Moral Status Survey

I use short surveys on philosophical issues as conversation starters in my classes. I've adapted one below for the intertubes as a part of my online bioethics course. The first two parts are Likert scale questions, and the third part has a few examples of discussion questions I use in class after I give out the quiz. I am grateful to any passers by who want to check it out and give feedback.

part 1

part 2

part 3

Online teaching materials from George McDonald Ross

George McDonald Ross has some very nice, but sadly incomplete electronic philosophy teaching materials online. The highlight are interactive reading tools for difficult philosophical texts. This is a sample of an interactive Kant reading. The reader is given a passage from Kant and then asked to select the best interpretation of it. Better yet, after that, she has to select the best reason to think that this is the best interpretation. After selecting both an interpretation and a reason, she gets a response. My only complaint is that the responses are too vague. Almost all of them boil down to "Yes, that is a reason."

George also has a very elaborate page for a Kant course which I have only poked around in a little. The nice thing about it is that you can get, in side-by-side frames, George's translation of the first critique and his commentary on it.

Also cool: lots of free online translations of historical texts in philosophy. He's got some Boethius in there, but not the Consolation. If there was a free student-friendly translations of the Consolation out there, I would be able to get through three-quarters of my intro class using free texts. (Right now I am using a nice translation of Plato for students by Cathal Woods and Ryan Pack made available under the creative commons license. I also use this nice free version of Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. which has been annotated for students by Jonathan Bennett.

"Local Idiot To Post Comment On Internet"

I've been collecting resources for my new online teaching project "How not to look like a moron on the internet" which I will use in conjunction with all my online classes. After careful consideration, I've decided not to use this. It is very funny and contains many teachable moments, but I think the part about a video of a man being sodomized by a horse means that it is not good teaching material for many parts of my audience.

I am, however, using Stupid Filter.

"Online teaching at my institution is a scam"

One thing I really like about the AAPT is that people use all of the classroom techniques that they are discussing in their presentations. So the session on teaching online, the always engaging Andrew Carpenter, featured small group work. In my group a gentleman in a blue shirt opened by voicing the exact concern that I have had about online teaching at a huge number of institutions, including perhaps LCCC: (paraphrasing) "You need to have some mechanisms to insure that people who take online courses are actually self motivated enough to finish them. Online at my institution is a scam. We have a fifty to sixty percent dropout rate. Students seek out these courses because they think they will be easier, and then they can't get their act together enough to finish the course."

This is a big deal. Right now students in online courses as self selected to be the exact kind of students who would do badly in them. They are signing up because they have time management issues. Either they are too unmotivated or too busy. Further, since online teaching is marketed to lower income and returning students, you are targeting people who are on the other side of the digital divide. I really the boosters of online teaching in administration and IT would address this issue.

ok, to the next talk.

liveblogging the American Association of Philosophy Teachers Conference

This event is always so fun and useful. I go to register last night and I run into someone who turns me on to this: a five week long in class role playing game based on historical situations. The game my colleague was talking up was a recreation of Athens in 403 BCE culminating in the trial of Socrates with The Republic entered as evidence. Students are assigned roles like Alcibiades, and they have to research the character and present speeches on their behalf. Great stuff.

More soon.

Open Access Logic Textbooks

I've decided that my students should not have to pay for a logic textbook. Most textbooks are obscenely expensive., but logic textbooks in particular get in my craw. The formal systems that they teach have been a part of the human intellectual heritage for over a hundred years, and the textbooks don't do anything in particular to make more approachable for students. They survive on the laziness of instructors, not on any originality content or presentation

So logic is going to be the first class that I teach to use a free, open access textbook. But which one? Changing textbooks is hard. For a long time I used Hurley at SLU I switched to Barwise and Etchemendy, but I never quite adapted to it, and since it was too sophisticated for LCCC students, I've gone back to Hurley. But Hurley is crazy expensive at $155. So what to do?

Here is my first very quick survey

blogic, by David Velleman: Respected author, looks like a nice approach, but seems to be pitched at the same level as Barwise and Etchemendy. Also, there doesn't seem to be a download or print version available.

For All x: Covers all and only the standard topics with the standard approach. It looks like I could take this on without seriously changing the preps from my Hurley course. Available as .pdf or as a print-on-demand book from Lulu. The author says that when he teaches it, he simply takes the book to the copy shop and has it printed as a coursepack. very nice.

Introduction to Logic Online interactive textbook. Would be nice if I were teaching online, but would be an adjustment from what I currently do. Covers all and only the topics I want to cover, though.


Introduction to LogicA collection of modules from the Conections website of free course modules. Hard to adapt or for cc students to relate to. Tied to the Teachlogic website which looks mostly like it is about infusing logic into the computer science curriculum.

Formal Logic from wikibooks. Doesn't look approachable.

Heck, the Magnus book looks like just the item. That was quick. I wounder how quickly I can replace all my texts with open access books. There are some books, like Liszka's ethics text that I wouldn't want to replace, just because the book is so high quality. Munson's bioethics book is also very popular among students. My intro class right now relies on primary historical sources, which are generally available for free on line, but students have little problem shelling out $10 for the penguin version. I guess Critical Thinking should be next.

Other open access textbook resources

Make Textbooks Affordable

Connections

Wikibooks

Also useful:

Some free logic software from Hatzic. Not sure how to work this in pedagogically.

job advice

I would like to emphasize again that if someone says to you "Oh, yes, teaching on line is easy. I use this that and the other totally high tech method, and I get great responses from my students!" they are not offering you teaching advice. They are showing off. Under no circumstances should you try to do what they do.