Journal

MOOC Justice?

One of the clearest explications of what's at stake in online education today has been made public as an open letter from the San Jose State University's Philosophy Department to Michael Sandel regarding the use of the EdX MOOC on Justice.

“What kind of message are we sending our students if we tell them that they should best learn what justice is by listening to the reflections of the largely white student population from a privileged institution like Harvard?”

"The Document: An Open Letter from San Jose State U.'s Philosophy Department," The Chronicle of Higher Education - http://bit.ly/10aXPqW

Humanities STEM

“We’re not as different as they think. Yes, calculus is one of the great achievements of the human mind, but Hamlet is another. The violin is a third. With apologies to C.P. Snow, humanities versus sciences is a false dichotomy. Both the sciences and the humanities require deep creativity and intellectualism, an ability and desire to use reason, and a willingness to change your mind. When they attack the humanities, they are attacking all of us, they just don’t understand enough science to know it.”

"Why STEM Should Care About the Humanities" The Chronicle - http://chronicle.com/blogs/conversation/?p=4037

Plagiarism 101

“I conceded, however, that the effort required to produce such a convincing act of plagiarism would not be substantially less than the effort required to produce an honest research paper.”

"Successful Plagiarism 101" The Chronicle - http://bit.ly/10WAMTp

On Shipwrecks

I sometimes liken studying humanities at Newcastle to engaging the ocean beaches here. In the beginning of your studies you learn to swim, avoid riptides, and maybe start to body surf a bit in the waves. More advanced students eventually learn to make surfboards with wood lying about and some become quite acrobatic. Later even boats can be made and whole crews join massive research vessels that take off to sail the ocean blue. However, it seems to me that advanced studies in philosophy, religion and theology are something more akin to scuba diving. We study those ships that sink, interrogating their integrity under extreme conditions. Our task includes the various disciplines that surf and sail, maybe even sublating them to draw on Hegel's terminology. However, our aim is to look beneath the waves. It might be called an interest in substance, but probably best to leave it vague given how many ways we've come to think of being since Aristotle first identified metaphysics as such.

To some surfers it's hard to tell what we're doing, as we're invisible below the water. To others who care to peak, it seems rather odd that we might be interested in such de(con)struction. Still the passion for scuba is so strong that I've even known some of my colleagues to sink old ships intentionally and wait for the coral to grow. It's messy at first, but soon, whole new ecosystems develop. New schools of fish come to swim and eek out an existence (new sharks too). I've come to think that some of the new things we're doing in religion and theology at Newcastle require some sinking and settling. But there's a reef waiting for us if our wreck catches those age old ocean currents.

Online Ed

A slew of articles have been posted the past few weeks about the "revolution" in online education ventures like Coursera and Edx, but also more widely in universities around the world. I thought I'd just post a few of these articles here in one go as well as provide a few comments. 

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Religion in a Chinese MBA

“The executive M.B.A. curriculum at Cheung Kong includes classes on philosophy, Eastern and Western religion, global history and literature. ‘We hope our executive students can strive for enlightened lives — it may not be attainable, but it should be strived for,’ Mr. Xiang said.”

"In China, Executives Flock Back to Graduate School" - http://nyti.ms/XIAeRS

UC Online

“Online classes are and will be part of the educational mix, in California and elsewhere. But they cannot be counted on to revive a beleaguered public system whose mission is to educate a great many freshmen who need close instruction and human contact to succeed. To broaden access and preserve what is left of the public university, California lawmakers will need to change budget priorities that have been moving in the wrong direction for a long time.”

"Resurrecting California's Public Universities - http://nyti.ms/10r8ltK

You're Distracted

“The e-mail drill was one of numerous mind-training exercises in a unique class designed to raise students’ awareness about how they use their digital tools. Colleges have experimented with short-term social-media blackouts in the past. But Ms. Hill’s course, ‘Information and Contemplation,’ goes way further. Participants scrutinize their use of technology: how much time they spend with it, how it affects their emotions, how it fragments their attention. They watch videos of themselves multitasking and write guidelines for improving their habits. They also practice meditation—during class—to sharpen their attention.”

"You're Distracted, This Professor Can Help" The Chronicle - http://bit.ly/16c1Obi

Notes for Online Learning

I finished an annual review document for theology programs here in Newcastle. We've had some successes with some of our pilot courses, which blend online and face to face learning. The feedback we get from students is consistent with what has been coming through in the analysis of new online courses cited on The Chronicle of Higher Education, as well as in a recent article just posted in the New York Times this week, which summarises some quantitative studies done on this issue.

“A five-year study, issued in 2011, tracked 51,000 students enrolled in Washington State community and technical colleges. It found that those who took higher proportions of online courses were less likely to earn degrees or transfer to four-year colleges.... Interestingly, the center found that students in hybrid classes — those that blended online instruction with a face-to-face component — performed as well academically as those in traditional classes. But hybrid courses are rare, and teaching professors how to manage them is costly and time-consuming.

The online revolution offers intriguing opportunities for broadening access to education. But, so far, the evidence shows that poorly designed courses can seriously shortchange the most vulnerable students.”

- "The Trouble with Online College" - http://nyti.ms/W9bBZq

See also, http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/?p=42521

Locke and Hobbes

I was reading in philosophical hermeneutics this past month for something I was writing. I came across an excellent essay by Anthony Thiselton on "New Testament Interpretation in Historical Perspective." What jumped out at me was how much time political philosophers like Locke and Hobbes spent interpreting the bible to promote their own rationalist aims. Mark Lilla makes a similar point in his recent The Stillborn God. Whereas some secularists avoid theology for the sake of the political order, Lilla contends that the key to a healthy secular society is a certain degree of sophistication in political theology. He cites Hobbes in particular as a master at using political theology towards secularising ends. In any case, whether religious or not, theological literacy is valuable to thinking and engaging the claims of religion in public.

This March 21, Russell Blackford will be giving a Religion in Political Life seminar at the University of Newcastle's Cultural Collections. He'll discuss his new Blackwells Press book, Freedom of Religion and the Secular State, where he explicitly discusses Locke's proposal. In any case, here's how Thiselton puts it:

“There is a parallel to Locke in the response of Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) to royalist appeals to Christian theology to support the divine right of kings and to parliamentarian appeals to a doctrine of the priesthood of all believers to support a more egalitarian political order. Locke and Hobbes approached theological issues independently against a theologically or ecclesially manipulative background. Locke produced a painstaking critical apparatus of notes on Paul to serve the single ‘plain meaning,’ which was to cut across all social and religious attempts to commandeer Pauline texts for manipulative purposes. His motivation was not a ‘secular worldview’ as such; he was a religious man. The issue was not an assimilation of Christian faith into his empirical or rationalist philosophy. Too often Locke has been seen through the eyes of the ecclesiastical writers of his own time who formulated counterattacks against his use of the common sense ‘reason’ and his appeals to the ‘plain sense’ of the Bible. But he appealed to reason, not against genuine faith as such, but against manipulative religion, whether from the political and religious left or from the political and religious right.”
— Anthony Thiselton "New Testament Intperpretation in Historical Perspective" pp. 11-12

Stems and Soil

This time of year I often feel the need to say why the humanities matter in a university. It's linked to why I get up in the morning or do what I think I am doing as a lecturer in religion and theology. But I also feel obligated to explain its value for incoming students. Implied here is the question, "What do I do with that degree?" To some degree this is an economic question of sustenance. But, so too, implied in this question are metaphysical suppositions about what "matters." Increasingly, our understanding of the world is shaped by a rather limited materialism which refuses to face questions of love, beauty, history and cultural and religious beliefs. Terry Eagleton's recent Faith, Reason and Revolution addressed this, and I don't mean to suggest that there is not a live debate here. Quite the opposite. It seems increasingly important to raise the materialist question again and again in order to avoid the rather banal assumption that degrees in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, or STEM subjects, can do without the soil of the humanities. 

Of course, nobody would deny that we need more engineers to help design better buildings, more efficient transport, and biologists to keep working on cures to the pandemics we face. Some of the most complex mathematics sit behind one of the most simple buttons we click each day, Google's search. However, what good are such things when people fly airplanes into buildings, or unleash biological disease upon a rival population?

As I introduced the incoming students studying religion and theology this year, the key value I hope they learn is cognative empathy, that ability to step into the shoes of another and really understand their disposition. Reading others well, especially those we disagree with, is crucial to this habit. It seems to me that the humanities are about training students in the habits of the mind which underwrite civil society. They provide the historical, literary and cultural understanding to examine and interrogate the human condition.

To use another analogy, one of the great challenges in physics today is to develop a theory which can account for newtonian and quantum mechanics together. "God does not play with dice," Einstein quipped, at the rather probabilistic whacky-ness of the quantum view of reality. The challenge can also be summed up as the relationship between two forces. While gravity is a weak force which nonetheless orders planetary movements, the atomic forces which quantum mechanics accounts for are incredibly strong. The world that seems solid and stable to us is actually mostly empty space held together by atomic forces, electrons, neutrons, etc. The analogy is that whereas the STEM subjects seem to be rather strong forces building, healing and creating, the humanities function like weak gravity. Cultural and religious understanding, the ability to empathise with the positions of others, is a weak force. However, our everyday sense of decency in civil society utterly depends upon it.

As so many recent philosophers have understood, the enlightenment values which undergird democratic societies are fragile. The so-called postmodern critique of the likes of Derrida were meant to call our attention to this fragility, not undermine it.  

The Wealth of Words

“Why should vocabulary size be related to achieved intelligence and real-world competence?... Words are fantastically effective chunking devices. Suppose you put a single item into your working memory—say, “Pasteur.” So long as you hold in your long-term memory a lot of associations with that name, you don’t need to dredge them up and try to cram them into your working memory. The name serves as a brief proxy for whatever aspects will turn out to be needed to cope with your problem. The more readily available such proxies are for you, the better you will be at dealing with various problems. Extend this example to whole spheres of knowledge and experience, and you’ll realize that a large vocabulary is a powerful coping device that enhances one’s general cognitive ability.”

E.D. Hirsch, "A Wealth of Words" City Journal - http://bit.ly/VsmTgn

Who are Mooc's most likely to help?

“Here’s the cruel part: The students from the bottom tier are often the ones who need face-to-face instruction most of all.

”The idea that they can have better education and more access at lower cost through massive online courses is just preposterous,” says Patricia A. McGuire, president of Trinity Washington University. Seventy percent of her students are eligible for Pell Grants, and 50 percent come from the broken District of Columbia school system. ...

Getting them to and through college takes advisers, counselors, and learning-disability experts — a fact Ms. McGuire has tried to convey to foundations, policy makers, and the public. But the reinvention conversation has had a “tech guy” fixation on mere content delivery, she says. “It reveals a lack of understanding of what it takes to make the student actually learn the content and do something with it.”

Amid the talk of disruptive innovation, “the real disruption is the changing demographics of this country,” Trinity’s president says. Waves of minority students, especially Hispanics, are arriving on campus, many at those lower-tier colleges, having come from schools that didn’t prepare them for college work. “The real problem here is that higher education has to repeat a whole lot of lower education,” Ms. McGuire says. “That has been drag on everyone.””

Edward Tenner, "Who are MOOCs Most Likely to Help?" The Atlantic - http://bit.ly/VTn8uR

Philosophy as an Art of Living

“All things considered, we should not lose sight of the fact that what I’ve described above is only one way of conceiving the relation between a philosopher’s work and her life. While predominant among the ancient philosophers, as well as among some modern ones (Montaigne and Nietzsche, for example), the understanding of philosophy as an “art of living” is far from characterizing mainstream academic philosophy in the twentieth or twenty-first centuries... However, things are not always that simple. In 1927 Martin Heidegger published Sein und Zeit, one of the most influential philosophical works of the twentieth century; some say the most important one. Only a few years later Heidegger joined the Nazi Party. His political involvement is often cited as one of the most serious mistakes a philosopher can ever make. We are shocked, and rightly so. And, yet, where does our shock come from? From the fact that some German called Martin Heidegger joined the Nazi Party or rather from the fact that a great philosopher by that name did it? If the latter, why exactly are we upset? Isn’t there at work, in our disappointment with Heidegger’s lamentable political options, an expectation, if an obscure one, that a philosopher’s life should be lead philosophically?”

Costica Bradatan, "Philosophy as an Art of Living," LA Review of Books - http://bit.ly/WOT6cD

Empathy and Outrospection

“Cognitive empathy… is about perspective taking, about stepping into somebody else’s world, almost like an actor looking through the eyes of their character. It’s about understanding somebody else’s worldview, their beliefs, their fears, the experiences that shape how they look at the world and how they look at themselves. We make assumptions about people. We have prejudices about people, which block us from seeing their uniqueness, their individuality. We use labels, and highly empathic people get beyond those labels by nurturing their curiosity about others… I think we need to think about bringing empathy into our everyday lives in a very sort of habitual way. Socrates said that the way to live a wise life was to know thyself, and we’ve generally thought of that as being about being self reflective, looking in at ourselves. It’s been about introspection. But I think that in the twenty-first century we need to recognize that to know thyself is something that can also be achieved by stepping outside yourself by discovering other people’s lives. And I think empathy is the way to revolutionize our own philosophies of life, to become more outrospective and to create the revolution of human relationships that I think we so desperately need.”
— Roman Krznaric, The Power of Outrospection, http://bit.ly/SI2gI0

Reinventing the Book

“‘I’m finding my literary skills incredibly valuable in software development, which is not something I would have expected. ... My ability to very precisely verbally describe how a reader engages a text, what a reader needs, turns out to be a huge asset in software development.’”

"Why a 17th-Century Text Is the Perfect Starting Point for Reinventing the Book," The Atlantic, http://bit.ly/SKMSNj

IOT on the Ontological Argument

“In the eleventh century St Anselm of Canterbury proposed that it was possible to prove the existence of God using reason alone. His argument was ridiculed by some of his contemporaries, but was analysed and improved by later thinkers including Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz. Other philosophers have been less kind, with the Enlightenment thinker David Hume offering one possible refutation. But the debate continued, fuelled by interventions from such heavyweights as Immanuel Kant and Kurt Gödel; and it remains one of the most discussed problems in philosophy.”

Melvyn Bragg discusses the Ontological Argument on the BBC Radio 4 program, In Our Time, http://bbc.in/STH9Q1

The Writing Revolution

“For years, nothing seemed capable of turning around New Dorp High School’s dismal performance—not firing bad teachers, not flashy education technology, not after-school programs. So, faced with closure, the school’s principal went all-in on a very specific curriculum reform, placing an overwhelming focus on teaching the basics of analytic writing, every day, in virtually every class. What followed was an extraordinary blossoming of student potential, across nearly every subject—one that has made New Dorp a model for educational reform.”