OMP3.3 Test Drive(TD) Press

Hot Thespian Action!

Robin C. Whittaker — 2012-09-05

In Hot Thespian Action! Robin Whittaker argues that new plays can thrive in amateur theatres, which have freedoms unavailable to professionalized companies. And he proves it with 10 relevant, engaging playscripts originally produced by one of Canada’s longest-running theatres, Edmonton’s acclaimed Walterdale Theatre Associates.

This collection challenges notions that amateur theatre is solely a phenomenon of the pre-professional past. Whittaker makes an important contribution to Canadian theatre studies with the first North American anthology in 80 years to collect plays first produced by a nonprofessionalized theatre company.

Plays by • Brad Fraser • Mary Glenfield • Warren Graves • Gordon Pengilly • Barbara Sapergia & Geoffrey Ursell • Trevor Schmidt • Jonathan Seinen • Scott Sharplin • Mark Stubbings • Wilfred Watson

Imagining Head-Smashed-In

Jack W. Brink — 2012-09-05

At the place known as Head-Smashed-In in southwestern Alberta, Aboriginal people practiced a form of group hunting for nearly 6,000 years before European contact. The large communal bison traps of the Plains were the single greatest food-getting method ever developed in human history. Hunters, working with their knowledge of the land and of buffalo behaviour, drove their quarry over a cliff and into wooden corrals. The rest of the group butchered the kill in the camp below.

Author Jack Brink, who devoted 25 years of his career to “The Jump,” has chronicled the cunning, danger, and triumph in the mass buffalo hunts and the culture they supported. He also recounts the excavation of the site and the development of the Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump Interpretive Centre, which has hosted 2 million visitors since it opened in 1987. Brink’s masterful blend of scholarship and public appeal is rare in any discipline, but especially in North American pre-contact archaeology.

Brink attests, “I love the story that lies behind the jump—the events and planning that went into making the whole event work. I continue to learn more about the complex interaction between people, bison and the environment, and I continue to be impressed with how the ancient hunters pulled off these astonishing kills.”

A Designer's Log

Michael Power — 2012-08-24

Books and articles on instructional design in online learning abound but rarely do we get such a comprehensive picture of what instructional designers do, how they do it, and the problems they solve as their university changes. Power documents the emergence of an adapted instructional design model for transforming courses from single-mode to dual-mode instruction, making this designer’s log a unique contribution to the fi eld of online learning.

Dreamwork

Jonathan Locke Hart — 2012-08-10

Dreamwork is a poetic exploration of the then and there, here and now, of landscapes and inscapes over time. It is part of a poetry series on dream and its relation to actuality. The poems explore past, present, and future in different places from Canada through New Jersey, New York and New England to England and Europe, part of the speaker’s journey. A typology of home and displacement, of natural beauty and industrial scars unfolds in the movement of the book.

Accessible Elements

Lawton Shaw — 2012-08-10

Accessible Elements informs science educators about current practices in online and distance education: distance-delivered methods for laboratory coursework, the requisite administrative and institutional aspects of online and distance teaching, and the relevant educational theory.

Delivery of university-level courses through online and distance education is a method of providing equal access to students seeking post-secondary education. Distance delivery offers practical alternatives to traditional on-campus education for students limited by barriers such as classroom scheduling, physical location, finances, or job and family commitments. The growing recognition and acceptance of distance education, coupled with the rapidly increasing demand for accessibility and flexible delivery of courses, has made distance education a viable and popular option for many people to meet their science educational goals.

The Kindness Colder Than the Elements

Charles Noble — 2012-08-10

"These are poems that play with and in language, take pleasure in the sounds of words, poems that are propelled by puns. Yet even with this priority of sound and language, there are tender moments when the language does more than delight in itself, as though it has stumbled across lyric meaning accidentally."
—Jay Gamble, University of Lethbridge

Under the sop to Cerberus
The calculating brain calculated his death

His labour
Went over the moon
Just like the moron cow

His milk was the kindness
Higher but colder than the elements.

With wit and cunning, Noble's poems insinuate themselves into the mediations of "we use language" / "language uses us," into the objectification of "mind," into the struggles and cracking of systems. Cuing on Hegel's epochal revitalization of the syllogism, they begin with sentences-cum-arguments that issue from an everyman's intentions and insights, playing into and baiting the "sociality of reason." In the cut-up sentences then come the restless, accelerated themes—themes that exist only in their variations, ghosting into one another like the dusk and the dawn in a winging, distended now.

The dust of just beginning

Don Kerr — 2012-08-10

Don Kerr knows prairie culture better than most―he knows it from the inside out. He has made us aware of ourselves through his numerous volumes of poetry, his fiction, his many plays, his histories, and his interest in heritage. In this mature, accomplished collection, we can once again admire his unique prairie voice―minimalist, self-effacing, direct yet subtle and nuanced, immersed in his love of the vernacular language of this place. His line is muscular, his timing impeccable, his broad strokes with so few words exemplary.

Mobile Learning

Mohamed Ally — 2012-08-10

This collection is for anyone interested in the use of mobile technology for various distance learning applications. Readers will discover how to design learning materials for delivery on mobile technology and become familiar with the best practices of other educators, trainers, and researchers in the field, as well as the most recent initiatives in mobile learning research. Businesses and governments can learn how to deliver timely information to staff using mobile devices. Professors can use this book as a textbook for courses on distance education, mobile learning, and educational technology.

Sefer

Ewa Lipska — 2012-08-10

Poetic, witty, and ever so faintly surreal, Sefer delicately explores the legacy of the Holocaust for the postwar generation, a generation for whom a devastating history has grown distant, both temporally and emotionally. The novel’s protagonist, Jan Sefer, is a psychotherapist living in Vienna—someone whose professional life puts him in daily contact with the traumas of others but who has found it difficult to address his own family background, especially his memories of his father. During a two-week trip to his father’s birthplace, Kraków—a visit he has long postponed—he begins to sort out some of his feelings and to connect with a past the memory of which is swiftly disintegrating. Much like memory itself, Sefer speaks to us obliquely, through the juxtaposition of images and vignettes rather than through the construction of a linear narrative. With its fragmentary structure and its preference for hints rather than explanations, the novel belongs to the realm of the postmodern, while it also incorporates subtle elements of magical realism.

One of Poland’s best-known poets, Ewa Lipska is today a major figure in European literature. In their translation of Sefer, Lipska’s first novel, translators Barbara Bogoczek and Tony Howard deftly capture the poet’s unmistakable voice—cool and precise, gently ironic, and deeply humane.

Dustship Glory

Andreas Schroeder — 2012-08-10

In this new edition of a prairie classic, Andreas Schroeder fictionalizes the true story of Tom Sukanen's wild scheme to build an ocean-going ship in the middle of a wheat field in Saskatchewan. Set during the hardships of the "Dirty Thirties," Dustship Glory presents us with Sukanen's mythic effort to escape both the drought and pestilence of his time, as well as his own personal struggle to be free.

Featuring an illuminating foreword by beloved Saskatoon writer Don Kerr, Dustship Glory will provide Canadian and international audiences alike with the opportunity to reacquaint themselves with the dramatic tale of a ship that still stands in the fields south of Moose Jaw in Saskatchewan.

Emerging Technologies in Distance Education

George Veletsianos — 2012-08-10

A one-stop knowledge resource, Emerging Technologies in Distance Education showcases the international work of research scholars and innovative distance education practitioners who use emerging interactive technologies for teaching and learning at a distance.

This widely anticipated book harnesses the dispersed knowledge of international experts who highlight pedagogical, organizational, cultural, social, and economic factors that influence the adoption and integration of emerging technologies in distance education. Emerging Technologies in Distance Education provides expert advice on how educators can launch effective and engaging distance education initiatives in response to technological advancements, changing mindsets, and economic and organizational pressures. The volume goes beyond the hype surrounding Web 2.0 technologies and highlights the important issues that researchers and educators need to consider to enhance educational practice.

Man Proposes, God Disposes

Pierre Maturié — 2012-08-09

"From the edge of the plateau there was a splendid view: the Athabasca, flowing from the east, made a great curve in front of us and carried on towards the village. … At the moment we stopped, we could see lines of ten or fifteen sledges gliding on the trail made in the ice on the river. The view was so panoramic both to our right and our left, and also over the undulations descending towards the bank, that we took the decision right there and then to plant our flag on the spot, like explorers in an unknown land and to build our house there."

In 1910, young Pierre Maturié bid farewell to his comfortable bourgeois existence in rural France and travelled to northern Alberta in search of independence, adventure, and newfound prosperity. Some sixty years later, he wrote of the four years he spent in Canada before he returned to France in 1914 to fight in the First World War. Like that of so many youthful pioneers, his story is one of adventure and hardship—perilous journeys, railroad construction in the Rockies, panning for gold in swift-flowing streams, transporting goods for the Hudson's Bay Company along the Athabasca River. Blessed with the rare gift of a natural storyteller, Maturié conveys his abiding nostalgia for a country he loved deeply yet ultimately had to abandon.

Maturié's memoir, Man Proposes, God Disposes, appeared in France in 1972, to a warm reception. Now, in the deft and marvellously empathetic translation of Vivien Bosley, it is at long last available in English. As a portrait of pioneer life in northern Alberta, as a window onto the French experience in Canada, and, above all, as an irresistible story—it will continue to find a place in the hearts of readers for years to come.

A Very Capable Life

John Leigh Waters — 2012-08-09

Written in his mother’s unique voice, John Leigh Walters pushes the boundaries of memoir in A Very Capable Life, the extraordinary journey of a seemingly ordinary woman.

Zarah Petri was a child when her family left Hungary to establish a new life in Canada in the 1920s. With courage and innovation, Zarah and her family survived the Depression―even if it meant breaking the law to do so. In celebrating Zarah Petri, A Very Capable Life pays homage to all “ordinary” women of the early twentieth century who challenged society’s conventions for the sake of survival.

Letters from the Lost

Helen Waldstein Wilkes — 2012-08-09

On March 15, 1939, Helen Waldstein’s father snatched his stamped exit visa from a distracted clerk to escape from Prague with his wife and child. As the Nazis closed in on a war-torn Czechoslovakia, only letters from their extended family could reach Canada through the barriers of conflict. The Waldstein family received these letters as they made their lives on a southern Ontario farm, where they learned to be Canadian and forget their Jewish roots.

Helen Waldstein read these letters as an adult―this changed everything. As her past refused to keep silent, Helen followed the trail of the letters back to Europe, where she discovered living witnesses who could attest to the letters’ contents. She has here interwoven their stories and her own into a compelling narrative of suffering, survivor guilt, and overcoming intergenerational obstacles when exploring a traumatic past.

Making Game

Peter L. Atkinson — 2012-08-08

Making Game is a mixed-genre composition in which the author reflects on the philosophical and ethical implications of hunting wild game. This engaging essay is informed by the author’s significant background of scholarly engagement with the phenomenological tradition in modern philosophy.

Imperfection

Patrick Grant — 2012-08-07

"… aspirations to perfection awaken us to our actual imperfection." It is in the space between these aspirations and our inability to achieve them that Grant reflects upon imperfection. Grant argues that an awareness of imperfection, defined as both suffering and the need for justice, drives us to an unrelenting search for perfection, freedom, and selfdetermination. The twenty-one brief chapters of Imperfection develop this governing idea as it relates to the present situation of the God debate, modern ethnic conflicts, and the pursuit of freedom in relation to the uncertainties of personal identity and the quest for self-determination.

Known for his exploration of the relationship between Buddhism and violent ethnic conflict in modern Sri Lanka, as well as his contribution to the study of Northern Ireland and the complex relationships among religion, literature, and ethnicity, Grant provides the reader with an analysis of the widespread rise of religious extremism across the globe. Referencing Plato, Van Gogh, Jesus, and the Buddha, he enlightens the reader with both succinct and original insights into human society. Imperfection is the result of an important Canadian public intellectual at work.