A Commonplace Book on Teaching and Learning

A Commonplace Book on Teaching and Learning
Author: Pascal de Caprariis
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Total Pages: 166
Release: 2010-10-06
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1452053723

The format of the book is a little unusual because I decided to use the structure of a commonplace book, in which commonplace items that one comes across in one's life are jotted down for future reference in a journal. The idea is to let the quotations set up discussions about various aspects of learning. My intent was to end up with a loosely coupled but reasonably coherent set of ideas within each chapter. This goal was pursued by seeing to it that a substantial number of quotations within a chapter are at least somewhat related. One advantage of this format is that the reader can open the book nearly anywhere and find an idea that can be considered independently of other parts of the book. The intent is to provide on every page stepping stones that allow the reader to go a bit further by mulling over an idea

How Romantics and Victorians Organized Information

How Romantics and Victorians Organized Information
Author: Jillian M. Hess
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2022-06-02
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0192648489

Every literary household in nineteenth-century Britain had a commonplace book, scrapbook, or album. Coleridge called his collection "Fly-Catchers", while George Eliot referred to one of her commonplace books as a "Quarry," and Michael Faraday kept quotations in his "Philosophical Miscellany." Nevertheless, the nineteenth-century commonplace book, along with associated traditions like the scrapbook and album, remain under-studied. This book tells the story of how technological and social changes altered methods for gathering, storing, and organizing information in nineteenth-century Britain. As the commonplace book moved out of the schoolroom and into the home, it took on elements of the friendship album. At the same time, the explosion of print allowed readers to cheaply cut-and-paste extractions rather than copying out quotations by hand. Built on the evidence of over 300 manuscripts, this volume unearths the composition practices of well-known writers such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Sir Walter Scott, George Eliot, and Alfred Lord Tennyson, and their less well-known contemporaries. Divided into two sections, the first half of the book contends that methods for organizing knowledge developed in line with the period's dominant epistemic frameworks, while the second half argues that commonplace books helped Romantics and Victorians organize people. Chapters focus on prominent organizational methods in nineteenth-century commonplacing, often attached to an associated epistemic virtue: diaristic forms and the imagination (Chapter Two); "real time" entries signalling objectivity (Chapter Three); antiquarian remnants, serving as empirical evidence for historical arguments (Chapter Four); communally produced commonplace books that attest to socially constructed knowledge (Chapter Five); and blank spaces in commonplace books of mourning (Chapter Six). Richly illustrated, this book brings an archive of commonplace books, scrapbooks, and albums to the reader.