TEXT 1 below, retrieved and adapted from https://chroniclingamerica. loc.gov/lccn/sn83035487/1851-06-21/ed-1/seq-4/ on July 9th,2018.

Text 1

Women’s rights convention – Sojourner Truth

One of the most unique and interesting speeches of the convention was made by Sojourner Truth, an emancipated slave. It is impossible to transfer it to paper or convey any adequate idea of the effect it produced upon the audience. Those only can appreciate it who saw her powerful form, her whole-souled, earnest gesture, and listened to her strong and truthful tones. She came forward to the platform and addressing the President said with great simplicity:

"May I say a few words?" Receiving an affirmative answer, she proceeded: I want to say a few words about this matter. I am a woman's rights. I have as much muscle as any man and can do as much work as any man. I have plowed and reaped and husked and chopped and mowed, and can any man do more than that? I have heard much about the sexes being equal. I can carry as much as any man, and can eat as much too, if I can get it. I am as strong as any man that is now. As for intellect, all I can say is, if a woman has a pint, and a man a quart -- why can't she have her little pint full? You need not be afraid to give us our rights for fear we will take too much; -- for we can't take more than our pint will hold. The poor men seem to be all in confusion, and don't know what to do. Why children, if you have woman's rights, give it to her and you will feel better. You will have your own rights, and they won't be so much trouble. I can't read, but I can hear. I have heard the bible and have learned that Eve caused man to sin. Well, if a woman upset the world, do give her a chance to set it right side up again. The Lady has spoken about Jesus, how he never spurned woman from him, and she was right. When Lazarus died, Mary and Martha came to him with faith and love and besought him to raise their brother. And Jesus wept and Lazarus came forth. And how came Jesus into the world? Through God who created him and the woman who bore him. Man, where was your part? But the women are coming up blessed be God and a few of the men are coming up with them. But man is in a tight place, the poor slave is on him, woman is coming on him, he is surely between a hawk and a buzzard.

Reference: Robinson, M. (1851, June 21). Women’s rights convention: Sojourner Truth. Anti-slavery Bugle, vol.6 no.41, Page 160.

Text V

Language Assessment and the new Literacy Studies

Some Final Remarks

Planning language assessment from a structuralist view of language has been a fairly easy task, since it aims at testing the correct use of grammar and lexical structures. This has been a very comfortable way to evaluate students’ performance in many regular schools or language institutes due to the stability of standardized answers. From the perspective of the new literacy studies, the comfort of teaching and assessing objective and homogeneous linguistic contents is replaced by a wider spectrum of language teaching and assessing possibilities, whose key elements turn to be difference and critique. Typical activities based on this new approach would enable students to make and negotiate meanings in a much more flexible way, corroborating the novel notion of unstable, dynamic, collaborative and distributed knowledge.

The inclusion of contents of such nature in language assessments may be, at a first glance, a very laborious process due to the fact we are simply not accustomed to that. Actually, we sometimes find ourselves deprived from the teaching skills necessary to apply a more critical teaching approach, a fact that is much the results of our positivist educational background.

Nonetheless, since the emergent digital epistemology will require subject more capable of designing and redesigning meaning critically towards a great deal of representational modes, we need to reconsider our teaching approaches, go further and seek theories that take such issues into account. By redefining the notions of language and knowledge, we, thus, assume that the new literacy studies from the last decades may offer very good insights to the field of foreign language teaching.

The re-conceptualization of language assessment according to the new literacies project presented in this paper does not intend to suggest prompt fixed answers, but it takes the risk of outlining possible activities, signaling certain changes regarding its characteristics and contents, as previously shared.

The increasing importance of the new literacy and multiliteracies studies and their fruitful theoretical insight for the rethinking of pedagogical issues invite us to review our foreign language teaching practices in a different perspective. By sharing some of our local findings, we attempt to corroborate the collaborative and distributed knowledge discussed by the literacies theory itself and hope to be contributing to the new educational demands of the emerging epistemological basis.

From: DUBOC, A.P.M. Language Assessment and the new Literacy Studies. Lenguaje 37 (1),2009. pp.159-178, p.175-176.

Security: UAC Gets Tolerable

Let's talk about User Account Control ? the Windows
Vista security element that was a prominent example for
everything that bothered people about that OS. UAC aimed to
prevent rogue software from tampering with your PC by
endlessly prompting you to approve running applications or
changing settings. The experience was so grating that many
users preferred to turn UAC [PARTICLE] and [VERB] their
chances with Internet attackers. Those who left it active risked
slipping into the habit of incautiously clicking through every
prompt, defeating whatever value the feature might have had.

Whereas Vista's notorious User Account Control gave
users no control over the feature other than to turn it off,
Windows 7's version of UAC lets users choose from two
intermediate notification levels between 'Always notify' and
'Never notify'.

Windows 7 gives you control over UAC, in the form of a
slider containing four security settings. As before, you can
accept the full-blown UAC or elect to disable it. But you can also
tell UAC to notify you only when software changes Windows
settings, not when you're tweaking them yourself. And you can
instruct it not to perform the abrupt screen-dimming effect that
Vista's version uses to grab your attention.

If Microsoft had its druthers, all Windows 7 users [TO
USE] UAC in full-tilt mode: The slider that you use to ratchet
back its severity advises you not to do so if you routinely install
new software or visit unfamiliar sites, and it warns that disabling
the dimming effect is "Not recommended." , Redmond: I
have every intention of recommending the intermediate settings
to most people who ask me for advice, since those settings
retain most of UAC's theoretical value without driving users
bonkers.

(Adapted from
http://www.pcworld.com/article/172602/windows_7_review.html)

Old Tray, New Tricks: Windows 7's Taskbar and window
management tweaks are nice. But its changes to the
System Tray - aka the Notification Area - have a huge
positive effect.

Changes in Windows 7 transform the System Tray from
an intrusive eyesore (in Windows Vista) into a useful set of
shortcuts and other controls.
In the past, no feature of Windows packed more
frustration per square inch than the System Tray. It quickly grew
dense with applets that users did not want in the first place, and
many of the uninvited guests employed word balloons and
other intrusive methods to alert users to uninteresting facts at
inopportune moments. At their worst, System Tray applets
behaved like belligerent squatters, and Windows did little to put
users [PARTICLE] in charge.
In Windows 7, applets can't pester you unbidden
because software installers can't dump them into the System
Tray. Instead, applets land in a holding pen that appears only
when you click it, a much-improved version of the overflow area
used in previous incarnations of the Tray. Applets in the pen
can't float word balloons at you unless you permit them to do so.
In Windows 7, applets can't pester you unbidden
because software installers can't dump them into the System
Tray. Instead, applets land in a holding pen that appears only
when you click it, a much-improved version of the overflow area
used in previous incarnations of the Tray. Applets in the pen
can't float word balloons at you unless you permit them to do so.
It's a cinch to drag them into the System Tray or out of it again,
so you enjoy complete control over which applets reside there.
More good news: Windows 7 largely dispenses with the
onslaught of word-balloon warnings from the OS about
troubleshooting issues, potential security problems, and the like.
A new area called Action Center - a revamped version of Vista's
Security Center - queues up such alerts so you can deal with
them at your convenience. Action Center does issue
notifications of its own from the System Tray, but you can shut
these off if you don't want them pestering you.
All of this helps make Windows 7 the least distracting,
least intrusive Microsoft OS in a very long time. It's a giant step
forward from the days when Windows thought nothing of
interrupting your work to inform you that it had detected unused
icons on your desktop.

(Adapted from
http://www.pcworld.com/article/172602/windows_7_review.html)