom and beyond. Welcome to the world of academic writing!
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Elementary New Testament Greek
Joseph Dongell · First Fruits Press · 2014
The need for this particular grammar arises from the peculiar shape of the MDiv curriculum at Asbury Theological Seminary. Several years ago the faculty adopted a curriculum that required one semester of Greek and one semester of Hebrew, each as preparatory for a basic exegesis course in each discipline. It became clear after several years of trial and error that a “lexical” or “tools” approach to learning Greek and Hebrew was inadequate, no matter how skilled the instructors or how motivated the students. In today's general vacuum of grammatical training in public education across the United States, students typically enter seminary training with no knowledge of how languages work. Any training we might give them in accessing grammatical information through the use of Bible software programs will, we learned, come to naught in the absence of an understanding of just what such information actually means. We agreed that we actually needed to “teach the language itself,” at least in some rudimentary fashion, if we hoped students would make sense of grammatical and linguistic issues involved biblical interpretation. The first 12 chapters of this grammar are designed to correspond to the first semester's instructional agenda. In these chapters we introduce all the parts of speech, explain and drill the basic elements of grammar, set forth the larger verb system (excluding the perfect system), teach the tenses of the Indicative Mood only (again, excluding the perfect system), and help students build a vocabulary of all NT words occurring 100 times or more. We also lead students into the NT itself with carefully chosen examples, while at the same time guiding them in each lesson to learn the use of the standard NT lexicon [BDAG] and an exegetical grammar [Wallace's Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics]. We are well aware of the limitations of this approach, but genuinely believe that some instruction along these lines is better than none, and that such an approach provide a fo
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Chapeau! First-Year French
David Dinneen; Madeleine Kernen · KU ScholarWorks · 1989
Chapeau! is a first-year college text. Although it may appear, at first glance, to move very fast and introduce a large amount of material early, the vocabulary and grammatical structures that we expect students to control actively by the end of the year are limited in accord with our notion of a reasonable application of the ACTFL proficiency guidelines. As a result, while some instructors may be surprised at such things as the absence of the possessive pronoun, no insistence on the use of optional subjunctives, and no active treatment of the relative dont, others may be disturbed by what we still include in a first-year text. What we do expect students to acquire (which is quantitatively less than what we present in the text for them to know about), we believe they will acquire well, providing a sound basis for further study (formal or informal) and permitting us to say to them, both during and at the end of the course, "Chapeau!"
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Au Boulot! First-Year French
David Dinneen; Hope Christiansen; Madeleine Kernen; Herve Pensec · KU ScholarWorks · 1995
Au boulot! is a two-year college French program consisting of: a textbook, workbook and 21 accompanying audio exercises; as well as a reference grammar, to be used the entire two years. We also insist that our students obtain a full-sized dictionary, and we recommend the HARPER-COLLINS-ROBERT bilingual New Standard Edition. (Instructors will note in reviewing the materials that we provide vocabulary lists at the ends of chapters, with translations, but no glossary. We have become convinced after years of experience that glossaries are counter-productive. It is vital that students learn to use dictionaries, and the sooner the better.)
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Essentials of Linguistics, 2nd Edition
Catherine Anderson; Bronwyn Bjorkman; Derek Denis · eCampusOntario · 2022
This Second Edition of Essentials of Linguistics is considerably revised and expanded, including several new chapters, diverse language examples from signed and spoken languages, enhanced accessibility features, and an orientation towards equity and justice. While the primary audience is Canadian students of Introduction to Linguistics, it is also suitable for learners elsewhere, in online, hybrid, or in-person courses.
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An Introduction to Philosophy
Russ Payne · BCcampus · 2023
The goal of this text is to present philosophy to newcomers as a living discipline with historical roots. While a few early chapters are historically organized, the goal in the historical chapters is to trace a developmental progression of thought that introduces basic philosophical methods and frames issues that remain relevant today. Later chapters are topically organized. These include philosophy of science and philosophy of mind, areas where philosophy has shown dramatic recent progress. This text concludes with four chapters on ethics, broadly construed. Traditional theories of right action is covered in a third of these. Students are first invited first to think about what is good for themselves and their relationships in a chapter of love and happiness. Next a few meta-ethical issues are considered; namely, whether they are moral truths and if so what makes them so. The end of the ethics sequence addresses social justice, what it is for one's community to be good. Our sphere of concern expands progressively through these chapters. Our inquiry recapitulates the course of development into moral maturity. Over the course of the text, the author has tried to outline the continuity of thought that leads from the historical roots of philosophy to a few of the diverse areas of inquiry that continue to make significant contributions to our understanding of ourselves and the world we live in.