Open Source Pedagogy

Deconstructing Sasha Fierce

I’m guessing that many of us have those fleeting fantasies from time to time in which we conjure up what we imagine would be the AWESOMEST. COURSE. EVER. For example, my fantasy courses: “I’m Not Here To Make Friends: Ethics and Reality TV” (sort of a cross between ethical theory, applied ethics, and existentialism), or…

Read More

Cold War In The Classroom

Dr. Miller, aka Anotherpanacea, has called me to account for my post a few days ago (“Why I Won’t Turn It In“), in which I detailed my objections to the pay-per-plagiarism-police service known as Turnitin.com. AnPan does use the service, and he offers his own justifications for that choice in his post titled “Why I…

Read More

Why I Won’t Turn It In

I recently learned that my institution has signed up for Turnitin.com, an Internet “plagiarism-prevention” service that allows professors to submit students’ papers and checks them against other submissions to verify that they’ve not been copied. There’s no mandate at my institution yet (as far as I know) for faculty to participate, and so I plan…

Read More

Thinking In Images

I was at a dinner party recently with colleagues and, per usual, the conversation at some point turned to bemoaning students’ sometimes less-than-ideal language skills. The complaints were standard fare– what ever happened to proper grammar? to sophisticated and orderly essay construction? to close and careful reading skills? to the capacity for clearly translating ideas…

Read More

The Things They Take With Them From Class

I’m inclined to just post this image without any explanation at all. It’s a snapshot of a status update I saw on Facebook yesterday in reference to my colleague Dr. Grady and myself. Grady is teaching Kant’s first Critique right now, and I just began teaching Marx in my 19th C. Philosophy course. (You can…

Read More

Outbursts I’ve Considered, Then Thought Better Of…

I don’t think I’ve said so officially on this blog yet, but the NBC sitcom “Community” is one of the funniest things on television in a long, long time. It’s about a group of ne’er-do-well’s attending community college who accidentally fall into a Spanish “study group” together. Much hilarity ensues. The group’s Spanish professor, SeƱor…

Read More

More Experiments in Pedagogy

As readers of this blog know, I implemented a new pedagogical technique in all of my courses a while back that I called “blogging in the classroom” and that I described here and here. (If you scroll down on the column to your right, you can find links to the student blogs for courses I…

Read More

You Are Not Going To Be Famous

Take a look at this short lecture (only about 10 minutes) that Jim Hanas delivered as a part of the “useless lecture series” that he helps curate. According to Hanas, the point of his address was to debunk what he calls “America’s Big Lie,” the one perhaps best epitomized by Andy Warhol’s famous remark about…

Read More

Teaching Naked

In an article from The Chronicle of Higher Education entitled “When Computers Leave Classrooms, So Does Boredom”, Jeffrey Young reports that the Dean of Meadows School of the Arts at Southern Methodist University has recently banned all “machines” from classrooms and challenged his faculty to “teach naked” … by which he means, to teach without…

Read More

Small Groups

Last week and this week, I’m participating in the annual seminar that reviews and (occasionally) amends the curriculum of the core humanities course-sequence at my college. Some of the work that we do is tedious and bureaucratic, but a lot of it includes really interesting sessions on pedagogy, core text discussions, interdisciplinarity and more general…

Read More