Thought while listening to Studio 360.

Suppose you can travel back in time, and the rule is that you can change things that don't have any effects that endure to the future time you came from. You can then meet someone to whom it seems you can do anything. That person would then have to confront the fact that in a concrete, measurable way, nothing they do really matters.

I suppose some sci fi story somewhere has dealt with this idea.

"A standing army is like a standing member...

A standing army is like a standing member. It's an excellent assurance of domestic tranquility, but a dangerous temptation to foreign adventure."

NYT on textbook prices.

The New York Times money blog has a post about saving money on textbooks. Mostly it just covers the standard advice on finding cheaper books, but it does contain a couple interesting statistics.

"College textbook prices rose about 6 percent, on average, every year — that’s twice the rate of inflation — from 1986 to 2004."

...

“We are finding that 75 percent of students still prefer print to digital,” Ms. Allen added."

For my students the number is around 95%. Our population is a little older, but more importantly, they are a lot poorer.

Thankfully, federal rules that went into effect in July may help ease the pain. Publishers can no longer bundle their textbooks with accompanying materials like workbooks without offering the items separately, and they must reveal their prices to professors when making a sales pitch. Colleges, meanwhile, are now required to provide students with a list of assigned textbooks during course registration, which allows for more time for shopping before classes begin.

I heard people at the AAPT talking about the regulations and what a pain they are, but we have nothing at our institution regarding this. I'm pretty sure I could get in compliance quickly if I needed to, though.

Loftis, J. Robert: "Breaking the Back of Perverse Incentives: Ending High Textbook Prices for Good with Free Online Textbooks"

I gave a talk at the AAPT arguing three connected theses:

1. Textbook prices are an injustice
2. Philosophy teachers have a professional duty to create and use free online textbooks
3. This duty is best fulfilled using what I call the Open Office model

. The Open Office model simply means that you try to replicate functionality of the existing closed access product without innovating a lot. This contrasts with the Linux model, which tries to displace an expensive product by creating something that works better, but is unfamiliar and difficult for most users. Most existing free textbooks, I think, are written on the Linux model.

At the conference, a lot of people were talking up concept mapping software, xmind in particular. So the night before the talk I decided to give xmind a whirl by making a concept map for my talk. this is what I came up with. I think I made the whole thing too big. It is hard to figure out what the print area of these diagrams are.

This is the handout, which lists free textbooks and course materials databases along with little descriptions and recommendations.

A sample from our garden

A sample from our garden
Originally uploaded by rob helpychalk.

While we were out of town, everything went crazy.

Peter Bradley, John Basl, Rudy Garns "Social Networking Technology and Teaching Philosophy."

Peter Bradley, John Basl, Rudy Garns "Social Networking Technology and Teaching Philosophy."

Peter

Textbooks are like client-server systems; we need textbooks that work more like peer networks.

Why not make distributed textbooks? Every part of writing a textbook is social, so lets doing social media.

He actually has a free online critical thinking textbook, that comes with a printed version, and in use at 3 schools. USE THIS.

He is collecting critical thinking examples at http://inquiry.mcdaniel.edu/, and wants start crowdsourcing the database of examples.

John (remotely using wimba classroom)

Twitter!

What can you get your students to do on Twitter? Write a haiku or a tweet summarizing the reading.

#PhilQ is the hashtag for philosophical questions

I am now following him on twitter.

Google Wave!

Rudy

All his stuff is here

He uploaded his slides to slideshare.com. Use this in the future.

Mostly familiar technologies. He puts his classes on groups.diigo.com for social bookmarking. Also netvibes.

Alexandra Bradner, Chris Weigl & Emily Esch, "Pedagogical Issues in Experimental Philosophy"

“Clickers and experimental philosophy”

Alexandra:

Sample survey

Emily

What experimental philosophy is.

Empirical philosophy: Any philosophy where people use empirical work, generally from other disciplines. People have been doing this for ever. John Doris Lack of Character

Experimental philosophy: Philosophers who run their own experiments.

Negative project vs. positive progress

Negative: Bashing conceptual analysis. Intuitions are suspect, subject to framing effects, etc.

Positive: Finding out what folk concepts people actually have. Useful work on personal identity and free will. Sean Nichols on agency.

Knobe (2006). [Josh Knobe founding father of movement.)

Environmental question: chairman of the board intentionally harmed the environment but not intentionally helped.

Chris

What unique discussions can experimental philosophy bring to a class?

Nahmias and Nadelhoffer “Polling in teaching philosophy” in teaching philosophy.


Guy goes off on whether these should be called “thought experiments” or “hypotheticals”

Why does this matter?

How can we best integrate experimental philosophy with traditional texts?

Intro level: In the background while talking about thought experiments
Upper level: As an explicit metaphilosophical issue.

What special challenges does teaching experimental philosophy face?

Emily

Introduction to philosophy with experimental philosophy
Units covered: Morality, personality Identity, Epistemology, Free Will, God

Thought experiments covered: Trolley, transplant, experience machine, ship of Theseus, soul switching, eletransporter, Gettier, truetemp, trapped conversationalist, drug addict, Pascal’s wager

She used the thought experiment at the intro with no background. Surveys on pencil and paper. Tabulated by prof.

Benefits

Comprehension: Its worse than you thought. People don’t understand the thought experiments

Participation

Variation: increased rigor makes the variation in intuitions more salient.

Justification: leads people to justify their answers.

Alexandra:

Paper version of original survey. “Always have a plan B when you are working with technology”

Turningpoint Anywhere. With Response XR clicker.

Her recommended system:

Bioethics guy has a turning point ppt on the turning point website. This si very good.
Polleverywhere.com

Use cell phones or laptops

Disadvantage: It just draws attention to people who are lower income.

Surveymonkey:

Best for research. Lets you do branching surveys. Easy to print from.

Frogmetrics

Coolest clicker ever.
Higher ed unfriendly.
Great metrics.

Chris

Namias, et al., Nichols and Knobe. Good articles using x-phi in the free will area.

Stephen Finn “Creating in class exercises to hone philosophy skills”

Stephen Finn “Creating in class exercises to hone philosophy skills”

He’s under contract to create an exercise book—this is part of the writing of it. Send him an email if you want to use any of his exercises.

[Kinds of exercises:
Writing
Arguments/critical thinking
Intuition listing
Looking carefully over schemes/lists
Close reading
Decision making/question answering.]


Today the agenda is to develop a list of philosophy skills and exercises that work those skills.

What are the skills students need to succeed in a philosophy course?]

Critical reading for philosophy
Finding an argument.
Identifying intent
Indentifying larger conversation.
Analysing arguments
Writing skills
Articulation
Citation.
Reflective equilibrium.
Rauhut’s quizzes
How to ask a question.
Socratic prompts from changingminds.org.  good
Engaging other views.
Oral presentation.
“understanding the question to which their reading is the answer”
Dealing with thought experiments
“Distinguishing fact and opinion claims” (AARGH why would a philosopher use this distinction.)

He hands out some exercises.

We do Skill #3 analyzing philosophical texts: What is the au doing—claiming, arguing, questioning, informing, defining, etc.

Group one on skill one
• Group response: “We got hung up on just what you meant by the instructions.”
• “I like to emphasize re-reading. Have them read it. Say what they think. And then read it again.
• Use one sheet per group to force group interaction.
• “what did you learn new on the third reading”

Group two and three: Skill three
• You need background on what these things are.
• Write numbers next to sentences. Let students write multiple numbers.
• Annotate text on a smart board. Give them your own annotated text with you system.

Group four on skill 9
• Group response: “We got hung up on just what you meant by the instructions.”


“Are there uniquely philosophical skills?”
“No. what we are doing is reinforcing skill sets across disciples. Right now, the way the university is compartmentalized, students compartmentalize not just their knowledge, but their skills. Philosophy breaks that down.”



Small groups again

• State elaborate exemplify: Reading exercises. For each passage state the point, elaborate on it, exemplify it. “Do you add evaluation later” “Not that this stage.”
• Analytical outline for their own writing. You’ve got a draft, try to figure out what it actually says. “Does this carry over into other texts?”
• Have two students attempt to summarize the same paragraph. See if they match.
• Powerpoint arguments with blanks.
•
“I think the more structure the better with introductory students.”

Understanding Bakugon

Joey is obsessed (for this week at least) with Bakugon, so I thought I'd make an effort to understand the game underlying the product line. Joey doesn't understand it either, but I thought if one of us did, we could have more fun.

Right away, I am perplexed by things that I imagine kids just blow right over. The video says "Bakugon represent six important attributes," and then list six funny made up names. How do you "represent" an "attribute"? Based on other things Joey watched, I think they mean that there are six kinds of Bakugon. But they might mean that each Bakugon has six properties that you need to keep track of. Why is this so ambiguous? For all the fancy animation, did they not bother to get a good translation of the original game instructions?

Other comments: I don't want to show Joey these instructional videos, because he's going to want to buy too many things. Also, he will want to simply watch the video repeatedly with me. And then he'll want another movie. And then he'll want to spend the day watching Youtube videos.

At least the don't insist that the kid who wins the game gets to keep the other kid's toys.

So what is the smallest amount of money I can spend and still have enough plastic crap to sit down and play a game of Bakugon with my son?

Bakucoin? There is a Bakucoin? What does that do?

Ok, if you buy a Bakutriad pack you get 3 Bakugon, three gate cards, and three ability cards, which is enough for one side of a Bakugon battle. If we purchased two of these, we'd have enough for a game. Next question: If we scoured the house and sorted through all the plastic crap would we find this much Bakugon paraphernalia?

Baku = explode
Gan = sphere.

And again, it is hard to tell what exactly you are purchasing, if you try to buy the product on Ebay.

If we went to Target or Toys 'r' us to get Bakugon, we could make it a fun expedition what would get the kids out of Mom's hair for several hours. But we'd probably wind up buying more crap than we wanted.

Do we even want to go down this route? The game is designed to encourage you to buy more crap.

Federal Health Care Aid for Illegal Immigrants

So far I've been avoiding researching the situation with illegal immigrants and health care, even though every time I teach medical ethics, I have students claim that it is unfair that they have to pay for health care while those illegal immigrants get it for free. This year I'm going to deal with, though, because I have a couple very intelligent, hardworking students writing papers on it, one with personal experience on the subject.

So I've just tried to get people to be more specific about what federal programs they are actually talking about. My thought was that this would deflate hysterical rhetoric of the "OMG those lazy, coddled immigrants get free everything, like health care, and pie!" sort. The problem with this tactic is that the law here is simply a mess. We are dealing with two of the most incoherent, contradictory legal areas in the US: health care payments and immigration. If you could find a way to throw in the tax code, you would have a federal gibberish trifecta.

So far, one of my students has cited the The Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act of 1986 and the Alien Emergency Medical Program, which is mandated as a part of the Welfare Reform Act.

This might wind up as a case of justice vs. compassion, at least if you read all arguments with maximum charity, which would be interesting.

The Opposite of Mother is not Father, Dammit.

One of Caroline's activity books asserts that the opposite of "mother" is "father." Actually, a lot of children's books and toys make mistakes like that. If two things are commonly paired, the designer of the product thinks they are opposites. So salt and pepper are opposites. I've emphasized to Caroline that these people are simply wrong. To be opposites, the member of a pair must cancel each other out. Still, I'm particularly galled by idea that the *opposite* of "mother" is "father."

Scoobie-Doo Realism

wants to posit that there is an intellectual movement that should be called "Scoobie-Doo Realism." People take up a stance of Scoobie-Doo Realism when they pose as hard nosed advocates of science and objectivity, because they can unmask a traditionally mysterious figure. This despite the fact that their own explanations make no sense and they hang out with a talking dog.

Experts: "We're Fucked"

The industry professionals at The Oil Drum suspect that the real leak in the Deepwater Horizon site is not at the blowout preventer, but 1,000 feet below the sea floor. BP may have even been trying to increase the flow at the sea floor to relieve pressure on the leak 1,000 feet below.

The post is full of technical industry talk (and rather badly edited) so it is hard for me to figure out exactly what they are saying, but there seem to be two further catastrophes to fear. Apparently the sea floor there is just silt that doesn't really provide any support for the blowout preventer. The preventer is just resting on the 1000 foot pipe beneath it, which now seems to be buckling. The other problem is that the sea floor itself might be opening up, causing the whole oil reserve to come to the surface at once. I'm not sure how this outcome is compatible with the worry about the pipe collapsing, since it seem to imply that the sea floor is a solid mass that can shatter, which they just said it wasn't. I'd like to see more explanations of this stuff.

Update: Prof. Goose from The Oil Drum has stopped by Unfogged to explain some things http://tinyurl.com/3xunewu. He points out that the article is by a TOD commenter, not a regular writer. Goose points to comments on The Oil Drum thread that undermine dougr's original post. A guy calling himself R2-3D points to other signs that would be present if there had been a casing blow out beneath the sea floor. Maybe we should leave this to the experts to debate before we reach higher levels of panic than we have currently.

End of the School Year

Every weekday this year, a small line of first graders (including Caroline) has formed on my front lawn, waiting to board the bus. Often one child's younger brother got in line too. He is around three and was inevitably wearing pajamas. He just wants to be like the big kids. His mom made sure he didn't actually get on the bus. School is over after today, and I will miss this little ritual.