By Angelica Ribeiro, PhD
When reflecting on your writing progress this year, it’s common to focus on what didn’t go well, such as receiving a rejection letter, struggling with a writing project, or getting negative feedback. While these setbacks can provide valuable lessons, it’s equally important to acknowledge what went well. In his book Flourish, Martin Seligman advocates for a helpful exercise called “What-Went-Well.”
TAA member James V. Morrison, the Stodghill Professor Classics at Centre College in Danville, Kentucky, has been awarded a Publication Grant from the Textbook & Academic Authors Association to cover image permission costs for his forthcoming academic book, Comedy in Literature and Popular Culture from Aristophanes to Saturday Night Live. The book will be published by Routledge in 2025.
“I was delighted to learn that I have received a $1,000 Publication Grant from TAA,” he said. “It is very generous of TAA to support this work of comparative literature and performance: the images are especially valuable for sections in the book discussing parody, satire, and caricature.”
School Safety: True Stories and Solutions from School Leaders, edited by Joseph (Rocky) F. Wallace, Valerie Flanagan, and Robin Magruder, is a transparent look at the diverse mix of safety issues school administrators face every day. The wisdom shared in how these real events were handled with fast thinking and care for all parties makes this read a helpful resource for any educator.
Social Emotional Learning and Servant Leadership: True Stories from the Classroom edited by Joseph (Rocky) F. Wallace, Valerie Flanagan, and Robin Magruder, is a collection of real experiences, written by faculty and alumni of Campbellsville University’s School of Education. This collection illustrate sthe diverse needs of P-12 students, and the interventions that can make a life-changing difference in their young lives.
Writer, Scholar and Award-winning Teacher Helen Sword has launched a Substack thread called ScholarStack to help LinkedIn academics who write on Substack or subscribe to the newsletters of fellow academics. ScholarStack is “compendium of newsletters by, for, and about academic writers and writing.” Learn more or subscribe
By Dave Harris
Is there is a danger that LLMs (or other AI) will create an “uber-textbook” using the work of individual authors, basically stealing the best of all the individual work of scholars for profit, while paying the authors nothing? This question came up in the November 6, 2024 TAA Conversation Circle on royalties, and I wanted to touch on it again, after writing a related piece this past spring.
The previous piece argued (1) that current AI is too limited to do good intellectual work, and, (2) regardless of the capability of AI, that it’s important to take one’s own interests, desires, and personal experience into account because writing and research are personally uplifting positive experiences worth having, even if you’re not necessarily selling your work.
