JCCC Writing Center resources

Located on the 3rd floor of the library in room 308, the Writing Center (or WC) holds a slew of resources. they have a copy of each textbook used by English and Journalism faculty - maybe each text book used by humanities. MLA Handbooks, EasyWriters, and other style and usage texts also litter the tables.

Many instructors keep a binder with assignment prompts and examples of student work. Sometimes an example is worth more than any other kind of explanation. Look for mine.

They also have scads of handouts, but the most useful resources are the peer consultants. Talk to them.

REMEMBER: you need your JCCC ID card for many services.

Research resources.

I now share research with students via JCCC library's electronic course reserve. Just go to the Billington Library homepage, then click the "course reserve search" link indicated by the red arrow in the top image to the right (click either image to enlarge).

It will open up a new page. Find the Instructor scroll down menu (indicated in figure 2 by the yellow arrow) and find my name.

When citing research refer to the 2009 MLA documentation (available free online in pdf if you don't have the handbook with you. See also our social bookmarking page on MLA, and previous posts). I find the sample paper particularly useful. Scroll

Cool resources, free learning materials, fun stuff

Laughing Squid (a blog I like) points us to a Free Music Archive. You can download music legally and, according to laughing squid, use it pretty much however you want. If you find something good here let me know and I can use it as a soundtrack on video I produce for our class.

Other blogs I like are Open Culture, which will give heads up to great cultural content on the web, like the top educational and cultural videos. Have a dry professor? You can find the best of the ivy league holding forth on biology, physics, literature, you name it. AND you can download it to your personal media device.

The Philosophy Monkey bills itself as "your source for humor, edumacation and critical thinking" (all in our objectives) though they don't publish as often as I'd like.

I like BoingBoing.net, but I stopped following, less because of the infrequent posts on drug or sex related topics (be forewarned) and more because it's so prolific. There are sometimes 40 or 50 posts a day.

Do you use and aggregator (feed catcher, feed reader)? It collects the RSS feeds from blogs (or podcasts) you want to follow and makes web research much more convenient. I use bloglines (click to view my account). It's about the most popular and the organization is intuitive for me. It also makes following my favorite comics easier (with the exceptions of Doonesbury and Baby Blues - they force you to visit their site).