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A Rhetoric of Literate Action: Literate Action Volume 1

Contributor: Bazerman

Publisher: WAC Clearinghouse

License: CC BY-NC-ND

The first in a two-volume set, A Rhetoric of Literate Action is written for "the experienced writer with a substantial repertoire of skills, [who] now would find it useful to think in more fundamental strategic terms about what they want their texts to accomplish, what form the texts might take, how to develop specific contents, and how to arrange the work of writing." The reader is offered a framework for identifying and understanding the situations writing comes out of and is directed toward; a consideration of how a text works to transform a situation and achieve the writer's motives; and advice on how to bring the text to completion and "how to manage the work and one's own emotions and energies so as to accomplish the work most effectively."

(5 reviews)

A Theory of Literate Action: Literate Action Volume 2

Contributor: Bazerman

Publisher: WAC Clearinghouse

License: CC BY-NC-ND

The second in a two-volume set, A Theory of Literate Action draws on work from the social sciences—and in particular sociocultural psychology, phenomenological sociology, and the pragmatic tradition of social science—to "reconceive rhetoric fundamentally around the problems of written communication rather than around rhetoric's founding concerns of high stakes, agonistic, oral public persuasion" (p. 3). An expression of more than a quarter-century of reflection and scholarly inquiry, this volume represents a significant contribution to contemporary rhetorical theory.

(1 review)

Placing the History of College Writing: Stories from the Incomplete Archive

Contributor: Shepley

Publisher: WAC Clearinghouse

License: CC BY-NC-ND

In Placing the History of College Writing, Nathan Shepley argues that pre-1950s composition history, if analyzed with the right conceptual tools, can pluralize and clarify our understanding of the relationship between the writing of college students and the writing's physical, social, and discursive surroundings. Even if the immediate outcome of student writing is to generate academic credit, Shepley shows, the writing does more complex rhetorical work. It gives students chances to uphold or adjust institutional codes for student behavior, allows students and their literacy sponsors to respond to sociopolitical issues in a city or state, enables faculty and administrators to create strategic representations of institutional or program identities, and connects people across disciplines, occupations, and geographic locations. Shepley argues that even if many of today's composition scholars and instructors work at institutions that lack extensive historical records of the kind usually preferred by composition historians, those scholars and teachers can mine their institutional collections for signs of the various contexts with which student writing dealt.

(1 review)

WAC and Second-Language Writers: Research Towards Linguistically and Culturally Inclusive Programs and Practices

Contributors: Zawacki and Cox

Publisher: WAC Clearinghouse

License: CC BY-NC-ND

In WAC and Second-Language Writers, the editors and contributors pursue the ambitious goal of including within WAC theory, research, and practice the differing perspectives, educational experiences, and voices of second-language writers. The chapters within this collection not only report new research but also share a wealth of pedagogical, curricular, and programmatic practices relevant to second-language writers. Representing a range of institutional perspectives—including those of students and faculty at public universities, community colleges, liberal arts colleges, and English-language schools—and a diverse set of geographical and cultural contexts, the editors and contributors report on work taking place in the United States, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East.

(5 reviews)

WAC Partnerships Between Secondary and Postsecondary Institutions

Contributors: Blumner and Childers

Publisher: WAC Clearinghouse

License: CC BY-NC-ND

Working with educators at all academic levels involved in WAC partnerships, the authors and editors of this collection demonstrate successful models of collaboration between schools and institutions so others can emulate and promote this type of collaboration. The chapters in this collection describe and reflect on collaborative partnerships among middle schools, high schools, colleges, and universities that are designed to prepare students for the kinds of work and civic engagement required to succeed in and contribute to society. The WAC partnerships celebrated in this collection include frameworks to build connectivity between institutions while addressing Common Core State Standards, academic and non-academic collaborations around science education, WAC partnerships in Argentina and Germany, and both long- and short-term collaborations.

(2 reviews)

Working With Academic Literacies: Case Studies Towards Transformative Practice

Contributors: Lillis, Harrington, Lea, and Mitchell

Publisher: WAC Clearinghouse

License: CC BY-NC-ND

The editors and contributors to this collection explore what it means to adopt an "academic literacies" approach in policy and pedagogy. Transformative practice is illustrated through case studies and critical commentaries from teacher-researchers working in a range of higher education contexts—from undergraduate to postgraduate levels, across disciplines, and spanning geopolitical regions including Australia, Brazil, Canada, Cataluña, Finland, France, Ireland, Portugal, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Key questions addressed include: How can a wider range of semiotic resources and technologies fruitfully serve academic meaning and knowledge making? What kinds of writing spaces do we need and how can these be facilitated? How can theory and practice from "Academic Literacies" be used to open up debate about writing pedagogy at institutional and policy levels?

(1 review)

Squeak by Example

Contributors: Black, Ducasse, Nierstrasz, and Pollet

Publisher: University of Bern

License: CC BY-SA

Squeak is a modern open-source development environment for the classic Smalltalk-80 programming language. Despite being the first purely object-oriented language and environment, Smalltalk is in many ways still far ahead of its successors in promoting a vision of an environment where everything is an object, and anything can change at run-time.

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(0 reviews)

Pharo by Example 5.0

Contributors: Ducasse, Zagidulin, Hess, and Chloupis

Publisher: Stéphane Ducasse

License: CC BY-SA

Pharo is an open-source, elegant and pure object-oriented language that supports truly immersive and life programming experience. Pharo offers excellent tools such as hot-debuggers and on the fly code update that change the programming experience. More at http://www.pharo.org.

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(0 reviews)

Deep into Pharo

Contributors: Bergel, Cassou, Ducasse, and Laval

Publisher: Square Bracket Associates

License: CC BY-SA

Pharo is a clean, innovative, open-source, live-programming environment.

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(0 reviews)

Introduction to Autonomous Robots

Contributor: Correll

Publisher: Nikolaus Correll

License: CC BY-NC

This book introduces concepts in mobile, autonomous robotics to 3rd-4th year students in Computer Science or a related discipline. The book covers principles of robot motion, forward and inverse kinematics of robotic arms and simple wheeled platforms, perception, error propagation, localization and simultaneous localization and mapping. The cover picture shows a wind-up toy that is smart enough to not fall off a table just using intelligent mechanism design and illustrate the importance of the mechanism in designing intelligent, autonomous systems. This book is open source, open to contributions, and released under a creative common license.

(1 review)