Contributed by David Seelow, PhD, Director of Writing and the Online Writing Lab, School of Liberal Arts, Excelsior College This May 17th Excelsior College will host a major symposium entitled Games and the Curriculum: Toward a New Educational Model. You can attend this event online by registering at http://ecgaming.eventbrite.com/# or attending in person if you are on campus or in the Albany...
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Contributed by Mary Firestone Last year, when my students filed into my Contemporary Literature class with their Norton Anthologies, they complained about how heavy the textbooks were. Soon though, the real story came out.  “Is this the only textbook for the class?” one student wailed.  “I thought this was a contemporary literature course! Some of these stories are...
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Contributed by Dr. Constance Cramer, faculty member in the undergraduate Humanities and Arts program and the Master of Arts in Liberal Studies Program, School of Liberal Arts   The drive to the Maryland Shore last summer seemed overly long.  As we passed cow pastures, irrigation ditches and endless groves of trees, I found myself meditating on the promise of the coming week.  I...
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Contributed by Beth Davies-Stofka, Ph.D.  It’s fair to say that higher education vastly prefers the written word to the drawn picture.  But are there good reasons for this preference?  Isn’t a picture worth a thousand words?  Perhaps the time has come to begin using comics as teaching tools.  They possess a largely unacknowledged ability to deepen and extend...
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Contributed by Dr. Tracy Caldwell, Program Director and Faculty Advisor, Master of Arts in Liberal Studies Program First I want to congratulate you on this wonderful accomplishment. I am honored to be able to speak to you briefly today on the benefits of the liberal arts education you have achieved and that is being celebrated by you today.  It is an excellent time to reflect on your...
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Contributed by Richard Wu, Associate Dean, School of Liberal Arts, Excelsior College I came to this country from China in 1992, at the age of 35, too old to enact my Broca area and the related motor system to learn to speak English if I had not learned the language before. Fortunately I had. In fact I had a master degree in English from China. I felt lucky to be able to come to the U.S., where I...
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Contributed by Laura Eklund In his book, “The End of Art,” Arthur Danto suggests that we have entered an age of art without manifestos. He says there is no longer a dominant aesthetic school in Western Art. He points to the moment of Andy Warhol’s stacked Brillo boxes, as the beginning of “The End of Art.” What he means is the end of art without manifestos. In our...
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Contributed by Karen White - The reality of the fact, according to a recent Sloan-C survey performed by Allen & Seaman in 2010, is that “the growth rate for online enrollment (17%) continues to outpace the overall growth rate for enrollments in higher education (1.2%) ”  (Emphasis mine). Who would have ever thought it, based on the difficult naissance process online learning...
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Contributed by Claire Bradin Siskin – All writing instructors sooner or later must grapple with the issue of plagiarism, and the problem is particularly acute for those who teach English Language Learners (ELLs). An online tutorial called “Avoiding Plagiarism” has been developed. It is one component of the English as a Second Language Writing Online Workshop (ESL-WOW). ESL-WOW...
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Contributed by Errol Craig Sull - It’s a mixed bag:  what we pull together and offer our students to ensure they not only have a positive online learning experience but they continue to embrace and use beyond the course what they learned while in the course.  Each online instructor has developed his or her own approaches that best work, no doubt – but how do we really know...
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