Author Archives: chendric

On cheating and philosophy (for #rhizo14)

I’m participating (as much as I have time for, which isn’t much) in a course on Peer 2 Peer University called Rhizomatic Learning, run by Dave Cormier. The first topic for this course is on “cheating as learning” (here’s an intro video about the topic).

My day job takes up all of my time and more, so when I kept finding myself unable to sit down and write a blog post, I took a cue from Scottlo over at ds106 radio, who often does live broadcasts or recordings while in transit–in the car, walking, etc.

The only problem with this one is that I was rushing to get to work, walking quickly, so I got pretty out of breath sometimes talking at the same time!

I realize that by recording rather than writing this I am limiting my audience to those who don’t mind taking 15 minutes to listen to something and try to remember enough to maybe comment. I’m also limiting my own future use of these thoughts, because it’s much easier to go back and skim something than to listen to it all the way through. It’s very hard to “skim” an audio recording! But it worked for the purposes of me not having much time to sit down and write. Hopefully I’ll be able to write posts for later on in this course.

For now, here are my thoughts on what “cheating” might mean in terms of questioning rules of traditional practice when teaching philosophy.

I hate it when spiders just sit there

[I usually do my ds106 stuff on Tumblr, but animated gifs over 1 MB become just gifs there, and I couldn’t make this one small enough without changing it substantially. Damn Tumblr.]

So there’s a new visual assignment for ds106 called “Illustrating odd autocompletes.” I think it’s pretty self-explanatory, especially with the example I’ve made here. I won’t comment on the last autocomplete above.

The idea of hating it when “spiders just sit there” struck me as very odd. I mean, what does one want them to do instead? Wave their legs and scream at you? I think I’d kinda rather they just sit there than, say, jump around wildly.

Of course, having a spider just sit there would be a plain static image. But I wanted to make it so the spider is sitting there doing something. I came up with the idea of having its eyes move, like it’s just waiting for you to do something, or for you to go away, and looking around in the meantime.

I wasn’t sure exactly which way to make the eyes move. At first I thought about making them move in different directions, but that seemed like it would just make the spider look like it had lost its mind, and that wasn’t really the effect I was going for. I thought about trying to make the eyes move back and forth sideways, but wasn’t sure how to do it. I could figure out how to rotate them (see below), but having the white part of the eyes move back and forth in the middle would have been trickier because I would have had to just move the white “glare”, and there is glare on the top of the eye as well as around the bottom. It just wouldn’t look right, I feared. So turning in the same direction it was. I was going to have the eyes go further around, but got tired of dealing with so many layers!

I made a version with just the two front eyes moving and was going to leave it at that, but then my 6-year-old son said: “Mommy, you should make the other eyes blink.” Sure, I thought, that’d be cool, but not gonna happen. But of course, once he planted the idea, I had to figure out how to do it. The blinking doesn’t look like real eyelids, but that wasn’t what I was going for. I just wanted to see if I could make it look like blinking at all! When I was done, my son said: “that’s pretty cool, but why doesn’t the blinking part go all the way down?” I had to tell him that I was just too lazy.

So I found a CC-licensed closeup of a spider (there are some really gorgeous ones on Flickr when you search for “spider close up”!): “Bearded Jumping Spider,” by Thomas Quine, licensed CC-BY. I then set to work on it in GIMP.

The process

I’m out of practice. I learned the first time I did ds106 that I should take screenshots during the process so I can explain what I mean in images rather than only in words. But now that I’ve merged most of the layers (steps 5-7, below), I can’t take any useful screen shots showing the various layers I made.

1. I made a duplicate or two of the original image, so that I could mess around with one and have at least one other one that was intact.

2. To make the eyes move, I needed to isolate them and put them on their own layers. I used the “lasso” or “free select” tool in GIMP to go around the spider’s right front eye, and then I went to Selection->Float, which made a floating layer with the selection. I then went to Layer->To New Layer, which put the floating layer onto a new transparent layer. I did the same thing with the front left eye, and made numerous copies of these (7 or 8, I think). That way I could do a gradual rotation with the layers.

3. But then I discovered a problem. When I floated the selections and put them on new transparent layers, what happened was that those portions of the original image were removed, leaving white space for the eyes. Not a problem if the layers above just cover over that space completely, but when you start to rotate them the white shows through (because they aren’t perfectly round. Given that the eyes are black, this was easily fixed. I just painted in the white areas on the original image with black, using first the “fuzzy select” tool to get most of the white area and then the bucket fill tool, and then, since there was a pixel or two still white around the edges, I used the paintbrush tool to cover over the rest of the white with black.

4. So now I had 7 or 8 each of the right eye and left eye layers, with the eyes surrounded by transparent areas, all stacked on top of the original image with the eye sockets now painted black. Time to rotate. I selected the first right eye layer and used the “rotate” tool to rotate it a certain number of degrees, and then did the same number with the left eye layer above it. Repeat, with the next right eye layer being a little more rotated, etc. Then, about halfway through I reduced the rotation of each eye so that the eyes would go back to their original position.

5. In GIMP, if you try Filters->Animation->Playback with things on different layers like they were, it will animate each layer separately, which means I’d get the right layer, then the left eye layer, then the right eye layer, etc., which doesn’t really show me what it looks like. So I merged the first right eye layer with the first left eye layer, the second right eye with the second left eye, etc. (by control-clicking on the one on top and choosing “merge down”). I also had to merge the first right eye/left eye layer (those two layers now merged) onto the original image, because the original had just black eye sockets and GIMP was animating that separately from the eye layers above it.

6. But there was a slight problem that I wanted to fix. The spider’s left eye isn’t as round as its right in this image, and when I rotated the left it covered over part of the hairy part around the eye, and then when it went back to the original this part showed through again. It was bugging me. So I used the paintbrush tool and painted some of that hairy part around the left eye black, where the eye rotated. Now you can’t see that happening at all.

7. So at this point is when my son said, hey, why don’t you make the eyes on the sides blink? To do this, I had to duplicate the original image that now had the black painted around the left eye as noted in #6, and with the first eye layers merged onto it. I made as many copies of this as I had eye layers. I then gradually painted brown onto the new spider image layers in a way that would look like the brown was going down, then up.

8. Last step was to merge the eye layers with the new spider layers that had brown eyelids painted on them. This was because the new spider layers had eyes rather than black eye sockets (given what I did in #5). And when I animated the layers I got the rotated eye layers interspersed with the original eye positions, so it was going back and forth strangely.

 

The ds106 daily create for today is to make the most boring video on YouTube. When I asked my son for what would make for a really boring video, he looked at this animated gif and said, “well, that’s pretty boring.”

 

Césaire, Walcott and Henri Christophe

File:Heinrich I - König von Haiti.jpg

Engraving of Henri Christophe, downloaded from Wikimedia Commons (public domain): https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Heinrich_I_-_K%C3%B6nig_von_Haiti.jpg

 

[In the Arts One group in which I’m teaching, this week we read two plays about King Henri Christophe of Haiti, one by Aimé Césaire called The Tragedy of King Christophe (mid 1960s) and one by Derek Walcott called King Christophe (1949)].

In class today I had planned to have us talk about the following in small groups after we did the larger group discussion, but when I looked at my watch I realized it was already too late! And since we only have one seminar discussion on these texts, I thought I’d use a blog post to make some observations/suggestions.

Endings

I’m on a bit of an “endings” kick the past couple of weeks. I was very intrigued by and somewhat puzzled by the ending of Alejo Carpentier’s The Kingdom of This World, as I wasn’t sure what to make of the fact that Ti Nöel is never heard from again, after his seeming epiphany and transformation into someone who seems like he’s now going to take action. I’m still working on that one (does he become the vulture in the last paragraph, flying towards the Böis Caiman, which is where Bouckman ralllied the slaves for the first battle of the revolution?).

So when thinking about these two plays together, I started thinking about comparing beginnings and endings. Comparing the beginnings didn’t get me that far (yes, of course, they’re very different, but I couldn’t really do much with that), but I found something interesting when I compared the endings. Both end the same place, with Henri’s death, which provides a nice even field for thinking about how they treat this event.

Ending of Césaire’s play

I’ll start with Scene five of the last Act (Act III), starting with p. 86. In this scene, several things struck me, including the discussion between Christophe and Hugonin at the beginning, when Christophe tells him, finally, that’s enough comic relief and Hugonin speaks about the reality as compared to Christophe’s hopes, thus leading Christophe to note that Hugonin’s words are “weighed down with the wreckage of my dreams” (87). I’m still working on what I think of Hugonin as a character, what his role in the play is, but here he is definitely able to use his position to speak the truth (or close to it) plainly to Christophe. I think he may do so in more veiled ways earlier in the play, but I haven’t looked all the way through yet to verify this.

But what I want to focus on in this scene is something else. Christophe, towards the end of the scene, tries to rally his troops, tries to follow the proverb that says “When you see an arrow that’s not going to miss you, throw out your chest and meet it head on” (88). He stands up and talks about how he can still fight, how they are all scared of him, how the enemy’s army is riffraff, etc. It seems like it’s going to be a kind of rousing, hero’s end … but then he falls just as he shouts for them to move forward… and blames someone else (“Who did that?”) (90). An unreal apparition of Boyer appears and describes how people are rightly deserting Christophe for his treatment of them, and the soldiers desert.

This, to me, is an image of Christophe in miniature, in a way, of him attempting to move boldly forward, to engage in heroic deeds for his people, but then failing because of the way he treats them in order to try to mould them, shape them into something great (a theme in Césaire’s play). They desert him, and he falls. His death, in this context, could be read as a lonely, cowardly one, hiding away. His last words: “I’ll attend to the rest alone” (90).

Then, of course, there’s the scene with Hugonin giving a “minute of silence” before we hear the shot. He announces at the end that he is “Sometimes addressed as Baron Saturday” (93), which I had to look up. Baron Samedi is a Voudou spirit, specifically the spirit of the dead. He is usually portrayed in a black tuxedo and top hat, and he has a fondness for tobacco and rum. He is, apparently, well known for bad behaviour including debauchery, swearing, making filthy jokes, and drinking too much. So that explains why he appears as he does in this scene. Whether we are to take Hugonin as an image of Baron Samedi throughout the play I don’t know.

Lastly, then, there is the burial of Christophe in mortar on a mountain, which I think we can take as the construction site of the citadel, but I’m not certain. Much is made of him being erect, standing up, not lying down–as he wanted Haiti to do. And he gets to continue to do for a very long time, becoming one with the stone, as Carpentier notes in his novel. He will eventually turn to dust, but he is more solid and enduring this way than he would be if just buried in the dirt.

Ending of Walcott’s play

This ending is much more focused on images of dust and ruin, of impermanence, weakness, oblivion than the one in Césaire’s play. The beginning of the end could be said to be after Christophe kills Brelle; right afterwards he begins to hear the drums, leading him to recognize his coming doom: “What drums are those?/ They are coming nearer./ Oh, Vastey, my dreams … / Ruin, ruin, O King, ruin and blood!” (95). And from there he quickly becomes paralyzed, cannot move his legs.

In Césaire’s play he’s paralyzed too, of course (and apparently Christophe did have a stroke that left him partially paralyzed), but he still seems to rally towards the end, to try to stand up resistant, rouse his troops, etc. Of course, it doesn’t work, but he tries. In Walcott’s play he seems weak, seems to have submitted to his fall without much of a fight. Unlike Vastey he doesn’t regret anything, but doesn’t really stand up, literally or figuratively. He gets “half upright” on p. 106, and then “sinks in the chair, beaten, but alert.”

Vastey speaks of the citadel as already falling into ruins, and of “dust on the mirrors, floors cracking” in his own rooms (99). And he speaks to Henri of how death erases the complexion, makes us the same: “In death, Henri, the bone is anonymous;/ Complexions only grin above the skeleton” (101). This reminds me of the gravediggers scene in Hamlet, in which Hamlet speaks of similar things. And of course, Henri himself addresses a skull at the end (like Hamlet does), pointing out that while alive, “Time like a pulse was knocking in the eyelid” — death is always there, waiting, decay and ruin (106).

Christophe wonders what he will leave behind besides an anonymous skull; “A king’s memory, or oblivion” (107). His last words suggest oblivion, perhaps, rather than a king’s memory: “And after that …/ Oblivion and silence” (107). (Hamlet’s last words: “The rest is silence.”)

And that’s it; no burial in stone, no memorial, no nothing. Just dust, ruin, oblivion and silence. This one seems to emphasize impermanence, decay, dust and ruin, at least in the ending, than Césaire’s does.

 

Well, I won’t go further in trying to make something of this, because to do so I’d have to do close readings of many more passages from each play, and this post is very long already. But I found this difference interesting, and it made me think further about the emphasis on time as an enemy in Walcott’s play (Sylla, p. 34; Christophe, p. 84), and the emphasis on history “burning biographies like rubbish,” which is said twice (100, 106).

 

Providing feedback to students for self-regulation

On Nov. 21, 2013, I did a workshop with graduate students in Philosophy at UBC on providing effective feedback on essays. I tried to ground as much as I could on work in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning.

Here are the slides for the workshop (note, we did more than this…this is just all I have slides for):

 

Here is the works cited for the slides:

Carless, D. (2006). Differing perceptions in the feedback process. Studies in Higher Education, 31(2), 219-233.

 

Chanock, K. (2000). Comments on essays: Do students understand what tutors write? Teaching in Higher Education, 5(1), 95-105.

 

Lizzio, A. and Wilson, K. (2008). Feedback on assessment: Students’ perceptions of quality and effectiveness. Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education, 33(3), 263-275.

 

Lunsford, R.F. (1997). When less is more: Principles for responding in the disciplines. New Directions For Teaching and Learning, 69, 91-104.

 

Nicol, D.J. and Macfarlane-Dick, D. (2006). Formative assessment and self-regulated learning: a model and seven principles of good feedback practice. Studies in Higher Education, 31(2), 199-218.

 

Sadler, D.R. (1989). Formative assessment and the design of instructional systems. Instructional Science, 18, 119-144.

 

Walker, M. (2009). An investigation into written comments on assignments: do students find them usable? Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education, 34(1), 67-78.

 

Weaver, M.R. (2006). Do students value feedback? Student perceptions of tutors’ written responses. Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education, 31(3), 379-394.

Tweets about my OpenEd13 presentation

I gave a presentation at the Open Education Conference 2013 in Park City, Utah on Nov. 8, 2013. See my previous post for video, slides and bibliography.

I also wanted to see what people were saying about it during the presentation, in case there were some ideas there that are useful for my continuing research into this issue (and there were!). So I made a Storify story. Here’s the link to it on Storify if you’d rather see it there.


Open Education Conference 2013 Presentation

Difficulties Evaluating cMOOCs: Navigating Autonomy and Participation

 

Given Nov. 8, 2013, at the Open Education Conference 2013 at Park City, Utah.

Here is the video recording. I had only 25 minutes to present, and I was late starting because I was messing with my computer, trying to get it to show me “presenter mode” while it showed the slides on the screen so I could see my notes. Then I tried to see my notes on my phone. Then I gave up on my notes and just winged it! (I was using Keynote rather than PowerPoint, and I’ve never tried to use presenter mode before…the problem was that I couldn’t print out my notes because the printer in the “business centre” of the hotel was out of order!)


Here are the slides, which are licensed CC-BY so you can use any part of them if you want. Again, these were in Apple Keynote, and when I exported to PowerPoint some of the colours, fonts and alignments got messed up a bit.

 

When I get a free half a day (probably in December) I’ll write up a post in which I explain my argument in this presentation, including the slides at the end I didn’t get to!

Update Feb. 2015: Well, obviously I never wrote this up. Which is too bad, because now it’s been quite awhile and it would take me a long time to try to do so. I do plan to return to this research at some point (perhaps in the Summer of 2015), and see what else has been published in the meantime. And who knows what kind of open online course models there will be by then?!

 

 

Bibliography

Things either cited on the slides or quoted from in the presentation (at least, the original version as I wrote it, not the shortened one given in the video!)

 

Ahn, J., Weng, C., & Butler, B. S. (2013). The Dynamics of Open, Peer-to-Peer Learning: What Factors Influence Participation in the P2P University? (pp. 3098–3107). IEEE. doi: 10.1109/HICSS.2013.515

 

Cormier, D. (2010a). Knowledge in a MOOC – YouTube. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWKdhzSAAG0

 

Cormier, D., & Siemens, G. (2010b). Through the Open Door: Open Courses as Research, Learning, and Engagement. Educause Review, 45(4), 30–39. Retrieved from http://www.educause.edu/ero/article/through-open-door-open-courses-research-learning-and-engagement

 

Downes, S. (2007, February 3). What Connectivism Is. Half an Hour. Retrieved from http://halfanhour.blogspot.com.au/2007/02/what-connectivism-is.html

 

Downes, S. (2009, February 24). Connectivist Dynamics in Communities. Half an Hour. Retrieved from http://halfanhour.blogspot.co.uk/2009/02/connectivist-dynamics-in-communities.html

 

Downes, S. (2013a). Supporting a Distributed Online Course ~ Stephen’s Web. Presented at the Information Technology Based Higher Education and Training ITHET 2013, Antalya, Turkey. Retrieved from http://www.downes.ca/presentation/327

 

Downes, S. (2013b). The Quality of Massive Open Online Courses. MOOC Quality Project. Retrieved from http://mooc.efquel.org/week-2-the-quality-of-massive-open-online-courses-by-stephen-downes/  A longer version of this post can be found here: http://cdn.efquel.org/wp-content/blogs.dir/7/files/2013/05/week2-The-quality-of-massive-open-online-courses-StephenDownes.pdf

 

Fournier, H., Kop, R., & Sitlia, H. (2011). The Value of Learning Analytics to Networked Learning on a Personal Learning Environment. Presented at the 1st International Conference Learning Analytics and Knowledge, Banff, Alberta. Retrieved from http://nparc.cisti.nrc.ca/npsi/ctrl?action=shwart&index=an&req=18150452&lang=en

 

Kop, R. (2011). The challenges to connectivist learning on open online networks: Learning experiences during a massive open online course. The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, 12(3), 19–38. Retrieved from http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/882

 

Kop, R., Fournier, H., & Mak, J. S. F. (2011). A pedagogy of abundance or a pedagogy to support human beings? Participant support on massive open online courses. The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, 12(7), 74–93. Retrieved from http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/1041

 

Lane, L. M. (2013). An Open, Online Class to Prepare Faculty to Teach Online. Journal of Educators Online, 10(1), n1. Retrieved from http://www.thejeo.com/Archives/Volume10Number1/Lane.pdf

 

Mackness, J., Mak, S., & Williams, R. (2010). The ideals and reality of participating in a MOOC. In Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Networked Learning 2010 (pp. 266–275). University of Lancaster. Retrieved from http://eprints.port.ac.uk/5605/

 

McAuley, A., Stewart, B., Siemens, G., & Cormier, D. (2010). The MOOC model for digital practice. SSHRC Knowledge Synthesis Grant on the Digital Economy. Retrieved from http://www.edukwest.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/MOOC_Final.pdf

 

Milligan, C., Littlejohn, A., & Margaryan, A. (2013). Patterns of Engagement in Connectivist MOOCs. Journal of Online Teaching and Learning, 9(2). Retrieved from http://jolt.merlot.org/vol9no2/milligan_0613.htm

 

Siemens, G. (2006, November 12). Connectivism: Learning Theory or Pastime for the Self-Amused? elearnspace. Retrieved from http://www.elearnspace.org/Articles/connectivism_self-amused.htm

 

Siemens, G. (2008, August 6). What is the unique idea in Connectivism? « Connectivism. Connectivism. Retrieved from http://www.connectivism.ca/?p=116

 

Siemens, G. (2012, June 3). What is the theory that underpins our moocs? elearnspace. Retrieved from http://www.elearnspace.org/blog/2012/06/03/what-is-the-theory-that-underpins-our-moocs/

 

Waite, M., Mackness, J., Roberts, G., & Lovegrove, E. (2013). Liminal Participants and Skilled Orienteers: Learner Participation in a MOOC for New Lecturers. Journal of Online Teaching and Learning, 9(2). Retrieved from http://jolt.merlot.org/vol9no2/waite_0613.htm

 

Williams, R., Karousou, R., & Mackness, J. (2011). Emergent learning and learning ecologies in Web 2.0. The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, 12(3), 39–59. Retrieved from http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/883

 

Williams, R. T., Mackness, J., & Gumtau, S. (2012). Footprints of emergence. The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, 13(4), 49–90. Retrieved from http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/1267

What the heck are the “laws of nature” for Hobbes?

Destruction of Leviathan, engraving by Gustav Doré (1865). In the public domain. Accessed from Wikimedia Commons.

 

No, I don’t mean which laws of nature does he list–that’s easy. The first two, in Chapter 14, state:

1. Everyone should “endeavour peace” when it is possible to attain; if not, we can engage in “war.”

2. We should be willing to transfer our natural right to all things in the state of nature to a sovereign power, when others are willing to do so too, for the sake of peace and defense of our security.

Then there are 17 more in Chapter 15, saying things such as: we should keep our covenants (so long as there is a common power to enforce them), we should pardon past offences by those who repent of them, acknowledge equality of persons, treat people impartially when judging disputes, and more.

My question is: What sort of things are these laws? What does it mean to say they are laws of nature?

Different ways of thinking about what “laws” are

One way to think about “laws of nature” is to imagine them like physical laws, like the laws of motion. If Hobbes’ laws of nature were like this then it would seem they would describe how people just naturally act; they would be laws in the sense of descriptions of universal regularities of human action.

But it’s pretty clear that Hobbes’ laws of nature are not simply descriptions of how humans always or usually act. What comes closer to that sort of thing are statements he says about our common desires and aversions, as discussed on Monday–things like desire for power (“one’s present means to obtain some future apparent good” (Chapter 1, Sect. 1, p. 50), or fear of death.

Another way of thinking of “laws” is as rules created by an authority, such as a governmental authority (civil laws) or the commandments of God. Are the laws of nature laws in that sense? Turns out Hobbes says yes, that we can think of them as “delivered in the word of God, that by right commandeth all things” (Chapter 15, sect. 41, p. 100). So then, all these things we should do would be commandments given to us by God.

“general rule[s], found out by reason”

But Hobbes actually talks about laws of nature in quite a different way than this, most of the time. In his lecture on Hobbes, Robert Crawford pointed out that there is a difference between thinking of “natural law” (which can be considered as a commandment by God) and “laws of nature”–the latter being instead “precepts determined by reason” (from my notes on the lecture).

Here’s how Hobbes defines a law of nature: “a precept or general rule, found out by reason, by which a man is forbidden to do that which is destructive of his life, or taketh away the means of preserving the same; and to omit that, by which he thinketh it may be best preserved” (Chapter 14, sect. 3, p. 79). So here, it sounds like we can use our reason to determine that we ought to do whatever we can to preserve ourselves.

But that doesn’t sound all that different from thinking of laws of nature as what we naturally tend to do, because, as noted above, we already do tend to naturally seek to preserve ourselves. So what gives?

Articles of peace that protect people “in multitudes”

Hobbes also calls the laws of nature “articles of peace,” suggested by reason, by which people can live together well in groups without falling into a state of war (Chapter 13, sect. 14, p. 78): “These are the laws of nature dictating peace for a means of conservation of men in multitudes” (Chapter 15, sect. 34, p. 99).

Here is where things start to get clearer for me. For Hobbes, people naturally tend to seek their own preservation and the power to be able to attain that which they consider good, but when we live together with others (or even near them) our natural desires and aversions lead us into conflict (the “state of war”). We don’t naturally and automatically coordinate our efforts so as to achieve the best outcome for all of us. Hobbes says that we are not like bees or ants, who can live sociably together naturally (Chapter 17, sect. 6, p. 108).

We need to use our reason to determine what rules we should follow to make living with others in groups something that conduces to our own individual desires for self-preservation and the means to fulfill our desires now and in the future. So, for example, reason can tell us that the laws of nature numbers 2-19 should be followed in order to promote peaceful living in groups. The first law of nature is something we can determine by reason too–if we live in a group with others, what would really be best for us is to seek peace, because that’s going to allow us to achieve our natural desires best. But if it’s not possible, do the next best thing–whatever you need to to survive and defend what you have, namely war.

Best and worst outcomes

I had this on the board in seminar today, but we didn’t get a chance to talk about it.

This is meant to show that in the state of nature, even if we want to try to work together with others, come together in social groups to cooperate rather than engage in conflict and war, it doesn’t actually make rational sense to do so. We can try to work together in groups by coming up with rules that we should all follow, but it only makes sense to follow such rules if we can be reasonably assured others will too. That would be the state of “peace.” That, for Hobbes, is the best outcome.

The worst outcome is being “prey”–when I follow rules and most others don’t: “he that should be modest and tractable, and perform all he promises, in such a time and place where no man else should do so, should but make himself a prey to others, and procure his own certain ruin, contrary to the ground of all laws of nature, which tend to nature’s preservation” (Chapter 15, sect. 36, p. 99). In this quote Hobbes is saying it’s stupid to follow the laws of nature when there’s no assurance that others will too.

But without a common power to enforce rules, we don’t have reasonable assurance that others will follow them. So to avoid the worst outcome (prey) it makes sense to engage in conflict, trying to take what others have, avoiding any rules except “do whatever is necessary for your own preservation” (not a quote from Hobbes). This means either being a predator or engaging in war, though since most other people will recognize that they too should do whatever is necessary to preserve themselves, the most likely outcome is war.

This diagram also explains the first law of nature: we should seek peace if we can (it’s the best outcome), but if we can’t, it makes the most sense for our own self-preservation to engage in war.

Back to just what the heck laws of nature are

Naturally, when we live with or near other people, we are going to end up in war. That’s the rational choice. But reason also gives us another option: it suggests “articles of peace,” rules we should follow to achieve peace. The first step is to set up a state with a sovereign (the second law of nature), and then to follow the 3rd through 19th laws of nature once in that state, since these will promote peace (according to Hobbes).

So the laws of nature are not just how we naturally always act. If we were bees or ants we would naturally work together in groups in a way that would promote peace. But we need reason to tell us a set of rules that we should follow in order to achieve this, because if left on our own we will end up in war.

But in what sense are they also commandments of God? Assuming for the moment that Hobbes isn’t an atheist, one can think of this in at least two ways: (1) God commands us to seek peace because it’s a good thing according to God, or (2) God created the earth and humans and therefore created the conditions required for promoting peace. He created us to desire to preserve ourselves, and doing so is good according to our desires.

Well, that’s certainly plenty and probably too much for one blog post! It’s as long as many of the Arts One essays!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Why is Faustus such an unsympathetic character?

I am somewhat persuaded by the reading of Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus that suggests Marlowe is providing an anti-Calvinist play rather than a morality play (but please don’t take that to mean I don’t want you all to argue otherwise in your essays if you wish!). In short, the play can be read as criticizing Calvinism insofar as it presents a character who, even though he may try to repent, cannot do so because his heart is too “hardened” (118 (sorry, don’t have the book with me at the moment, so Act, Scene, or line numbers!)). That a religious view would make it impossible for those who wish to repent to be able to do so, the thought goes, suggests that it’s a problematic view.  As soon as the lecture on this play for Arts One is posted (keep a watch here: http://artsone-digital.arts.ubc.ca/christopher-marlowe-doctor-faustus/) those who couldn’t be there can hear what Miranda Burgess had to say about this.

But I have been giving some thought to what one of you said in seminar on Wednesday, that if this reading is legitimate, then why would Marlowe have given us such an unsympathetic character in Dr. Faustus? He’s rather a fool, as some of you have noted in your blog posts, and he doesn’t do anything useful with the magic he obtains, beyond making a name for himself. If Marlowe had wanted to criticize Calvinism with this play, why do it with a character that most people are not going to empathize with, that most people will think deserves what he got in the end? Why not make your main character be someone about whom you could make what might seem more like a “tragedy,” as the official title of the play suggests? That would require, I think, a person who is flawed, but not quite so bad, someone the audience could empathize with, so they could see themselves possibly in that person’s position. Is that true of Faustus? Maybe for some, but for most of us in the class it seems that Faustus is someone we distance ourselves from.

So then we return to how having such a character could fit with a reading of the play that says Marlowe may have been criticizing Calvinism with it. Here’s one option, though I’m sure there are others! And, of course, on a different reading of the play having Dr. Faustus be unsympathetic is not a problem at all.

In order for Dr. Faustus’ fall to be believable under a Calvinist interpretation, he has to be someone who can’t repent, who is so corrupted that this is impossible. If he were a more sympathetic character then we might think he could repent, because we might not think he is one of those who are predestined to be damned. Then the fact that he does not might show that he has chosen not to, even though he could. But if he is pretty clearly a corrupted character, then it’s easier to recognize that he’s one of those who won’t be able to repent no matter if he seems to be trying.

This is just a draft of an idea, and I’m not yet sure it works, so am happy to hear comments!

 

 

Antigone, alone

[For anyone who regularly reads this blog (are there such persons? :)) I should explain that from time to time I’ll be writing posts on particular texts as part of teaching in the Arts One program. Students are blogging about these texts, and when I have time, I will do so too. You can see blog posts from students in my small group here, and blogs from all Arts One students at the Arts One Digital site.]

I have this vague feeling that I’ve taught Antigone in Arts One before, but I can’t find any notes on it, which makes me think perhaps I haven’t. But it seems much more familiar to me than it would be if I hadn’t read it since I was in university. Perhaps that’s because I have taught Oedipus Rex in Arts One, many times. There are some similarities, of course–attempting to go against some kind of rules/laws (in Oedipus Rex, Oedipus (as well as other characters) tries to avoid doing what the gods say he will do), a ruler being too sure of himself to back down until it’s too late, Teiresias saying what’s really the case but the ruler not listening to him (until it’s too late), the wife of the ruler committing suicide, the ruler falling from power and glory to despair (though arguably, it’s worse in Oedipus’ case than in Kreon’s, given what O. has done).

There are numerous things I could write/talk about in regards to Antigone, but the one I want do discuss briefly here is her determination to be alone. She begins the play trying to enlist the help of her sister, Ismene, but when Ismene refuses to help Antigone says,  “Leave me alone, with my hopeless scheme” (p. 25, line 120). And for the rest of the play, she seems determined to be alone.

Ismene attempts to share her suffering later on, and Antigone refuses. Antigone insists that she is friendless, that no one will mourn her (p. 54, line 996; p. 55, line 1025)–but Ismene is already mourning her before she dies, and what about Haimon? Why does she assume he won’t mourn her? Antigone also insists that “there is no one I love who sighs over me” (p. 55, line 1030), which seems to indicate that if others are upset at losing her, will “sigh” over her, she doesn’t love them. Similarly, she states, “with those I love gone,/I go alone and desolate” (p. 56, lines 1074-1075). Then there is, of course, that notorious line mentioned in lecture: Antigone claims to be “the last daughter of the house of your kings” (p. 57,  line 1096).

Antigone seems determined to be alone, to bemoan how alone she is, even though there are those who love her that are left. Perhaps it is simply that she is angry with Ismene for refusing to help, and thus she is disowning her in some sense. And perhaps she was somehow pressured (by her brothers?) into marrying Haimon, given that that might help her family retain their claim to the throne (a guess, really), but maybe she didn’t care for him herself. But she makes such a show of being alone, claims it publicly, insists that no one will mourn her, that I wonder if something else might be going on.

She also claims to be an “exile,” a “stranger” in some sense (p. 54, line 1000; p. 56, line 1048), and Kreon makes a similar statement (p. 55, line 1039). I think this is likely related to her insistence on being alone. So maybe if we could figure out in what sense she is an exile/stranger, maybe we could shed some light on why she is so bent on being alone and proclaiming this to the world. There are several possibilities for how/why she’s an exile…I’m curious to hear what others think in class!

Oh, and there’s something, too, about how Polyneices was alone, unmourned in death (until Antigone buried him) and Antigone claims the same for herself–she’s making an explicit connection between Polyneices and herself, it seems. But what significance might this have? I’m still thinking about it!

A troubling result from publishing open access articles with CC-BY

For week four of the Why Open? course, we are looking at potential benefits of openness, as well as potential problems with it. There are many, many interesting stories and case studies listed on that part of the course, and I’m still working through looking at them (I’m interested in them all!).

For this post, I decided to add in another story that has recently come to my attention, and that hits home for me as an academic.

Rosie Redfield, Professor in the department of Zoology at the University of British Columbia, recently blogged about an issue that a colleague had experienced with an open access publication: after publishing in an open access journal (PLOS One), which puts a CC-BY (Creative Commons Attribution) license on published articles, she discovered that her research paper had been included in a collection of papers published by Apple Academic Press, for which the publisher was charging over $100 Canadian.

CC-BY logo, downloaded from the Creative Commons downloads page

Now, this may not seem so bad, because, after all, the CC-BY license allows this. It allows others to do anything they want with one’s work, so long as one is cited as the original author. So it would seem not to be the case that the publisher is doing anything wrong (that’s what I thought at first), and what’s really at issue here is authors not knowing that this sort of thing could happen. Thus it would seem that education about what CC-BY allows is all that is really needed (that’s also what I thought at first).

And even if the publisher is charging a lot of money for a book with open access articles in it, those articles still remain open access to be viewed by anyone, so no harm done, right?

Wrong. As I started reading more of Redfield’s posts on this issue, and when I read the results of a survey she did of researchers, I started to see some of the complications of the situation. Then when I met with her in person last week, I came to realize the nuances of what is happening and the potential problems that can result, both for researchers and for the public.

What’s the problem?

This is not simply a matter of authors being upset that someone else is making money off of their work (though as the survey results show, some do have that concern)–there are other problems as well. These are not listed in any particular order, but rather the order in which they’re coming to mind for me.

1. One might argue, as some of the authors in the survey did, that a publisher is making a profit off an open access work becomes more of a concern when authors have to pay a fee to publish in many open access journals (or to publish an article as open access in non-open access journals). Here’s a pretty thorough list of scholarly journal publishers and their “article processing charges” (APC’s). I was once asked if I wanted to pay over $2000 to have a 2-3 page book review published as open access in an otherwise closed journal. I decided the book review just wasn’t that good. 

The point is, it’s not just that some people are upset that others are making money off their work, but rather that they had to pay to publish their work open access, and they did this because they wanted the work available for others to view for free. Well, of course, it isn’t always individuals paying these APC’s–people can use grants to do so, and/or they can get funding to do so from their institution, just to name a couple of other sources of the money.

A rebuttal could be: well, the articles are still available to view for free, on the journal’s website, and likely other places around the web as well. This brings up the next problem.

 

2. Just because the articles are available for free elsewhere doesn’t mean the people who see the book in which they’ve been republished, and which is selling for a good chunk of money, are able to find that out easily. The problem with this particular book that Redfield talks about in her blog is that there was no indication at all that these were open access articles, and that they are available for free on the web. Of course not–that would mean no one would buy the book. Several authors in Redfield’s survey mention that they think such books should have to list the original source of the publication.

So people looking for scientific research may see the book and think they need to buy it to get access to the research. I find this quite troubling, as for me, the point of open access publishing is to allow people access to research without having to pay. That people are ending up getting duped into paying is a problem, in my view.

And it’s not just individuals, libraries may be buying such books (and using public funds to do so), as suggested in a comment on one of Redfield’s blog posts on this issue (the comment also mentions some other important downsides as well). When I met with her, Redfield told me she had spoken to a librarian at the University of British Columbia libraries, who said that they had about 50 of Apple Academic Press’s titles. Redfield was in the process of getting these titles to find out whether any of them are republications of open access articles.

Redfield notes in a blog post that actually, according to the terms of PLOS One, anyone who redistributes an article for that journal must also “make clear the license terms under which the work was published.”  The same is true for the license terms of BioMed Central. Upon looking into the legal code of the CC-BY 3.0 unported license, it seems to me that this sort of thing is required by the CC-BY license itself. It says, in section 4(a), here, that “You must include a copy of, or the Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) for, this License with every copy of the Work You Distribute or Publicly Perform.” I had forgotten this, but of course I include a link to the CC license for any CC-licensed image I use on this blog, for example, precisely for that reason.

The PLOS One license terms also say that the redistribution of articles from PLOS journals must include citation not only of the author, but also of the original source. So do the Wiley Online Open terms (which allow you to publish an open-access article in an otherwise non-open access journal). And Taylor and Francis and Routledge Open too. I’m not going to do an exhaustive search of all open journals, or journals that allow open-access content, to see what their terms are. The point is that such terms do exist, and at least in the case where the article from PLOS One was republished without citing the original source and license, such terms were violated.

 

3. The articles in the book Redfield talks about were edited to some degree from how they appeared in the original publications (I’m not sure how much, exactly). Of course, the CC-BY license allows others to “adapt” the work, so this is not a problem in itself. The problem comes in when one thinks about what might be possible, such as book editors making fairly significant changes to an article that, even by accident, end up making the argument weaker or suggest claims that the author would not have made him/herself.

Then, what comes into the picture is potential harm for the author, from people thinking they’ve said things they haven’t, and wouldn’t, say (if those things put the author in a bad light because they make the argument worse, or the data analysis worse, etc.). A number of the authors in Redfield’s survey said they would be worried about possible misrepresentation of the authors’ interpretations of results. Other authors worried that others might think they had self-plagiarized–published the same thing twice, without citing their earlier publication.

It might seem on the surface that the CC-BY license allows such things to happen, but as Redfield points out in one of her blog posts, CC-BY (and all CC licenses that have “attribution” as one of their requirements) have a “no endorsement” clause: those who use a work licensed CC-BY and alter it in some way, must not indicate that the original author endorses the revision of the work. The legal code of the CC-BY license makes this even clearer–see section 4(b)(iv) here. 

Since the publisher of the work Redfield discusses listed the authors as “contributors,” and did not state that the articles had been previously published elsewhere and edited for publication in the book, one could make the case that the way they’ve presented the articles suggests “endorsement” by the authors. Redfield argues for this point here.

But since the authors in this case were not told that their articles were going to be published in the book, they did not have a chance to give an endorsement or not. Nor does CC-BY require that original creators of works with a CC-BY license be informed that their works are being reused and adapted.

 

What should be done?

My first thought, upon seeing the first one or two of Redfield’s blog posts, was that this problem could be solved by simply educating authors about the various CC licenses, and about what is allowed under CC-BY, so they can decide whether they want to use CC-BY or some other license. I thought that those who wanted to avoid the problems noted above could choose a different license, like perhaps CC-BY-SA (share-alike)–which would require that any use of the work have an equivalent license on it, possibly reducing incentives to republish collections of such works–or CC-BY-ND (no derivatives)–which would not allow anything to be changed. There are several problems with this response.

 

1. It may not be the case that authors have a choice of licenses when publishing in an open access journal, or when publishing an open access article in an otherwise non-open access journal. PLOS One, for example, does not give you a choice–you have to use CC-BY or not publish there. So do BioMedCentral and PeerJ and  Sage Open. Some publishers do allow a choice, such as Wiley (you can choose a license for your open access article in an otherwise non-open access journal), and Taylor and Francis.

But those who are worried about reuse of CC-BY articles might just choose not to publish in the OA journals that require CC-BY (this does not apply to researchers who are mandated to publish open access as CC-BY, of course). Unless some other things change. Like possibly the following.

 

2. As noted above, the republishing of open access articles without citing the original publications and licenses under which they were published may be in violation of the license terms of the original articles. If so, then it seems logical that legal action should be taken against the publishers who violate those terms. This is what Redfield suggests in a blog post.

I agree, but who should take such legal action? It’s too much to ask for individual authors to take legal action, unless they can find legal counsel who will take on the case without charging anything, or very much. Who among us has enough money to pay attorneys and other fees to sue a publisher?

Redfield suggests perhaps the journal publishers should take on the duty of suing such book publishers, which seems to me to make sense because the book publishers are violating the terms of the journal publishers’ own licenses. But this raises other issues, as discussed in the comments to that post (authors are the ones with legal standing to sue because they hold copyright, journals may have to raise article processing fees to cover such activities).

One might also ask: what motivation do journals have to go after publishers who are redistributing content that the journal is not making money from each time it is accessed anyway? They have made money through other means than subscriptions or fee for access, so would they be motivated to try to stop such republication? Perhaps, if enough authors shy away from publishing open access articles because of fears of this sort of thing happening.

 

Conclusion

The bigger point here is the following. Even if you don’t think this is a big deal (and many don’t, as evidenced by comments on Redfield’s blog posts about this issue), it appears that there are a good number of authors who do, and who may then choose not to publish in open access journals because of it. This is ignoring the point, of course, that many researchers are now being mandated to do so; there are still quite a few who are not…though this may change soon.

Even if a journal allows a choice of licenses, authors may wonder if, were it to be the case that the license was violated, they or someone else would be able to take action to do something about it. And if no one is doing anything about it, then what’s to stop this sort of thing from spreading further, if it’s lucrative? 

Whether it is a profit-making business, whether significant numbers of individuals and libraries are buying such books, remains to be seen. And the more that authors are required to publish open access works, the more this sort of thing might become lucrative, if it isn’t already. But I think this is an issue worth paying attention to and trying to figure out what can and should be done about the violation of open access licenses in open access journals, even if one doesn’t think that has happened in this particular case.