Open SUNY Textbooks announces the release of its latest project, A Concise Introduction to Logic. Author Craig DeLancey is Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Department of Philosophy at SUNY Oswego. View and download the text here for free.
The textbook is an “introduction to formal logic suitable for undergraduates taking a general education course in logic or critical thinking, and is accessible and useful to any interested in gaining a basic understanding of logic. This text takes the unique approach of teaching logic through intellectual history; the author uses examples from important and celebrated arguments in philosophy to illustrate logical principles.”
About Open SUNY Textbooks
The mission of Open SUNY Textbooks is to provide an academic-friendly publishing model and infrastructure which supports faculty adoption, remixing, and creation of open educational resources (OER) and courses. We are dedicated to improving student learning outcomes and addressing the affordability of course materials.
Open SUNY Textbooks is an open access textbook publishing initiative established by State University of New York libraries and supported by SUNY Innovative Instruction Technology Grants. This pilot initiative publishes high-quality, cost-effective course resources by engaging faculty as authors and peer-reviewers, and libraries as publishing service and infrastructure.
The pilot launched in 2012, providing an editorial framework and service to authors, students and faculty, and establishing a community of practice among libraries. The first pilot is publishing 15 titles, with a second pilot to follow that will add more textbooks and participating libraries.
Participating libraries in the 2012-2013 pilot include SUNY Geneseo, College at Brockport, College of Environmental Science and Forestry, SUNY Fredonia, Upstate Medical University, and University at Buffalo, with support from other SUNY libraries and SUNY Press. The 2013-2014 pilot will add more titles, and includes new participating libraries; SUNY Oswego, Monroe Community College, and more soon.
Writing in College: From Competence to Excellence By Amy Guptill, with contributions by Aly Button, Peter Farrell, Kaethe Leonard, and Timothée Pizarro.
Many high school students have mastered writing conventions but still struggle to understand and meet the expectations at the college level. Other students, perhaps out of school for a number of years, are getting reacquainted with academic writing while working to meet college-level challenges. Writing in College demystifies college-level expectations, helping students see the purpose behind the varied writing assignments they face.
Guptill skillfully positions specific and applicable advice about college writing within the larger framework of transitioning to the culture of the academy and college-level expectations. In addition, chapters can be read independently and assigned separately, and each is accompanied by further resources, suggested exercises, and advice from other student writers.
Writing in College: From Competence to Excellence is designed for students who have largely mastered the conventions of high-school level writing and are now rising to meet more the advanced expectations of college. Students will find in Writing in College a warm invitation to think of themselves as full, self-motivated members of the academic community. With concise explanations, clear multi-disciplinary examples and empathy for the challenges of student life, this short textbook both explains the purposes behind college-level writing and offers indispensable advice for organization and expression.
About the Author
Amy Guptill is an Associate Professor of Sociology at The College at Brockport, SUNY where she has a joint appointment with the Delta College Program, an alternative interdisciplinary General Education option. Her research focuses on spatial and structural shifts in agriculture and food systems with recent work on innovative agricultural marketing. She teaches courses in the sociology of food, development and globalization, community and social change, social statistics and college writing. In addition to Writing In College: From Competence to Excellence, she is the coauthor of a recent college textbook entitled Food & Society: Principles and Paradoxes (Malden, MA: Polity, 2012).
Value of Open Access Textbooks
The author is thrilled to offer this book as an open textbook. The cost of commercial textbooks is an urgent and growing problem, and all students should have easy access to advice about how to get the most out of the hundreds of pages of writing they’ll do over the course of a four-year degree.
Licensed for reuse and remix, the Open SUNY Textbooks are a valuable addition to the open access textbook community. Freely available, the open access content is peer reviewed by fellow instructors and scholars for quality and then copy-edited before publication. Open textbooks are just one component of the open educational resources movement (OER) and provide high quality, reusable material for course instructors to create cost savings for students and institutions.
About Open SUNY Textbooks
The SUNY Textbook program is a creative means to improving access to educational materials while fostering a community of resources that spans disciplines and encourages interdisciplinary study. SUNY Libraries and faculty are leading SUNY’s open textbook publishing initiative and have already saved thousands of dollars for SUNY students. Having published 12 free online textbooks, with 14 more planned in the next 18 months, this innovative multi-institutional program is lowering the cost of textbooks for students in New York and beyond.
Open textbooks are available to everyone free of charge. Over 50,000 downloads of Open SUNY Textbooks occurred between February 1, 2015-December 14, 2015, with visitors and readers from all over the world. For program details, please visit http://textbooks.opensuny.org
Open SUNY Textbooks: New Release! Instruction in Functional Assessment by Marcie Desrochers and Moira Fallon
Instruction in Functional Assessment by Marcie Desrochers and Moira Fallon is the latest publication of Open SUNY Textbooks. Open textbooks help reduce the cost of textbooks and higher education, and Open SUNY Textbooks is an innovative program led by SUNY Libraries and Faculty.
Instruction in Functional Assessment provides students and instructors a foundational understanding of functional assessment procedures. This text includes case studies, role-plays, and assignments to support hands-on application of the material, and resources for instructors in evaluating students’ performance. Available open & free on opensuny.org as an interactive PDF and EPUB ebook.
Dr. Marcie Desrochers is an Associate Professor of Psychology
Dr. Marcie Desrochers is an Associate Professor of Psychology at The College at Brockport, State University of New York. Desrochers has conducted research on teaching functional assessment and evaluating the effectiveness of a computer simulation program called Simulations in Developmental Disabilities. She also has extensive experience teaching undergraduate and graduate students, and supervising students and practitioners in the field.
Dr. Moira Fallon is a Professor in the Department of Education and Human Development
Dr. Moira Fallon is a Professor in the Department of Education and Human Development at The College at Brockport, State University of New York and has over thirty years of experience in the field of special education in public schools. She holds certifications from several states in learning disabilities, behavior disabilities, early intervention, and assistive technology. Dr. Fallon has published widely in issues of inclusion and advocacy for individuals with disabilities, and has been a leader in developing learning communities, promoting school leaders for continuous improvement, and identifying research-based, supportive resources for improving professional skills.
As part of the Genesee Valley Historical Reprint Series, Milne Library is pleased to share the release of 8 reprinted cookbooks originally published between 1817 and 1921. This collection may not be the best resource for everyday cooking in the modern kitchen, but if you want to know how to cook chicken soup (starting with choosing the unlucky bird!) and other little-known culinary tricks, these are the books for you.
Old cookbooks preserve otherwise lost culinary and household knowledge. Many of these reprinted books, which are largely put together by the members of institutions and societies local to the Geneseo area, include recipes and advice for removing stains, concocting cleaning agents, and creating curatives that many people may be glad to rediscover. Warner’s Safe Cook Book has a robust section of miscellanea which ranges from laundry (“To Clean Clothing,” “To Keep Furs,” and “Old Fruit Stains”), to first aid (“For Severe Sprains”), to smoothing irons and putting together a bouquet of herbs. The Genesee County Cook Book offers “Substituting for Wheat in Any Recipe,” and The Genesee Valley Cook Book contains a recipe for “Good Paste,” as well as for various lotions and creams.
Also illuminating to read are game recipes that used to be quite common but are now almost never seen, calling for creatures such as turtles, blackbirds, and squirrels. One might find it interesting to know that the old nursery rhyme “Sing a Song of Sixpence” speaks truth in the line “Four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie,” for that is how many birds are needed in a Blackbird Pie!
More timeless, and contained in each of the eight cookbooks, are sections on jams, pickling, and preserving, which may be useful to cooks interested in canning or gardners with excess crops.
The cookbooks in the Genesee Valley Historical Collection, and in the Genesee Valley Historical Reprint Series, remind us of what life must have been like for women and their families during this time period, and how important and fortunate it was that they shared their wisdom in book form, when this wisdom otherwise was contained within families and communities and mainly passed on orally. My own reliance on the internet for simple cooking basics, or to learn something new, reminds me how lucky we are to have (often) free and easy access to this vast world of cultural and academic knowledge.
The books in the Genesee Valley Historical Reprint Series are available free online, through our website at go.geneseo.edu/omp. The titles are also available for purchase through Amazon.com (with proceeds supporting Milne Library’s Special Collections), and the originals are available for the community to browse and check out at Milne Library.
The high cost of textbooks is making some professors think outside the box. Rather than require students to purchase copies of books that are freely available online in their entirety — think Hamlet,Pride and Prejudice, or de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America — some professors are embracing eBooks.
While instructors may want the ease of being able to refer to a page number during discussions, or may want students to read the additional material that is in the version of the book he or she has, there are ways to work around these problems. Some instructors, for instance, have begun allowing students to use the online version of the book, or a cheaper version than what is listed in the syllabus, and then asking the class to number the paragraphs in each chapter so that, in class discussions, they can refer to chapter and paragraph instead of page numbers. (Obviously, some works are already bifurcated by acts, scenes, stanzas, etc.) Additional materials, such as introductory essays, can be scanned and placed in MyCourses (subject to copyright laws) for those students who did not purchase the same version of the book the professor has.
Some instructors actually find eBooks useful in other ways. Programs such as Diigo allow you to add an electronic post-it note to a web-based document, allowing students to comment on specific lines of text and respond to questions posted by the professor. Keep an eye out for new apps like this that add value to using eBooks in the classroom. Saving money for students will be just a bonus!
Milne Library is pleased to announce the publication of Tagging Along: Memories of My Grandfather, James Wolcott Wadsworth, Jr., by Stuart Symington, Jr., the first of what Milne hopes will be a long run of original titles published by the library through the CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform. This handsome 131-page, illustrated book is now available from Amazon.com, on a print-on-demand basis, for under $10. It will also be freely accessible in Open Monographs Press beginning in July.
A small group of librarians-cum-editors began working last fall with the author, who is the son of U.S. Senator Stuart Symington, Sr., and Evelyn Wadsworth Symington, daughter of U.S. Senator James W. Wadsworth, Jr., of Geneseo. With Symington, the editorial team worked out style issues, added photographs, and designed the cover and layout for the book–everything, in short, that publishing houses do to ready a book for publication. Milne Library then uploaded the electronic file of the book to CreateSpace, and descriptive and ordering information for the book appeared in Amazon.com. When copies are ordered, CreateSpace will print them for Amazon to ship. It’s a publishing model that Milne has been using in conjunction with hosting the open access ebook versions on Open Monograph Press. The initiative began last fall, when Milne issued Recollections of 3 Rebel Prisons, by G. G. Prey, the first title in its Genesee Valley Historical Reprint series.
Symington with his grandfather, James W. Wadsworth, Jr., in Paris during WW II
Tagging Along recalls the time Symington spent with his “kind, wise, generous, and very patient grandfather.” The story of “Grampa” Wadsworth’s political career and private life, woven together with the author’s memories and impressions of long childhood visits to his grandparents’ home and farms in Geneseo, is set against the rich background of Wadsworth family history. As SUNY Geneseo President Christopher Dahl says in the book’s foreword, Tagging Along is “a lively, affectionate memoir of a politician and statesman who was present at some of the major events of the twentieth century, a man who represents a conservative tradition rooted in respect for the soil and responsibility to his community–a tradition, sadly, very little in evidence in today’s civic and political life.”
Stuart Symington, Jr., a retired member of the Missouri Bar and a fellow of the American Bar Foundation, was born in Rochester, N.Y., and spent much of his youth on the Niagara Frontier and in Washington, D.C. He served overseas in World War II and graduated from Yale University and Harvard Law School.
Starting this fall, Milne Library is pleased to offer ebooks on demand from EBL, a vendor specializing in scholarly and popular books. The current collection has access to over 5,000 titles, with majority of content published between 2011 and 2012. Publishers include: Ashgate Publishing, Blackwell, John Wiley & Sons, Princeton University Press, McFarland & Company and several others.
To access ebook titles, students, faculty and staff need only search GLOCAT+ for subject of their choice, then limit by Show content type to “Book/eBook”.
Once you have a list of results you will see a link for Full Text Online. Click.
The link will take you to a drop-down menu where you will select SUNY Geneseo from the list of selected institutions.
On the next screen you will see information about the book title you selected; click Read Online and your table of contents for the book will appear.
As with print books, a loan is required before access to an ebook can be made available for an extended period of time.
Borrowing a book will activate full text access for the length of the loan (in most cases 1 day or 7 days) and enable you to copy and print from the books.
Note: To continue accessing the ebook once a loan has expired, simply create or request another loan as you did your initial loan.
If you want to download a title to your e-reader or computer, click on the Download tab on the lefthand menu; you will need to have Adobe Digital Editions installed for downloading content.
Read and enjoy!
Please contact Kate Pitcher, Collection Development Librarian, if you have any questions or comments about the ebook collection.
In a recent survey by Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project’s 62% of respondents said they didn’t know if their library offered e-book lending. In fact, only 12% said they had every borrowed an ebook from the library.
Milne Library provides our users with over 36,000 ebooks. Try searching our Find Milne’s eBooks on your latest research topic to see what’s in the collection!
Click on this image to search for ebooks at Milne
In addition to the ebooks purchased by Milne Library, you can access millions of ebooks on the web from sources like Google Books, Project Gutenberg, and HathiTrust.
Many busy Geneseo students may not have time to sit down and read a book for pleasure during the semester, but are still interested in a good “read.” That’s where audiobooks and podcasts can help.
In addition to purchasing audiobooks from sites like Audible, Amazon, and The Audio Bookstore, you can download free audiobooks from several sources.
Open SUNY Textbooks announces the release of its latest project, A Concise Introduction to Logic. Author Craig DeLancey is Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Department of Philosophy at SUNY Oswego. View and download the text here for free.
