Teaching

Grading War Letters to Home, Day 7

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson GradingWarLetterstoHome, Philosophy, RMWMTMBM Archive, Teaching 0 Comments

These are the letters from the seventh day of the Grading War.  If you landed here by accident and don’t know what you’re reading, click here for the backstory.11 December 2011, 9:09am  Dearest Leigh, I know not whether this missive will find you, but I pray that, if it does, it finds you well. The…

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Philosophy’s Next Generation of Auteurs

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Digital Humanities, Film, Open Source Pedagogy, Philosophy, RMWMTMBM Archive, Teaching, Thinking in Images 0 Comments

Once again this semester, I assigned short-film projects to the students in my Existentialism course.  And once again, the products of that assignment (which I only just finished grading) were amazing.  I’ve employed this assignment in select courses for the last several years and each year the students’ films have gotten more and more impressive. …

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Grading War Letters to Home, Day 3

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson GradingWarLetterstoHome, Philosophy, RMWMTMBM Archive, Teaching 0 Comments

These are the letters from the third day of the Grading War.  If you landed here by accident and don’t know what you’re reading, click here for the backstory. 7 December 2013, 11:20am Dearest Marcus, Oh Happy Day! This morn found my heart both gladdened and relieved after procuring news that Providence continues to shelter…

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Grading War Letters to Home, Day 4

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson GradingWarLetterstoHome, Philosophy, RMWMTMBM Archive, Teaching 0 Comments

These are the letters from the fourth day of the Grading War.  If you landed here by accident and don’t know what you’re reading, click here for the backstory. 8 December 2013, 11:35pm My Dearest Leigh,  It is my sincere hope that these few words find you well. I have had no time to write,…

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Tolerance Is Not A Virtue

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Open Source Pedagogy, Philosophy, Politics, RMWMTMBM Archive, Teaching, Women and Gender Issues 0 Comments

Let me be clear at the outset: when I say that tolerance is not a virtue, I’m saying that as a philosopher for whom virtue has a conceptually substantive meaning.  I do not mean to imply that tolerance is a vice, a claim to which I think no reasonable moral agent, and no philosopher worth…

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AltAc, TransAc, PostAc and Just Plain Old ACK!

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Philosophy, Politics, RMWMTMBM Archive, Teaching 0 Comments

Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow published a piece a few days ago in the NYT entitled “The Repurposed Ph.D.,” which served as my first introduction to the neologism “post-academic.” The abbreviated (and eminently hashtaggable) version of that term– “PostAc”– is something like the poorer, sadder and less pretty twin of “AltAc” (“alternative academic”), which has for the last…

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Doctor Nobody, or: How I Learned to Stop Sitting Passively By and Actually Fight the MOOC Machine

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Open Source Pedagogy, Philosophy, Politics, RMWMTMBM Archive, Teaching 67 Comments

As just-another college professor, it’s hard not to feel like the war against MOOCs is more than a little bit like the War on Drugs, or the War or Terror, or the War on Poverty.  The “enemy” is largely nonspecific, nonlocatable, plural, mutable, incredibly powerful and often invisible.  It’s hard to tell on which front…

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Concepts in Motion (or, Why You Should Assign Short-Films in Philosophy Courses)

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Film, Open Source Pedagogy, Philosophy, Pop Culture/Film/Literature, RMWMTMBM Archive, Teaching, Thinking in Images 0 Comments

“I say that I do philosophy, which is to say that I try to invent concepts.  What if I say, to you who do cinema: what do you do?” –Gilles Deleuze French philosopher Gilles Deleuze famously speculated in Cinema 1 (1983) that what he called the “movement-image,” a unique creative product of cinema, makes it…

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Facebook Privacy Dis-Agreement

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Digital Humanities, Philosophy, Pop Culture/Film/Literature, RMWMTMBM Archive, Teaching 0 Comments

It’s been a little while since the inhabitants of Facebookistan got all fired up about something–  where are you now Kony2012?— so I was half-delighted and half-disheartened to see the newest brouhaha to hit the social media site, which I’m calling the Facebook Privacy Dis-Agreement (FPD).  As these things tend to happen, FPD had been…

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Why I Stood With The Students

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Human Rights, Occupy Movement, Politics, RMWMTMBM Archive, Teaching 0 Comments

As I reported in my previous post, students at my college organized an event last Monday night, the Rhodes Solidarity Vigil, which was meant to demonstrate solidarity with the nonviolent student protesters at UC-Davis (and elsewhere) who were brutalized by police while peacefully exercising their right to assemble. This is why I stood with the…

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