Category Archives: Free

Creating Cuaderna Vía

Last summer, Chris Conway and Ignacio Ruiz-Perez approached me about helping them with a new idea they had – a Spanish-language literary journal for UT Arlington students called Cuaderna Vía.  They already had an issue’s worth of content, but needed help producing the tangible journal.

Over those months, we designed and produced a print edition of Cuaderna Vía’s first issue, but I also spent time using Open Journal Systems (OJS), a component of the Public Knowledge Project, to produce our online version, found here:

http://bit.ly/bWrW6c

Cuaderna Vía is not a peer-reviewed journal – but OJS does provide the capability of setting up a peer-review, online journal.  Within the system, as the editor of a journal, you can accept manuscripts, assign reviewers to them, copy-edit them, and produce a completely customized online version of your journal.

It’s not as easy to set up as many Web 2.0 applications out there – you can’t simply log in somewhere and it’s all ready for you.  You will need to assistance of someone with passing knowledge of web database applications (preferably PHP/MySQL).  But beyond the initial setup, it’s a matter of filling in forms to set up your look and feel and routine tasks to operate your journal.

Dr. Conway and Dr. Ruiz-Perez are using it to showcase the work of their students.  I can see OJS providing an excellent learning opportunity for would-be academics – learning first hand how to be a reviewer and how to write an article able to withstand the peer-review process. OJS will also open up student work for the world to see.

Digital Texts in the Composition Classroom, Feb 25th

Early adopters find ways to teach complex concepts, methods and software flying by the seat of our pants to be sure, but buoyed by much early trial and error experience acquired from having taught ourselves. For someone like me, whose field is digital media, I have made that seat-of-the-pants stuff my specialty, and, as a result, I am frequently called upon to teach less-experienced others how to teach using digital tools. One particularly challenging course in the English Department is First Year Composition. It may just be the toughest course to teach well and yet it is most often taught by our least experienced staff: our graduate students.

Those students recently asked me if I would come and lead a workshop for them on digital texts for the composition classroom. These new teachers face tough hurdles trying to retool green students into better writers. Their job gets tougher every year as what constitutes ‘writing’ continues to incorporate more multimodal objects (sound, image, video, etc.). The challenge for them is tougher still because they come from a generation that is often less digitally experienced than their students. Fortunately, in the English Department at least, they are not without resources. I lead a series of workshops on digital literacies, pedagogies, and research methods that give our students some tools for their own teaching up front, but they wanted more specifics that were designed for teaching the ever-so-unforgiving Comp. This workshop will take place on Thursday, February 25th from 12:00 to 1:30 or so in the eCreate Lab, located in Preston Hall 310. Please join us if you think the material might be of interest to you too.

Free, easy-to-use authoring tools that I will be discussing will include:

Voicethread, an online brainstorming tool for discussing texts, including powerpoint, video or screencasts

ccMixter, creative commons-based audio remixes

Piclits, an online tool for adding text to an image

Mixbook, an online scrapbook creator

Glogster, an online interactive poster creation tool

Xtranormal, an online text-to-movie animation creator

and

Animoto (for education version): an automated video creator that sutures narration, images, audio and video together into 30-second ‘trailers’

Drop me an email if you want more information: carolyn (dot) guertin (at) gmail (dot) com. If you come, be prepared to get your hands dirty :-).

Cheers,
Carolyn Guertin
Director, eCreate Lab
Dept of English
https://mavspace.uta.edu/guertin/portfolio/