Digital library
Textbooks, references and open learning resources.
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Knowledge For Humans
Charlie Huenemann · Charlie Huenemann
Knowledge for Humans is a textbook aimed at introducing students to fundamental questions about knowledge and skepticism. Many topics often covered in epistemology textbooks are also covered here, such as radical Cartesian skepticism, phenomenalism, externalism, and naturalism. But the text also covers useful topics that are not usually included, such as the social conditions for knowledge, common fallacies, Bayesianism, the internet, conspiracy theories, and how we should go about arguing with one another. It’s written in an easy-going style with clear examples and funny diagrams.
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#TheatreAppreciation
Kiara Pipino · SUNY Oneonta · 2022
#TheatreAppreciation is a textbook for introductory level lecture classes such as Theatre Appreciation and Introduction to Theatre. It provides insight about the art and craft of theatre, a brief exploration of theatre history, and discussion about the styles and forms of theatre along with an overview of professions in the field.
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Elementary Arabic I
Sadam Issa; Ayman Mohamed · Michigan State University · 2022
This open textbook is intended for beginning students of Arabic in their first semester. This OER is unique in its presentation of Arabic language content through theme-based modules. Each theme is addressed through vocabulary, grammar, reading, speaking, and writing components. Each chapter includes self-check embedded quizzes that help learners digest language concepts. The book is also designed with teachers in mind. Each chapter includes pair work and group tasks that the teacher can implement in class and other parts that can be assigned as homework. The focus of the book is to build literacy in Standard Arabic structure in a simplified and sequenced approach while emphasizing speaking skills. By the end of this course, students will be well prepared for building their competence in a sequenced and organized manner in the following parts of this series.
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Music on the Move
Danielle Fosler-Lussier · University of Michigan Press · 2020
Music is a mobile art. When people move to faraway places, whether by choice or by force, they bring their music along. Music creates a meaningful point of contact for individuals and for groups; it can encourage curiosity and foster understanding; and it can preserve a sense of identity and comfort in an unfamiliar or hostile environment. As music crosses cultural, linguistic, and political boundaries, it continually changes. While human mobility and mediation have always shaped music-making, our current era of digital connectedness introduces new creative opportunities and inspiration even as it extends concerns about issues such as copyright infringement and cultural appropriation. With its innovative multimodal approach, Music on the Move invites readers to listen and engage with many different types of music as they read. The text introduces a variety of concepts related to music's travels—with or without its makers—including colonialism, migration, diaspora, mediation, propaganda, copyright, and hybridity. The case studies represent a variety of musical genres and styles, Western and non-Western, concert music, traditional music, and popular music. Highly accessible, jargon-free, and media-rich, Music on the Move is suitable for students as well as general-interest readers. Citable link: https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.9853855
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Foundational Sight Singing
Tobin Stewart · TRAILS · 2022
Sight reading music can be a daunting endeavor for aspiring, and even experienced, musicians. Foundational Sight Singing was created to provide a systematic approach to learn to read, hear and perform music. The ordered presentation of both melodies and rhythms in this text helps students develop accuracy and fluency in sight singing which is a fundamental skill for all musicians. It is a text for developing proficiency in reading and sight singing that can be used in a variety of contexts from individual practice to choral or instrumental ensemble rehearsals to college ear training courses. Multiple exercises are provided for drilling and practice at each level throughout the text to grow the students’ fluency and proficiency in reading and performing pitch and rhythm. This text will help students build a solid foundation upon which they can establish mastery.
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La política petrolera en el gobierno de la revolución ciudadana: El caso del Campo Sacha
Nelson García-Osorio · Editorial Grupo AEA · 2022
En la primera parte, se realiza un resumen del manejo del petróleo a partir de 1972 hasta la actualidad, así como también se describe la política petrolera aplicada por los gobiernos, desde la administración del doctor Oswaldo Hurtado hasta la administración del señor Guillermo Lasso. En la segunda, se analiza el entorno jurídico en el contexto de los recursos naturales especialmente del petróleo, en el marco de la Ley de Hidrocarburos y de la Constitución de la República del Ecuador. Y en la tercera, se analiza la producción en el Campo Sacha, adjudicada a ORNCEM mediante el contrato de servicios específicos y de acuerdo a sus dos contratos modificatorios. Se concluye con algunas consideraciones que se deben tomar en cuenta y que llaman a la reflexión cuando se proponen y ejecutan contratos cuyo beneficio no es el mejor para el país. Por otro lado, los bosques son grandes “limpiadores” de dióxido de carbono, al ser destruidos se anula su potencial de absorción y, por lo tanto, contribuyen al calentamiento global del planeta por el incremento de gases de efecto invernadero, razón por la cual, se debe contrarrestar la deforestación.
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Introduction to Philosophy: Aesthetic Theory and Practice
Yuriko Saito ; Ruth Sonderegger ; Ines Kleesattel · Rebus Community · 2021
Aesthetic Theory and Practice offers fresh perspectives on canonical and emerging topics in aesthetics, and also brings attention to a number of culturally sensitive topics that are customarily silenced in introductions to philosophical aesthetics. The papers are heterogeneous in terms of length and degrees of difficulty, inviting the reader into the study of contemporary aesthetics, which spans a lifetime.
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It’s All Greek to Me! Using Authentic Readings to Improve Knowledge of the English Language and Western Culture
Charity Davenport · The University of Tennessee Libraries · 2019
“It’s All Greek to Me!” has everything—entertaining stories, academic articles in a variety of disciplines, vocabulary crossover in literary and academic readings, connections to local, American, and Western culture, and plenty of chances for critical thinking for advanced students of English as a Second Language (ESL). All readings are authentic with minimal adaptation from a variety of sources. This textbook also gives help for advanced level grammar and writing issues, using outside sources, and reading and vocabulary strategies.
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Documentary Making for Digital Humanists
Darren Reid; Brett Sanders · Open Book Publishers · 2021
This fluent and comprehensive field guide responds to increased interest, across the humanities, in the ways in which digital technologies can disrupt and open up new research and pedagogical avenues. It is designed to help scholars and students engage with their subjects using an audio-visual grammar, and to allow readers to efficiently gain the technical and theoretical skills necessary to create and disseminate their own trans-media projects. Documentary Making for Digital Humanists sets out the fundamentals of filmmaking, explores academic discourse on digital documentaries and online distribution, and considers the place of this discourse in the evolving academic landscape. The book walks its readers through the intellectual and practical processes of creating digital media and documentary projects. It is further equipped with video elements, supplementing specific chapters and providing brief and accessible introductions to the key components of the filmmaking process. This will be a valuable resource to humanist scholars and students seeking to embrace new media production and the digital landscape, and to those researchers interested in using means beyond the written word to disseminate their work. It constitutes a welcome contribution to the burgeoning field of digital humanities, as the first practical guide of its kind designed to facilitate humanist interactions with digital filmmaking, and to empower scholars and students alike to create and distribute new media audio-visual artefacts.
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A Possession Forever: A Guide to Using Commemorative Memorials and Monuments in the Classroom
Martin Kerby ; Margaret Baguley ; Richard Gehrmann ; Alison Bedford · University of Southern Queensland · 2021
This open textbook will guide educators and students through the process of using local monuments and memorials to contextualise, interrogate and extend their knowledge of historical events at a national and international level. Students will learn how to use local history to create an organic patchwork of local stories, interviews, photographs and artefacts contributed by, and for, the community and contextualised nationally and internationally. Through this process they will assume the role of historians rather than passive consumers of dominant ideologies and understand how historical events have shaped diverse views, including their own, of issues such as social justice, democracy, human rights and citizenship.
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Ancient Greek I: A 21st Century Approach
Philip Peek · Open Book Publishers · 2021
In this elementary textbook, Philip S. Peek draws on his twenty-five years of teaching experience to present the ancient Greek language in an imaginative and accessible way that promotes creativity, deep learning, and diversity. The course is built on three pillars: memory, analysis, and logic. Readers memorize the top 250 most frequently occurring ancient Greek words, the essential word endings, the eight parts of speech, and the grammatical concepts they will most frequently encounter when reading authentic ancient texts. Analysis and logic exercises enable the translation and parsing of genuine ancient Greek sentences, with compelling reading selections in English and in Greek offering starting points for contemplation, debate, and reflection. A series of embedded Learning Tips help teachers and students to think in practical and imaginative ways about how they learn. This combination of memory-based learning and concept- and skill-based learning gradually builds the confidence of the reader, teaching them how to learn by guiding them from a familiarity with the basics to proficiency in reading this beautiful language. Ancient Greek I: A 21st-Century Approach is written for high-school and university students, but is an instructive and rewarding text for anyone who wishes to learn ancient Greek.
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Fundamentals of Music Theory
Nikki Moran; Michael Edwards; Richard Worth; Zack Moir · University of Edinburgh · 2021
This open e-book is the result of a project funded by a University of Edinburgh Student Experience Grant, Open e-Textbooks for access to music education. The project was a collaboration between Open Educational Resources Service, and staff and student interns from the Reid School of Music. As a proof-of-concept endeavour, the project aimed to explore how effectively we could convert existing course content into convenient and reusable open formats suitable for use by staff and students both within and beyond the University. The resulting e-book presents open licensed educational materials that deal with the building blocks of musical stave (sometimes known as staff) notation, a language designed to communicate about musical ideas which is in use around the world. The resources in this e-book include video lectures and their transcripts, as well as supporting text explanations, examples and illustrations. The materials introduce topics such as the organisation of discrete pitches into scales and intervals, and temporal organisation of musical sounds as duration, in rhythm and metre. These rudiments are presented through an introduction to the elements of five-line stave notation, and through critical discussion of the advantages and limitations served by notational systems in the representation and analysis of musical sounds. This serves as the basis of further explanations, to illustrate musical concepts including key, time signature, harmonisation, cadence and modulation. We anticipate that subsequent versions of this e-book will update and develop the contents and presentation of the materials, following the success of this student-led collaboration.
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Malayalam: A University Course and Reference Grammar .
Rodney Moag · The Center for Asian Studies at The University of Texas at Austin · 2002
This textbook was developed to meet two distinct yet related needs. The more basic goal was to respond to the paucity of teaching materials suited to the needs of U.S. learners of Malayalam, particularly at the university level. Though some materials had previously been produced both in India and in the US, including three sets of materials co-written by the author, none were at all suited to the needs and purposes of American university students. Some of the author is earlier materials were ad hoc in nature, while the 510-page course written for Peace Corps volunteers concentrated on language for daily social interactions only. Both the Peace Corps materials and most of the materials written in India were written in Romantranscription, thus making no serious attempt to teach the Malayalam script or the skills of reading or writing. The Malayalam ·materials produced in India by various scholars or teach~rs were not readily available in the West, and were moreqver designed for Indian learners for whom formal explanations of the grammar and culture are largely unnecessary, since many of the grammar and discourse conventions are similar or identical to those found in their own mother tongues. Thus the texts available at that time lacked much of what was essential to the Western learner of the language. A couple more sets of teaching materials have come out in: the intervening 20 years, and some may now be ordered via the Internet. A partial list of these materials appears in the prologue following lesson Twenty-five in this text. These books are, ingeneral, designed to prepare the learner to handle everyday living situations in Malayalam, and as such can be useful adjuncts once the present volume has been thoroughly studied. This text was conceived and designed to go beyond social conversation to prepare the Western learner to use the language as a research tool. To meet this goal the skills pf literacy in Malayalam are essential, but this is only a beginning. It is al
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Tutt* a tavola!
Stacy Giufre; Melina Masterson · UMass Amherst · 2021
This new open educational resource is for Elementary Italian. Our goal is for this book to be comprehensive, user-friendly, inclusive, and cost-effective. Tutt* a tavola has two parts, one for each course, with six chapters in each. Generally speaking, each chapter addresses three to four grammatical topics and includes a vocabulary section related to a cultural theme. The vocabulary is also incorporated into the grammatical presentations and exercises. There is also a short reading in each chapter regarding different aspects of culture and language, to address those questions of diversity and inclusion that are often missing from the textbooks we have used in the past. To include more culture, we have also included multimedia: each chapter begins with a song that is used as a starting point for the inductive presentation of the chapter’s content, and ends with a video (a film clip, an interview, social media) that summarizes the ideas covered.
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CITOYEN.NE.S: Conversation en Français
Annabelle Dolidon · Portland State University Library · 2021
CITOYEN.NE.S is a French language method for the conversation class at the intermediate/ advanced level. Content and activities are built around the concepts of diversity, inclusivity and equity, and engage students to practice French while questioning and participating in the world they live in – to be full citizens whatever their background, their race or their gender identity. As the French spelling of the title indicates, the book embraces écriture inclusive and uses it for instructions and general information for all students. The book is composed of five chapters covering various themes. None of them provides again basic vocabulary from first- and second-year French courses, like food and body parts. Instead, each chapter builds on students’ previous knowledge and takes them further to develop language and cultural skills. Each chapter presents a mix of vocabulary lists and activities, authentic documents and others that have been written for the book, based on research. Chapters end with creative activities and one overarching assignment that help students go deeper in topics of interest. Early chapters have two grammar reviews, later chapters only one.
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Music in World Cultures
Matthew Mihalka ; Justin Hunter · University of Arkansas · 2021
This text provides just a small sampling of some of the various musical styles and traditions that might be found, though the skills developed in this course can be applied to any type of music.
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Yo puedo: segundos pasos
Elizabeth Silvaggio-Adams; Rocío Vallejo-Alegre · Milne Open Textbooks · 2021
Perhaps you remembered what the title of your book means from your previous experiences with Spanish. That is a great start! As you begin the equivalent of a second semester Spanish course with these materials, some of you might think about how long it has been since you studied Spanish while others may come to the class with some background knowledge. We want you to know this book has been designed with many types of learners in mind. Our goals were to address the need for students to achieve the ability to communicate in written and spoken form. We sought to address a common statement by students that may have previous experiences, be they from secondary school or another college that say, “I have studied Spanish for years and don’t know how to speak or write it.” We also sought to present a reasonable alternative to the expensive textbooks and online packages that don’t seem to be practical or relevant. We sought to enhance second language learning by creating our own materials that take a new approach, the flipped classroom model, to learning a second language based upon the skills that we deem most useful and that will enable our students to confidently express themselves in Spanish–tú puedes con Yo puedo 2.
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Writing for Change: An Advanced ELL Resource
Inés Poblet · Whatcom Community College · 2021
This book has been a part of my pandemic journey with a goal of building English language learner resources, gathering up what I have learned about anti-racist, culturally responsive, and decolonization approaches. I know that I have not nearly met this goal in this single resource and that there is so much more to do. I am simply starting on the collective path and am so humbled to join fellow colleagues in the work of rewriting the myths and false narratives of our field. This goes well beyond one specific discipline. It is a call to all educators and all institutions to choose love in action, to choose change. This OER text includes the following: an introduction to creating a collectivist culture to support learning models and activities about multiple ways of organizing ideas in an essay. short readings and discussion highlighting the work of community organizers, activists, and social justice movements writing prompts that ask learners to synthesize, reflect on, and connect to the topics projects inviting learners to apply the content to their community environment additional resources offering multiple modalities for further learning including videos, articles, and podcasts a contrastive and multilingual approach to exploring grammar patterns to support writing
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Music Theory for the 21st-Century Classroom
Robert Hutchinson · Robert Hutchinson · 2017
Music Theory for the 21st–Century Classroom is an openly–licensed online four–semester college music theory textbook. This text differs from other music theory textbooks by focusing less on four–part (SATB) voiceleading and more on relating harmony to the phrase. Also, in traditional music theory textbooks, there is little emphasis on motivic analysis and analysis of melodic units smaller than the phrase. In my opinion, this led to students having difficulty with creating melodies, since the training they are given is typically to write a “melody” in quarter notes in the soprano voice of part writing exercises. When the assignments in those texts ask students to do more than this, the majority of the students struggle to create a melody with continuity and with appropriate placement of harmonies within a phrase because the text had not prepared them to do so. In Music Theory for the 21st–Century Classroom, students learn about motive, fragment, phrase, and subphrase, as well as types of melodic alteration like inversion, intervallic change, augmentation, diminution, rhythmic change, ornamentation, extension, and retrograde. By understanding motive and subphrase (also known as “phrase segment” or “phrase member”), I believe students will better understand the logic and construction of melodies, which will aid them in creating their own music. This text is meant to take the student from the basics of reading and writing pitches and rhythms through twelve–tone technique and minimalism over the course of four semesters. Whenever possible, examples from popular music and music from film and musical theater are included to illustrate melodic and harmonic concepts, usually within the context of the phrase.
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Writing Fabulous Features
Nicole Kraft · The Ohio State University Pressbooks · 2019
"Writing Fabulous Features" teaches the art and craft of feature writing to help readers learning to write non-fiction with flair.