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Students in a senior English class examined the question of whether the "wisdom of experts" or "the wisdom of crowds" is more reliable and useful in a writing course by engaging in a parallel Wikipedia project. Each student either created a new entry or made significant changes to an existing Wikipedia entry, tracked changes to their contributions, and then wrote a paper and gave a presentation reflecting on what they learned; simultaneously, the class as a whole collaborated on a Wikipedia entry about a local landmark's controversy. Background readings familiarizing students with Wikipedia's procedures, as well as critical and philosophical interpretations of Wikipedia's significance, provided students perspective on Wikipedia's utility. While the instructor expected students to enter with an uncritical understanding of Wikipedia's reliability and then to see Wikipedia's fundamental untrustworthiness, students' work demonstrated that they entered the class skeptical about Wikipedia and that their projects showed them that Wikipedia was mostly reliable and useful. In this experiment, students showed that they were at an intermediate stage of "personal epistemology" and still had not achieved the level of reflective judgment sought by the school's information-literacy competency goals.

The Yale English professor and former intelligence agent Norman Holmes Pearson both epitomized and helped develop the deployment of the scholarly field of American Studies as a weapon in the Cold War. He leveraged his extensive connections in U.S. academia, professional societies, foundations, and the Department of State to help forge the state-private networks that drove U.S. cultural diplomacy in the 1950s and 1960s, particularly as their focus turned from Europe to the Pacific region. He was particularly influential in Australia, where he helped direct money and influential scholars to the new American Studies programs at Australian universities and to ANZASA. In this, he embodied how the short-lived Pax Americana was built by bureaucrats and functionaries, until it collapsed in the wake of the Vietnam War. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lise Jaillant. Modernism, Middlebrow, and the Literary Canon: The Modern Library Series, 1917-1955. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2014. 225 pp. $150.00 cloth In Modernism, Middlebrow, and the Literary Canon: The [...]

James Laughlin, the founder of New Directions Books, was also a poet whose artistic evolution ran almost precisely counter to that of the modernism he did so much to promote. [...]

This article reports a study that examines the efforts of one school--Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania--to improve student writing in first-year learning communities by promoting so-called process-based writing pedagogy outside of writing classes. Administrators encouraged instructors of subject-matter classes to integrate the writing pedagogy used in the first-year writing classes, thus improving both the writing and the teaching of writing across the community. Several surveys assessed how Duquesne's learning community program integrated the "process-based" writing pedagogy utilized in the first-year writing classes across all of the courses in each community--and how students and instructors evaluated the resultant improvement in student writing. Results suggest that these efforts were largely unsuccessful. Reasons included faculty overwork, too little attention to writing pedagogy, communication difficulties, and status differences between writing teachers and other faculty members.

Bulgaria ruffled Yugoslavia's feathers for including Macedonia as part of its historic territory, and Greece's and Turkey's for laying claim to Thrace. Such nations, she persuasively demonstrates, were not just puppets of their affiliate superpowers; they established and carried out cultural (and, she implies, economic and even military) policy separate from and sometimes even in conflict with the dominant nation. But for a girl growing up in Bulgaria in the 1970s, the only anniversary of real importance was "1300 Years Bulgaria", the expansive commemoration of the 681 CE founding of the medieval Bulgarian state. [Extracted from the article]

Over the past three decades, a "new Cold War history" movement has flourished, fed by the declassification of Western records and the opening of archives in the former Soviet bloc. In I We Begin Bombing in Five Minutes: Late Cold War Culture in the Age of Reagan i , Andrew Hunt of Waterloo University attempts to remedy this. [Extracted from the article]

Students in a senior English class examined the question of whether the 'wisdom of experts' or 'the wisdom of crowds' is more reliable and useful in a writing course by engaging in a parallel Wikipedia project. Each student either created a new entry or made significant changes to an existing Wikipedia entry, tracked changes to their contributions, and then wrote a paper and gave a presentation reflecting on what they learned; simultaneously, the class as a whole collaborated on a Wikipedia entry about a local landmark's controversy. Background readings familiarizing students with Wikipedia's procedures, as well as critical and philosophical interpretations of Wikipedia's significance, provided students perspective on Wikipedia's utility. While the instructor expected students to enter with an uncritical understanding of Wikipedia's reliability and then to see Wikipedia's fundamental untrustworthiness, students' work demonstrated that they entered the class skeptical about Wikipedia and that their projects showed them that Wikipedia was mostly reliable and useful. In this experiment, students showed that they were at an intermediate stage of "personal epistemology" and still had not achieved the level of reflective judgment sought by the school's information-literacy competency goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the relationship between literary publishers James Laughlin and Robert Hutchins focusing on the cold war between publishers for cultural freedom from the U.S. government. Topics include educational philosophy, American avant-garde, and political discourse in U.S. Also discussed is the struggle for freedom for art and science from government.

The article discusses a study conducted in Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, which integrates process-based writing pedagogy outside of writing classes to improve student writing in first-year learning communities. It states various underlying objectives of learning communities including social, academic, and pedagogical. Several goals of Duquesne University's Learning Community program were mentioned including helping first-year college students find friends and study companions, connecting the classroom with the community through service, and helping students learn how topics in different courses are related.

The article focuses on the effect of Cultural Cold War on modernism projects in the U.S. The project played a key role in redefining modernism as being characterized primarily by style, in directing modernism away from collectivist/Utopian origins and toward bourgeois individualism, and in constructing a coalition of elites. According to Intercultural Publication Inc. (IP) and its journal "Perspectives USA," headed by James Laughlin, the Cultural Cold War has significance in the domestication of literary and artistics modernism in the country.

The goals of this paper are to describe the initial implementation of a service-learning experience at the Duquesne University Mylan School of Pharmacy, discuss the challenges that presented throughout its first offering, explain how these challenges are being met, and reflect upon how to make future course offerings more effective. The School's newly required service-learning experience was given its own course name and number but was designed to complement a survey course in the American health care system wherein students learn the roles of a pharmacist in the delivery of medical care and of non-profit agencies in advancing public health. Students selected a site to complete the service-learning requirement through Duquesne University Volunteers (DUV) office, which had contacts with numerous agencies throughout Southwestern, Pennsylvania. Many of the sites did not distinguish adequately the difference between volunteerism and service-learning, resulting in a number of students performing menial tasks. In the second offering, many sites were eliminated and new options for completing the service-learning requirement were added. Additionally, course instructors initiated a relationship with faculty and graduate students from Duquesne University's English department in an effort to facilitate improvement in the students' writing abilities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Presents information on American poet Ezra Pound. Career information on Pound; Indication that Pound was captured in 1945 by Italian partisans and held in a detention camp; Discussion on the image of Pound as a traitor and a bigot; In-depth look at Pound's work; Discussion on anti-Semitism.