Dissertation writing

Shrinking education budgets make this resource of “free eBooks that can supplement or replace classroom texts” worth a share. I just discovered it via eSchool News. Here’s their write-up:

“E-Books Directory” is an online resource that contains links to freely downloadable eBooks, technical papers, and documents, as well as user-contributed content, articles, reviews, and comments. Launched in 2008 as a free service to students, educators, researchers, and eBook lovers, the directory is a database-driven web site that uses PHP scripting language and the MySQL relational database. As of press time, it listed 1702 eBooks in 391 categories, including children¹s books, history, humanities, literature, science, and mathematics. Under Classic Literature, for example, users will finds links to such iconic texts as Anna Karenina, Beowulf, Don Quixote, Great Expectations, Little Women, and more. The site says it does not support copyright infringement, nor will it link to web sites that trade copyrighted material. http://www.e-booksdirectory.com

I checked out some of the subject areas in the directory, and was pleasantly surprised to find that many of the books are less than a decade old, and often from some of the most reputable university presses, when I expected to find only very old, public domain works.

A few keepers from a 30-minute skim:

University of Houston’s Digital History U.S. History Textbook looks great for high school classrooms. No need to pay Houghton-Mifflin or MacMillan $100 per textbook when this one’s available for free. Spend those dollars elsewhere.

A Century of War is a collection of polemical essays that could extend any discussions of the wars of the 20th Century.

Indians Before Colombus, though dated (1955), is a University of Chicago Press text. Per the authors, “We have tried to tell the story of the Indians by piecing together the bits of available information. The data we have presented are accurate, and we have tried to set forth the facts as interestingly as possible.”

For writing teachers, the tasty-looking Less Than Words Can Say. The blurb:

Mitchell takes examples of bad writing and rips them to shreds. While some would think these mistakes don’t really matter, Mitchell insists that they do, because they are revelations about the mind that wrote them. Thus examples of bad writing that come from “educators” are given special attention; if educators have twisted minds, what can we expect to have happen to their charges?

Oh, snap.

Here’s a fun bit from Mitchell’s work that every student (and academic) should read:

Whatever else Churchill may have been doing in those days [when Hitler was preparing to attack Britain], he was always providing the English with words. With words he formed their thoughts and emotions. “We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills,” said Churchill. Millions answered, apparently, “By God, so we shall.”

Imagine, however, that Churchill had been an ordinary bureaucrat and had chosen to say instead:

“Consolidated defensive positions and essential preplanned withdrawal facilities are to be provided in order to facilitate maximum potentialization for the repulsion and/or delay of incursive combatants in each of several preidentified categories of location deemed suitable to the emplacement and/or debarkation of hostile military contingents.”

Check out the full list of titles here. I’ve only scratched the surface, or, put differently: “A full accounting of the plenitude of literary and non-literary selections available to education professionals and consumers alike at this website are beyond the scope of this weblog entry. Those interested in learning more about this phenomenon are advised to access the comprehensive listing here.”