Author Archives: chendric

Lecture on Hobbes’ Leviathan

On Monday, Nov. 10, 2014, I gave a lecture on Hobbes’ Leviathan for Arts One at UBC. There is a video recording, but we don’t post those until after students have submitted their essays (so no one is tempted to skip lecture!). I’ll link to that when it’s ready.

I wanted to share my presentation slides here because, as usual, I didn’t get to everything I wanted to say (it’s so hard to gauge exactly how much you can fit into a 2-hour lecture (or rather, 2 50-minute lectures!). I wanted to let students (and anyone else who is interested) get a chance to see the last few slides.

Or rather, I used Prezi for the first time with this lecture. I like it because it allows you to group your slides together in ways that can show how the argument is structured. Only mine is a bit messy–what does that say about my argument in the lecture, eh?

Here’s the link to the Prezi itself (wish they had an embed function!)
http://prezi.com/c9u71sd-iegp/?utm_campaign=share&utm_medium=copy

I only got to the last three slides on the bottom (the powers of the sovereign, the liberty of subjects, and what subjects can’t do). If you saw the lecture, skip past those to see what else I was trying to say, and why I was gesturing towards thinking that maybe the Hobbesian state wouldn’t be monstrous, and maybe our state shares some similarities with a Hobbesian one.

Or, if you don’t want to go through the whole Prezi just to get to the last few slides, here they are (they’ll make sense, hopefully, by themselves if you saw the lecture).

The last three are zoomed into the frontispiece as if we were going into the body of the commonwealth; thus the grey background!

The “open” in MOOCs

I was part of a debate on the value of MOOCs for higher education during UBC’s Open Access Week, on Oct. 29, 2014.

Here is the description of the event and speaker bios, from the Open UBC 2014 website (not sure how long the link is going to be active, so copied the description here). (The following text is licensed CC-BY)

Debate: Are MOOCs Good for Higher Education?

Description

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are subject to both hype and criticism. In 2012, the New York Times declared it was the year of MOOC, while critics branded 2013 as the year of the anti-MOOC. Today, the debate about the impact that MOOCs are having, and will have, on higher education continues and the topic of MOOCs often dominates conversations and questions about how changes in technologies, pedagogies, learning analytics, economics, student demographics, and open education will impact student learning. Many universities, including UBC, are experimenting with MOOCs in different ways – from trying to understand how to scale learning to how to best use MOOC resources on campus.
This session will explore different types of MOOCs, the possible role for MOOCs in higher education, and their benefits and drawbacks.

Speaker Bios.

Angela Redish (moderator) is the University of British Columbia’s Vice Provost and Associate Vice President for Enrollment and Academic Facilities. Dr. Redish served as a professor in the Department of Economics in the Faculty of Arts at UBC for nearly 30 years. She received her PhD in Economics from the University of Western Ontario, and her subsequent research studied the evolution of the European and North American monetary and banking systems. She served as Special Adviser at the Bank of Canada in 2000-2001, and continues to be active in monetary policy debates. Her teaching has been mainly in the areas of economic history, monetary and macro-economies.

Jon Beasley-Murray is an Associate Professor of Latin American Studies at the University of British Columbia. He has taught a wide range of courses, from Spanish Language to Latin American literature surveys and seminars on topics ranging from “The Latin American Dictator Novel” to “Mexican Film.” His use of Wikipedia in the classroom has led to press coverage in multiple languages across the globe.

Jon is a vocal critic of the current model of learning and assessment common in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), especially for the Humanities. He blogs at Posthegemony and is the author of Posthegemony: Political Theory and Latin America. His current book projects include “American Ruins,” on the significance of six ruined sites from Alberta, Canada, to Santiago de Chile. He is also working on a project on “The Latin American Multitude,” which traces the relationships between Caribbean piracy and the Spanish state, and indigenous insurgency and the discourse of Latin American independence.

Gregor Kiczales is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia. Most of his research has focused on programming language design and implementation. He is best known for his work on aspect-oriented programming, and he led the Xerox PARC team that developed aspect-oriented programming and AspectJ. He is a co-author of “The Art of the Metaobject Protocol” and was one of the designers of the Common Lisp Object System (CLOS). He is also the instructor for the Introduction to Systematic Program Design MOOC at Coursera. His discussion of the benefits of MOOCs can be found on the Digital Learning blog.

Christina Hendricks is a Senior Instructor in Philosophy and Arts One at the University of British Columbia. While on sabbatical during the 2012-2013 academic year, she participated in a number of MOOCs, of different types. Ever since then she has used her MOOC participation as a form of professional development and a way to make connections with other teachers and researchers around the world. She has also been one of the co-facilitators for an open online course (not massive) at Peer 2 Peer University called“Why Open?”, and is a part of a project called Arts One Open that is opening up the Arts One program as much as possible to the public.

For my portion of the debate, I wanted to talk about openness (duh…it was open access week!) and the degree to which what many people think of as MOOCs are open (some of them not very). I talked a bit about OERs (open educational resources) and open textbooks as ways to make MOOCs more open, and also about opening up the curriculum and content to co-creation by participants. This led me to cMOOCs, which could be described as having a more open pedagogy. I briefly touched on the value of cMOOCs for higher education, partly as professional development for faculty and for lifelong learning for students.

Jon Beasley-Murray has posted a copy of what he said during this debate, on his blog.

I’m told this session was recorded and the recording will be posted on YouTube, but I don’t think it’s there yet. In the meantime, here are my slides from the debate. I just had 12 minutes max, though I expect I went over time a bit!

The Open in MOOCs from Christina Hendricks

Forbidden Island (The Tempest and Forbidden Planet)

Forbidden Planet Movie Poster, from Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

For Arts One last week we read Shakespeare’s The Tempest and also watched Forbidden Planet, which is clearly based in part on Shakespeare’s play. I had never seen that 1956 film before, so the mystery and the big reveal at the end were a surprise for me. Then I started wondering just whether or not it could make sense to give a psychological reading to Shakespeare’s original. Here is what I managed to come up with before class last Friday, but we didn’t have time to talk about it in class. Mostly what I have are some suggestive thoughts and then questions!

The ocean and the storm, and Prospero’s art as connected to mental confusion and madness

This one is pretty easy to see from Prospero and Ariel’s conversation right after the storm. Prospero asks Ariel: “Who was so firm, so constant, that his coil/ Would not infect his reason”? Ariel: “Not a soul/ But felt a fever of the mad, and played/ Some tricks of desperation. All but mariners/ Plunged in the foaming brine and quit the vessel” (1.2.206-211). And of course, after they jump into the sea is when they end up on the island, confused by Prospero’s magic and illusions.

Then Ariel, when he appears as a harpy to Alonso, Sebastian and Antonio, says, “I have made you mad; / And even with such-like valour men hang and drown / Their proper selves” (3.3.57-59), thereby connecting drowning to madness.

Prospero’s art clearly makes people confused, provides illusions, clouds their reason. After the harpy scene with Ariel, Prospero says, “And these, mine enemies, are all knit up/ In their distractions. They are now in my power; / And in these fits I leave them …” (3.3.89-91). And when he breaks the charm over them: “their rising senses/ Begin to chase the ignorant fumes that mantle/ Their clearer reason” (5.1.66-68).

Gonzalo suggests that the madness that holds Alonso, Sebastian and Antonio is caused by their guilt, suggesting that we might be able to read Prospero’s art, at least to some extent, as a kind of psychological phenomenon happening within the minds of the characters: “All three of them are desperate: their great guilt,/ Like poison given to work a great time after,/ Now ‘gins to bite the spirits.” (3.3.104-106). If we were to go with this, though, what kind of interpretation could we give to the storm, if it were somehow in the minds of the king, his son, and the nobles on the boat? Would we have to say it’s in the minds of the mariners as well?

And what about Caliban’s experience of Prospero’s magic? He mostly seems to get pains from it. If we were to do a psychological reading of the play, could these be representative of some kind of pain in his own mind? I’m not sure it makes sense to think that Caliban might have guilt like the king and nobles, but he is clearly mentally pained by Prospero as well as physically.

Forbidden Planet

The psychological interpretation of the events of the play in the film is that the unconscious mind of Dr. Morbius (the Prospero character) has been able, through advanced technology from an alien civilization, to instantiate a monster in physical reality. He is not aware that he is doing it (of course! it’s unconscious), and much of the film is dedicated to trying to figure out what this monster is and how to stop it.

Dr. Morbius, like Prospero, has a great desire for knowledge. Dr. Morbius’ knowledge, along with the technology he gets from the Krell, is able to create physical manifestations of what one has in one’s mind; can Prospero do the same? In a way, yes, because he can make what he thinks of become a reality through his magic and with the help of Ariel, but I’m not sure it’s best described as physical manifestations, since it seems mostly visual and auditory illusions.

Too much knowledge, or too heavy a focus on gaining knowledge, is portrayed as dangerous in both works. It leads Dr. Morbius to unknowingly kill the other members of the crew of the Bellerophon (Bellerophon, by the way, is a mythological hero of ancient Greece who, among other things was famous for killing the Chimera–a beast with a lion’s head, a goal’s body, and a serpent’s tail. The monster in the film has a lion’s head, but I can’t recall the rest of what it looks like!), and the Krell machine kills the doctor from the ship. In the play, of course, it leads Prospero to neglect his rule. The captain of the ship in the film doesn’t rank very high on the knowledge scale, according to the Krell machine, but he is still a very effective leader as portrayed in the film. The same might be said for political rule: it’s more important to have practical and leadership skills than more abstract knowledge.

The other problem with what Dr. Morbius is doing is what killed the Krell as well: trying to become so intelligent, so moral, so peaceful that one forgets the dark side of the human psyche, which will nevertheless not disappear no matter how much one tries. What does Dr. Morbius’ unconscious mind want? To stay on the planet when the rest of his ship wants to leave (his monster destroys them when they argue for leaving and try to leave), presumably out of a thirst for knowledge; also, he wants Miranda to not be with another man (his monster starts killing people after Miranda kisses the first man from the ship, and it gets worse after she falls in love with the Captain).

Forbidden island?

Can we read Shakespeare’s play through the lens of thinking that Prospero’s unconscious might play a role in what his happening, somehow?

We could see Caliban as the “monster of the Id,” the representation of desires that, in someone whose reason and moral sense are in charge, are repressed (e.g., his attempted rape, his desire for drink, his desire for power?). And Prospero does acknowledge Caliban as his own: “This thing of darkness I/ Acknowledge mine” (5.1.274-275). If we read Caliban as representing Prospero’s repressed desires, then…yikes…attempted rape of Miranda? That does seem to be along the lines of what the film suggests, with Dr. Morbius being so upset when Miranda falls in love with the Captain.

We might also read the scene where Prospero suddenly remembers the plot against his life by Caliban, Stephano and Trinculo as his unconscious suddenly coming to the fore, coming through when he had tried to repress it (4.1.139). Caliban’s plot could represent Prospero’s own desire for power and his willingness to even kill to get it. Vicente mentioned in class on Wednesday that he thought Prospero might have meant to kill Alonso, Sebastian and Antonio, and I said I hadn’t gotten that, but there is a suggestion in the play that he might have had this in mind. In 5.1, Ariel says that if he were human, he would be touched with pity at the sight of those three, and Gonzalo weeping over them, and Prospero responds by saying that if Ariel can feel a touch of pity, how much more should Prospero himself. So he says, “Though with their high wrongs I am struck to th’ quick,/ Yet with my nobler reason ‘gainst my fury/ Do I take part. The rarer action is/ In virtue than in vengeace” (5.1.25-28). He gets a hold of himself, controls his passions, and after this releases the three from their spell. And this all right after he and Ariel have stopped Caliban’s plot!

That’s all I have the time write about right now, but I’d be curious to hear what others think of these suggestions…

Presentation on Open Leadership for OCLMOOC

In October of 2014 I was invited to give a short presentation on open leadership to OCLMOOC, an open online course for Alberta educators. I was at first unsure what I would say, as I thought perhaps “open leadership” was some category or theory of leadership I had never heard of but was being asked to talk about. But Susan Spellman Cann, who invited me to speak, assured me that I had plenty to talk about because I myself was an open leader.

Me? An open leader? I just started learning about, thinking about, and beginning to practice open education in Spring 2013–a mere year and a half ago. And I started being much more active on my blog and on Twitter starting around then too. I certainly didn’t think of myself as an open leader (yet).

But Susan convinced me, and I thought I might just have some useful things to share about what it might mean to be an open leader, if indeed I could consider myself one. So I agreed.

Here are the slides I used for the short presentation. And the recording of the session on Blackboard Collaborate can be found by a link on this page on the OCLMOOC website.

Oh, and the closed door on one of the slides is actually an animated gif of a door opening; it makes no sense for the door to be closed! It just doesn’t work on Slideshare, darnit!

Open Leadership for OCLMOOC from clhendricksbc

Open education in Philosophy

Right now I’m working on a chapter for an anthology on teaching philosophy; it is a kind of summary and expansion of a presentation I did for the American Association of Philosophy Teachers meeting last July, in Minnesota (see here for my blog post about this presentation). The anthology contains papers about presentations at the conference meeting.

I’m pasting below the proposal I submitted for this chapter, in case anyone is interested! But I’m also re-activating a survey I did last summer before this presentation, asking anyone who is interested to share their views on:

what you think open education is
what are some benefits and possible drawbacks to engaging in open education?

This is purely informal; I’ll just use it to inform my thoughts on these two questions (rather than reporting detailed results…I can’t claim anything about patterns of views from this very short and very informal survey!).

If you’d be willing to share your thoughts on these two questions, please fill out the survey! It is already embedded in an earlier blog post; I just updated the intro section to talk about this new chapter I’m writing. Please see the survey here: https://blogs.ubc.ca/chendricks/2014/05/14/informal-survey-open-ed/

Here’s the proposal I wrote for the chapter…

Teaching and Learning Philosophy in the Open: Why/Not?

At the 2014 meeting of the American Association of Philosophy Teachers, I facilitated a workshop discussing what “open education” means, and why/why not one might want to engage in it. I propose a chapter in the special issue of Teaching Philosophy that includes not only the results of our discussion at that meeting, but also those of a similar workshop I did at my institution, and a survey I have done in the past and will do again, asking a wider audience similar questions.

Slides for the workshop can be found here: http://www.slideshare.net/clhendricksbc/aapt2014-phil-openeduslides

Part One: Open education

In the first part of the chapter I will briefly discuss the concept of “open,” and then talk about “open education” in more detail. There is no single definition of “open” that is universally agreed upon, as what it means differs according to context (e.g., open access scholarly articles, open source software, open government, open data, etc.). I will talk about one definition I have found particularly useful for thinking about open education, which is the 5 “R’s” by David Wiley, open education advocate and Chief Academic Officer of Lumen Learning (http://lumenlearning.com/). According to Wiley, content is open to the degree that it allows people to retain, reuse, revise, remix and redistribute (see http://www.opencontent.org/definition/ for details on what these mean). One way to engage in open education, then, is to use, create, revise, distribute “open educational resources” (OER’s) that allow for one or more of the 5 Rs—e.g., syllabi, lecture notes, videos, audio resources, animations, and more.

I will then discuss one easy way to make one’s teaching and learning resources into OER’s, namely by using Creative Commons licenses. I’ll give an overview of what those are, what one can use them to do, and the different kinds of licenses available.

In the last part of this section I’ll share various ways one can engage in open education, collected both from the participants in the workshop at AAPT 2014 (some of their answers are recorded on a Google Doc, here), from a similar workshop I did at my university (answers here), and also from responses to a survey I did earlier in the summer of 2014 (and will do again), which can be accessed here.

Part Two: Why/Not?

Part Two of the chapter will be devoted to discussing upsides and downsides to engaging in open education in philosophy. Material for this section will come largely from the answers from participants in workshops and a survey linked in the previous paragraph, but also from my own experiences with teaching and learning in the open.

One of the participants in the AAPT workshop suggested that philosophy teachers may have a special incentive to engage in open education, given the value of what we teach to people of many ages, in many kinds of professions and life situations. We would be following in Socrates’ footsteps, who taught others without asking for payment. In this section of the chapter I will discuss reasons why one might think philosophers could have a special duty to engage in open education, but ultimately I will conclude that the benefits and drawbacks must be weighed by each individual in their particular situation to decide if they should do so.

It still happens here (and there, and there, and there…)

Every year, whether it’s explicitly on the syllabus or addressed in readings or not, questions about gender relations and gender inequalities come up in discussions in one or more of my classes. And most years someone asks something like: is gender inequality really still a problem here in (Vancouver, Canada, N. America…etc.)? Usually another student will reply with examples of how it is, but not always. And when I reply, I don’t always have the evidence on hand to support the examples I give.

I come across articles, reports, blog posts, etc., all the time that talk about yet another, and another, instance of how gender inequality is still a problem even where some students in Canada might think it’s not. But I haven’t kept a list so I could point to them.

I decided to create one, collaboratively. I started a list, but want additions from others, please.

I know the issue is so big that this document could go on nearly forever, but please put in examples that you think would help students understand that there is still a problem, in multiple areas (I have some sections for higher ed and philosophy, and there are several links about women in tech and gaming, but what other areas should be covered here too?).

To clarify, I am not meaning to say that gender inequality in the area in which I live is the only important thing to focus on. This is just one gender issue that comes up in class discussions, and I want to have a quick list of things to point to for that. There are obviously numerous gender inequalities around the world, and I would appreciate having links on the document about those as well.

The link to the document is here: http://is.gd/genderinequalitylinks

The doc is also embedded below.

Open and free, redux; Or, yes the words do matter

I am helping to facilitate a course right now at Peer 2 Peer University called “Why Open?” I did so last year as well, and managed to squeeze out a few blog posts during that course, which can be found in 2013 posts under the Why Open category on this blog.

We’re in week 2 of the course, and one of the things we’ve asked participants to do is to read a few documents about the differences between “open” and “free.” I blogged a bit about this last year, but realized as I was doing the readings this year that there is still a lot I don’t quite get. And the best way for me to understand things that I find complicated is to write about them.

Free software and open content

Last year I didn’t really bother with focusing on software to think about the differences between “open” and “free,” but this year I decided it was high time I get familiar with this issue. Here’s where I’m at in my understanding so far, from reading some of the things posted for week 2 of our course, plus also a couple of other articles, noted below.

GNU image from Pixabay.

The original in this dichotomy was free software, defined by four freedoms–as the Free Software Foundation puts it in their “free software definition”:

A program is free software if the program’s users have the four essential freedoms:

The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).

The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).

The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

A program is free software if it gives users adequately all of these freedoms. Otherwise, it is nonfree. While we can distinguish various nonfree distribution schemes in terms of how far they fall short of being free, we consider them all equally unethical.

There are, of course, similarities between these freedoms and those of the “open content definition” created by David Wiley, which now has 5 Rs:

The term “open content” describes any copyrightable work (traditionally excluding software, which is described by other terms like “open source”) that is licensed in a manner that provides users with free and perpetual permission to engage in the 5R activities:

Retain – the right to make, own, and control copies of the content (e.g., download, duplicate, store, and manage)

Reuse – the right to use the content in a wide range of ways (e.g., in a class, in a study group, on a website, in a video)

Revise – the right to adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the content itself (e.g., translate the content into another language)

Remix – the right to combine the original or revised content with other open content to create something new (e.g., incorporate the content into a mashup)

Redistribute – the right to share copies of the original content, your revisions, or your remixes with others (e.g., give a copy of the content to a friend)

Both of these refer to what one can do with the work, the software, etc.–one should be able to revise it, reuse it, redistribute it, etc. Of course, I’m glossing over differences between these two definitions and lists of freedoms, but the basic idea is similar I think.

Free software and open source software

Finley argues in “Where the Free Software Movement Went Wrong (and How to Fix it)” that much of the software that fits under the definition of open source according to the Open Source Initiative would likely also be “free software” according to the four freedoms above. But honestly, looking at the four freedoms above and this definition of OSS, I’m having a hard time seeing exactly where they differ. I think that freedom 0 for FS is not really in the OSS definition, for one thing. And freedom 3, redistribution, is turned into the freedom to redistribute copies as part of an aggregation of software programs in the OSS definition. So there are practical differences between the two (this short article explains briefly how FS is always OSS, but not vice versa).

Tux2, by Larry Ewing, on Wikimedia Commons.

The Open Source Initiative’s FAQs on the difference between free software and open source software isn’t terribly helpful in trying to understand the differences. It states that the definitions of FS and OSS use different language, but ultimately get to the same place. I’m not entirely sure that’s the case.

Stallman says, in “Why Open Source Misses the Point of Free Software”, that there is a big difference in values and purposes. Those who support “free software” are motivated by and focus on the freedom of the user/developer to do what they will with the software. While proponents of “open source software,” Stallman argues, aren’t so concerned about such freedoms and are instead interested in the pragmatic benefits that can be had through using open source software–better programs, easier ability to gather data, etc. And as a result, the OSS people aren’t worried if some of the four freedoms get curtailed, such as through “Tivoization”.

According to Morozov, in “The Meme Hustler“, Free Software (and its proponent, Richard Stallman) focused on the freedoms of the user of software–their ability to use it on various machines, to change the code, to redistribute it, etc. Morozov claims that Open Source Software, and its proponent Tim O’Reilly, focused on the freedom of developers:

O’Reilly cared for only one type of freedom: the freedom of developers to distribute software on whatever terms they fancied. This was the freedom of the producer, the Randian entrepreneur, who must be left to innovate, undisturbed by laws and ethics. The most important freedom, as O’Reilly put it in a 2001 exchange with Stallman, is that which protects “my choice as a creator to give, or not to give, the fruits of my work to you, as a ‘user’ of that work, and for you, as a user, to accept or reject the terms I place on that gift.”

“Freedom” here means being free to develop the software I want, how I want to, and letting you choose whether you want to accept my terms or go shopping for something else. This is the freedom of the free market, perhaps, with all the common arguments about improved productivity, efficiency, innovation, etc. that come along with that view of freedom (which may not actually be accurate, but that’s a different issue).

The words

One thing that is particularly interesting to me in all this is that there is a great deal of emphasis given to the particular word chosen. Some say the OSS supporters wanted to distance themselves from the ideology of the FS movement because the latter was not attractive to businesses (e.g., see Wikipedia on the history of free and open source software). “Free” could sound too much like “gratis” (no cost), “freeware”–which I imagine not too many for-profit businesses are going to want to emphasize. And if you’re not concerned about user freedoms, why focus on the word “free” anyway?

Enter “open,” which Morozov discusses fairly extensively in “The Meme Hustler.” He notes the ambiguity of the word: “Few words in the English language pack as much ambiguity and sexiness as ‘open.'” Morozov points out that the word “open” is similar to the word “law” in that both can mean so many different things: “from scientific ‘laws’ to moral ‘laws’ to ‘laws’ of the market to administrative ‘laws,’ the same word captures many different social relations.” This seems right to me (well, at least, that “open” is ambiguous; not sure about it being sexy); the fact that so many people and projects and organizations and businesses can claim to be “open” while doing very different things attests to that. When you consider all the various kinds of things claimed to have an “open” version (a sample list can be found in section 4 of the “openness” wiki entry from Peer 2 Peer Foundation), you might wonder, as I do, what holds them all together.

So the “open” in OSS can mean that code is available to view/study/revise, and also that software creation should be left to the “open” market without too many barriers on what one must allow users to do. You do not have to give users freedoms besides freedom of choice of which platform/app they want to use, on the terms offered by the providers.

All of this is making me wonder if I don’t like the word “free” better than open, given the sort of thing Stallman was after. But at the same time, of course, “free” is too ambiguous as well. Too often it sounds like no- or low-cost, which doesn’t capture the kinds of freedoms listed in the bullet points of both the FS definition and the open content definition at the beginning of this post.

I can see why some people, such as Chris Sakkas of Living Libre, have decided to try to use a different word–he uses “libre,” which he defines as follows (under “understanding libre” on the Living Libre page):

Describes a work that can be shared and adapted without limitations, though with conditions

A libre work can be shared and adapted by anyone in the world.

When the creator places their work under a libre licence, they give permission for everyone now and in the future to share and adapt their work. This permission, once given, cannot be withdrawn.

This permission is unlimited. You can share and adapt their work no matter who you are or how you are sharing it. You can sell it, print it out, put it on a file-sharing network, and so on.

This permission is conditional. When adapting their work, you have to obey certain conditions. The most popular is attribution: if you share or adapt a work, you have to give credit to the original creator. Another is a copyleft restriction. If you adapt a copyleft work, you must place your adaptation under the same copyleft licence.

Questions I’m left with

Is coming up with a new word the way to go? If “open” is ambiguous, how will a new word that most are not familiar with not also end up meaning many different things, since it will be hard to come to an agreement on a single definition?

Or, does it matter if “open” is so ambiguous? Wouldn’t we just be talking past one another if we mean different things with the same word? Doesn’t having so many meanings to the word invite people and organizations to claim they are “open” when what they are doing bears not a whole lot of resemblance to what many would call “open” activities?

Is there anything that ties all “open” things together so as to justify using the same word for them?

What do you think?

Presentation on open education at AAPT

Last weekend I attended the biannual meeting of the American Association of Philosophy Teachers. I’ve already blogged about one of the sessions I attended, here.

I also gave a presentation at the conference/workshop, on open education. I didn’t count how many people were there, but I’d estimate around 12 or so, which was a nice number to have. We had some good small group discussions, from what I could tell. The main problem is that I relied on the idea that someone in each group would have a computer or tablet to write the group’s ideas on a google doc. That only worked for two of the four groups (and for one of those, one person was trying to edit the google doc on an ipad and it wouldn’t type on the doc. Apparently you need to switch to desktop view on the google docs site to edit: https://sites.google.com/site/gappsforipad/docs).

Someone in another session had groups write ideas down on paper, and then he collected those and typed them into a single document himself. Next time I’d have some handouts available to do that for the groups w/o easy access to the google doc!

Here is the agenda I wrote up for the session, to give you a sense of what we did: AAPT2014-PhilOpenEdu-agenda

Click here for the google doc I asked people to put their group’s ideas on: You’ll notice that only two groups could type on the doc; the other ideas didn’t get written down. I wanted to type them on there as people spoke, but I was too busy responding, facilitating, etc.

And here are the slides I used for the session:

Teaching Philosophy Openly: why/not? from clhendricksbc

A draft of my Moral Theory course

In a recent blog post I talked about a presentation by Paul Hibbits at the summer workshop of ETUG (Educational Technology User’s Group, in BC), where he talked about doing his course planning in the open. I said in that post that soon I would share a planning document for one of my courses. Well, it’s not so “soon” after that post, but it’s finally here. I’ve been out of town the past month, so work on this has been pretty sporadic.

I am teaching a second year moral theory course this Fall. It’s required for majors, and one thing that those of us who teach this course have agreed on is that we’d like students to have a decent sense of consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics. Beyond that, the rest is up to us. We don’t get only philosophy majors, though; there is a significant number of people in this course who are just interested, or who have taken a course in philosophy and want to take another, etc.

I’ve got much of a draft of a planning document for this course, though I’m missing readings for Virtue Ethics (still gotta work on that part!). This is all still very much draft; it may change!

Here’s the document: http://is.gd/KyJcyM

I’ve made it open so that anyone with a link can comment, so please add comments on the document or below, in the comments section, if you have any.

You’ll notice that I tried very hard to make it so that students don’t have to buy (many) books, but I am asking them to buy one, Kant’s Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals. I would have liked it if all the readings could be open and free, but I don’t think we’re yet at that stage in philosophy. Some of them are, but some are behind journal paywalls.

I have a few female philosophers on there, but definitely need more, especially in the consequentialism/utilitarianism section.

Closing the feedback loop

I attended the biannual meeting of the American Association of Philosophy Teachers July 30-Aug 2, 2014, and got some fantastic suggestions/ideas for future teaching, as I did the last time I attended this conference. The AAPT workshop/conference is easily one of my top favourite conferences: it is so friendly, inviting, supportive, and there are great people to talk to about teaching philosophy as well as about life in general. I haven’t laughed this much, for so many days in succession, for a long time. It’s too bad this meeting is only held every two years, as these are people I’d sure like to see more often!

I’m going to take a few of blog posts to write down some of the (many) things that inspired me at this conference, that I’d like to try in my own teaching one way or another. There were many more things than I’m going to write about here—I have pages and pages of notes that I typed out during the conference. But in this and a couple of future posts, I’ll focus on just a few.

Broken feedback loop: when did you not respond well to feedback?

Rebecca Scott from Loyola University Chicago facilitated a session on closing the feedback loop, which started off in a really helpful way: she asked us to consider (among other things) times when we received feedback from someone (whether in the context of our academic lives or other aspects of our lives) and didn’t respond in the way that we now think would be most helpful.

Kawazu Loop Bridge, Flickr photo shared by Tanaka Juuyoh, licensed CCBY 2.0

I won’t give details on either situation, but one of them had to do with feedback I received at the end of a course that utterly shocked and floored me. More than one student said that I did something that was so very far from who I think I am that I just couldn’t believe it was true. All I could think of was: “How could someone think I was doing that? There’s no way I did that! They must be wrong.” I didn’t entertain (at first) the idea that the feedback could be right in some way. It just didn’t fit with who I thought I was.

Remembering this situation helped put me into the mindset of students receiving critical feedback (or, at least, helped move me closer to that I hope), and not believe it, getting angry, indignant, even lashing out. When that happens you are not even allowing yourself to think that the feedback might be true; since it doesn’t fit with who you think you are, your own evaluation of the quality of your work, the truth must be that whoever said that is simply wrong. I’m reminded of Socrates who, at least in Plato’s texts, would show his interlocutors that they didn’t know what they thought they knew, and for some the reaction was to just assume that Socrates must be wrong and to get angry with him.

Why might feedback not be incorporated into future work?

We came up with numerous reasons during the session, which I wrote down:

Getting emotional; taking things too personally; losing sight of the goal of feedback
Not caring about the work, just trying to get credit
Too motivated by grade, not enough by learning
Not believing that the feedback is true; e.g., coming into class with mindset that one is an A student b/c have gotten A’s so far, so don’t believe the instructor who gives a lower mark
Distrust of the instructor, institution, due to larger social issues/context
Not thinking that you could do any better, that you’re capable of improving even with feedback; including: getting discouraged at how much they have to change and thinking they can’t
Not seeing work as formative process; thinking that when the assignment is done you are done and don’t need to revisit it, to learn from it
Professor and students seeing diff goals of feedback; students might think that feedback is there to explain why they got the grade they did, but for the prof it might be there to show ways to improve
Not understanding the feedback
Not connecting feedback from past to future situations
Thinking that just reading the comments is enough to improve for later
Not having a clear idea of what good work looks like to aim for
Too much feedback; overwhelmed; don’t know what to do with it

The one that I find hardest to deal with (though many are quite challenging) is the first: the emotional reaction. It kept me from addressing my situation as well as I could have, and I can see how student emotional reactions could lead them to not want to even look at the feedback again or think about it at all.

A reflective assignment to close the feedback loop

Rebecca shared with us an assignment she gives to students that asks them to reflect on their feedback, that forces them to read it and consider it and reflect on what they want to change for the future based on it. And the first item on that assignment is a question, asking them what their immediate reaction was on receiving the feedback. The idea is that maybe if they have an outlet to write it down, to let you know their emotional reaction, this might help them move past it.

But I think the rest of the assignment might help with that too. Because it goes on to ask students to

write down how many comments they got in each of several categories (to help them see which areas they need to work on, and to ensure that they read the comments or at least skim them),
what grade they expected, what grade they got and what do they think explains the difference between these
how much of the feedback do they feel they understand
what two things do they want to work on for the next assignment, and
whether they have any questions or comments about the feedback they received

How might all of this help with the emotional reaction issue? Besides making them continue to think about the feedback even if they get angry instead of just ignoring it, it also gives them a chance to give feedback on the feedback, to try to figure out what could explain the difference between the grade they expected and the grade they got, which could include thinking about the feedback and how it might suggest that the grade makes at least some sense. Or, if they disagree with the feedback, it gives them an outlet to do so, and the instructor can follow up with them later to discuss the issue.

How I’d like to adapt this assignment, and also address a couple of the other problems above

I like this idea of a reflection on the feedback that you submit to the instructor, but I also want them to have a kind of running record of the feedback they’ve received, the 2-3 things they want to work on for the next time, what they did well and want to keep doing, etc. In addition, I want to make sure that they have to look back at this feedback for the next paper they write.

So, here’s an idea.

1. For the Arts One course I teach, in which students write a paper every 2 weeks (12 over the course of a year), I think I’ll ask them to include on each new essay:

a list of at least two things they tried to do better on this one, based on feedback from the last one
at least one thing they themselves noticed from their previous essay that either they think was good or that they would like to improve on, that no one else pointed out
- this is so that they don’t just look back at the feedback but also back at their previous essay and see what they themselves think, in order to do some self-assessment

2. I would also like to institute a policy in terms of my own feedback: that I will point out one or two instances of a certain type of mistake, and ask them to look for more instances (if I saw more in the essay, that is). Then, also on the next essay:

Point out at least one other place in the previous essay where one of the comments I made applies elsewhere too.
- This is again so that they need to go do some self assessment of their work, and so I don’t need to go through and point out every single mistake. I think this could help with the issue of being overwhelmed by too much feedback

3. Finally, I think it would be great if they could keep a learning log, digitally, where they keep track of, for each essay: the comments they’ve gotten from peers, at least two things from me that they want to work on, the things they’re doing well and want to keep doing. That way they have a running record and periodically I can ask them to reflect on whether there are any patterns/repeated comments, or whether they are getting better because certain sorts of comments aren’t being said anymore.

These things could hopefully all help with the issue of not connecting feedback on previous work to later work. But I have to figure out how much of this is adding too much work for the students, or whether it is all so pedagogically valuable as to be worth it.

Back to when I didn’t respond well

At first, I just shut down. So I can understand when students do that. I didn’t want to think about it and just wanted to move past it. But I did eventually do something: I emailed all my students and asked them to fill in another feedback form, anonymously, that would just go to me. I asked them to be as specific as possible, because I didn’t get quite enough details on the first one. I got a few more details on this second round, which helped me understand some of the concerns expressed and how students may have come to the conclusion they did (and even that I might have been unconsciously doing some of what they thought, even though I’m still reluctant to believe that). But not entirely fully. I think there was some miscommunication somewhere that I just can’t rectify now.

All the more reason to give students more of a chance to give feedback during the course so problems can be solved earlier! (I just did it once, during the first term, and not at all during the second: lesson learned!)