Open Source Pedagogy

A Conversation with Your Past Self

This semester, I’m giving my students the option to submit a video “Conversation with My Past Self” in lieu of taking the Final Exam. I was inspired by this video that I saw on Julie Nolke’s YouTube channel, in which she sits down at the breakfast table and chats with the January 2020 version of herself….

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Studenting White Quarantined

I created this infographic for my students. Feel free to steal, share, edit, whatevs. You can also access it at this link.

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What If You Were Gerald McGrew?: A “Rebuild the Internet” Thought Experiment

You may remember the story by Dr. Seuss (nĂ©, Theodore Seuss Geisel) from 1950 entitled If I Ran the Zoo, in which the pint-sized protagonist, Gerald McGrew, imagines the amazing creation he could bring about if he were allowed to run the zoo. If I Ran the Zoo is not only a great story about the never-before-seen exotic animals…

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What To Assign If You Want To Teach The Future (Redux)

ICYMI, I posted the first iteration of “What To Assign If You Want To Teach The Future” last year at the conclusion of my advanced seminar called “Technology and Human Values.” I’m now teaching that course every semester and, because both emerging technology and the scholarship about it is being produced at a mind-boggling pace,…

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Helping Students Become “One-Handed” Writers

There has been a push recently to encourage more “forward facing” philosophy, a long overdue and welcome development in our profession. However, for better or worse, what gets called “public philosophy”– the aim of this push– remains pretty vaguely defined. On the one hand, some argue that public philosophy should have real-world applications, though their…

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Postmillennial Public Service Announcements

For the last several years, I’ve been trying to incorporate new assignments and activities that encourage students to think of the work they do in my courses as having real impact on their lives outside of the classroom. I’m trying to work against their tendency to sit through a course as if they were a…

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An Experiment in the Redistribution of Grades, Part 3

What follows is the conclusion to a three-part series of posts detailing a pedagogical experiment that I tried out for the first time this term, which I call “An Experiment in the Redistribution of Grades” (ERG). You should read all the details of ERG in the original post here, but the basic idea was to give students…

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