palimpsest

Looking for Film Stills

I'm teaching cinematography through Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo this week (through Tuesday), and I've been trying to track down a few film stills to support some in-class activities. The main difficulty is actually finding stills that are in the proper aspect ratio. Most of the stills online appear to be publicity stills (not film stills) or cropped. So far, I've found this book review with a couple of good stills. Any suggestions (in the comments or by email) would be much appreciated. Update: Here are a few other Vertigo sites I found after my original post: A site called "Vertigo Described," which includes an extende essay on the film as well as a few film stills (too cluttered for my purpose), and a very interesting news article on a "Vertigo Tour of San Francisco" that directs tourists to all of the locations Hitch used in the film. Finally, a site called NorCal Movies, which is dedicated to documenting films made in Northern California (this site has plenty of great film stills, but having a better method for finding stills would probably be a good thing). Cross-posted at the chutry experiment.

common errors in english

Paul Brians, an English professor at Washington State University, maintains an impressive website on "Common Errors in English".

Film Course Blog

I'm keeping a course blog for my film class this summer. I'm not sure how much specific ativity there will be, but so far I've been stronly encouraging student participation in the comments section.

One of the major goals for me in the class will be to encourage students to think about how distribution, marketing, and promotion affect our experience of a film.

Plagiarism tutorial

At the University of Indiana, a quiz-cum-tutorial on plagiarism.

Not that I'm facing the end-of-semester bleakness, or anything.

teaching wiki

I just came across this resource:

Teaching Wiki aspires to be a community for college-level faculty. We imagine our primary audience to be faculty who are interested in writing instruction, perhaps technorhetorians but (as we invoke the wiki way here), we invite all college faculty and instructors to be wikiteachers with us.

We invite you to use Teaching Wiki to support your teaching efforts. Here are some examples of ways to use Teaching Wiki (but we invite you to surprise us)

1. Publish your teaching homepage (see, e.g., Anne Jones)
2. Create a homepage for your writing program. See, e.g., USFWiki.
3. Use wikis in your classes for assignments
1. Link to your (wiki) syllabi
2. Link to your students' writing
3. Link to your students' Wiki Assignments.
4. Reflect on the pedagogical implications of wikis, blogs, and other tools. Reflect on College Writing Online or other writing environments and tools for writers you are experimenting with.
   1. Identify resources that other teachers may enjoy
   2. Explore wiki-related research issues

dictionary of the history of ideas

The early '70s edition of the Dictionary of the History of Ideas is available online at the University of Virginia Electronic Text Center website.

Jon Udell's LibraryLookup

A new tool!

If your local public (or college) library is one of these Innovative, Voyager, iPac, DRA, or Talis Web-enabled libraries, find your library on the list and drag its link to your browser's link toolbar....

After you've "installed" your bookmarklet in this way, you can look up books at your local library. Let's say you're on a book-related site (Amazon, BN, isbn.nu, All Consuming, possibly others), and a book's info page is your current page.... You can click your bookmarklet to check if the book is available in your local library.

Jon Udell's LibraryLookup homepage. Link from In Favour of Thinking.