Via Teen Literacy Tips is Lit2Go, which is a free online collection of stories and poems in Mp3 (audiobook) format. You can

• Download the files to your Mp3 player and listen on the go,
• Listen to the Mp3 files on your computer,
• View the text on a webpage and read along as you listen,
• Print out the stories and poems to make your own book.
• You can also download many of the selections directly into your iTunes library.

Many of the titles also have educational resources to accompany the download as PDFs, including questions, chapter summaries etc.

Writers include: Jane Austen, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, Byron, Lewis Carroll, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Brothers Grimm, Rudyard Kipling, Edgar Allen Poe, Robert Louis Stevenso, Oscar Wilde and heaps more. Worth checking out…

His new Wordpress powered blog has a growing number of teaching resources that use read/write web technologies and collaborative learning strategies in engaging and purposeful ways. Among them is a link to his AP Literature class project, King Lear Street Talk, in which students publish their version of Shakespeare remixed for a modern audience. He describes the project as: “We’re still trying to do something interesting by translating Shakespeare’s incredibly difficult but holy King Lear into contemporary English with a mafia twist … Think Shakespeare meets The Sopranos. It’s on a wiki, which we’ll hopefully then record as a serial radio drama podcast, and make into a graphic novel with ToonDo. Fingers crossed.”

Image: http://www.bigforksummerplayhouse.com/Complete%20Shakespeare%20abridged.jpg

This is already being pilloried by tabloid “experts” who lament the loss of the Anglocentric canon. Their implied argument, as expressed in the pithily titled, At sea in Junk, but classics ahoy, that meaning is solely located in 17th-19th century British novels ignores the realities of how we receive and create information and knowledge and how we reflect our experiences through language and image in the 21st century world. One such argument in the article above is that “camera angles in the Australian movie Ten Canoes, which is spoken mainly in the indigenous language Ganalbingu, or deconstructing a website on multiculturalism would hardly seem to have much to do with the study of English in high school.” The article, of course, ignores the inclusion of Hamlet, As You Like It, Richard III, John Donne’s poetry and Jane Eyre to name a few.

This course offers students an engaging and meaningful mix of “important” classics and alternative film and fiction from Shakespeare, Blake, Mary Shelley to Blade Runner, Run, Lola, Run and Lost in Translation. When I studied the equivalent course in 1992, it was the sole precinct of Jane Austen, Shakespeare, Keats, Yeats and Coleridge. While I loved these works, the course was so homogenised and limited in its appeal that in a sizeable co-ed school, not one boy chose to do the course. Students have the right to be able to study more contemporary texts that reflect their own experiences. This is especially so given that the study of English is the one mandatory course and it was heartening to hear that a key determinant in the choice of these new texts was a consideration of what students would find appealing. It is also promising that the course recognises that students need to have the skills to analyse the multi-modal forms that are the predominant sources of their information.

The board states that this “literary feast” “provides a broad mix of Australian content, classic and contemporary literature and film for students of HSC Standard, Advanced and Extension 1 English and English as a Second Language courses.

There is still a strong contingent of classic authors including Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Emily Brontë, George Bernard Shaw, Virginia Woolf, William Blake and Henry Lawson, but there are also many modern stories such as David Malouf’s Fly Away Peter, Gail Jones’ Sixty Lights, Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion, Tim Winton’s Cloudstreet, Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake and Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time.

The new print texts include 11 Australian fiction and non-fiction books, bolstering the existing Australian content.

The new texts include:

• Patrick White’s The Aunt’s Story
• Raimond Gaita’s Romulus, My Father
• Contemporary Indigenous Plays, ‘Rainbow’s End’
• Robert Dessaix’s Night Letters
• Tara June Winch’s Swallow the Air
• Penguin Banjo Paterson Collected Verse.

New films for study include Rolf De Heer’s Ten Canoes, Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation and Stephen Frears’ The Queen.”

For these reasons, I like the term “information literacy”, which seems to be have particular currency amongst library specialists. Information literacy is not as narrow as “digital literacy” and also helps overcome the “if it’s not on the web it doesn’t exist” idea that many of my students subscribe to. The best metaphors for information overload in our culture are, in my opinion, being lost in a data smog or trying to drink from a fire hydrant – the vastness of information that surrounds us can be overwhelming.

Via Hey Jude:

Information literacy defined can as “the set of skills needed to find, retrieve, analyze, and use information.”

Information Literacy includes:

Media Literacy

Visual Literacy

Cultural Literacy

Digital Literacy

Alphabetic Literacy

Image: http://chs.smuhsd.org/community/information_literacy.htm

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Tags: literature, heterodoxy, classics,

The following is attributed to Warren Buffet, who when prompted by a question regarding the obligations of the wealthy to society, posed the following scenario: “Let’s say that it was 24 hours before you were born, and a genie appeared and said, ‘What I’m going to do is let you set the rules of the society into which you will be born. You can set the economic rules and the social rules, and whatever rules you set will apply during your lifetime and your children’s lifetimes.’ And you’ll say, ‘Well, that’s nice, but what’s the catch?’ And the genie says, ‘Here’s the catch. You don’t know if you’re going to be born rich or poor, white or black, male or female, able-bodied or infirm, intelligent or retarded.” I’m going to use this as a starter activity for Lord of the Flies.