Author Archives: chendric

Sympoze–open access, crowd-sourced peer review

Sympoze started off as a social bookmarking site for philosophers, where people would share bookmarks to sites, articles, etc. they found philosophically interesting.

Recently they changed their purpose to “a network of high-quality academic publications from various disciplines that utilizes crowd sourcing for the peer-review process.” They are hoping to improve the peer review process by inviting a “crowd” to sign up as volunteer reviewers, who will review manuscripts as they have time and interest to do so. Those that pass this process (they have “a higher acceptance to rejection ratio”) will be published in an open-source journal within a discipline, posted on site for free. There are multiple disciplines involved, not just philosophy.

But they need volunteer reviewers to make this work. See the Sympoze website for more and consider volunteering for this innovative and promising project!

Update November 2012: Sympoze is still around, gathering volunteers, so please consider volunteering. You can see what they’re working on here. They’ve also started a new project, in which philosophers who are planning to travel to a certain city put up a listing saying they’re willing to give talks there. People looking for philosophers to give a talk can search to see who is available. See more here.

Commercial Free Philosophy (Open Access)

Just came across this site run by Rick Grush at UCSD:  Commercial Free Philosophy, which argues for the promotion of open access research and publication in philosophy (and, of course, other academic disciplines).  This really caught my interest and I couldn’t agree more with the following, from the Commercial Free Philosophy website:  “Briefly, the business model on which commercial publishing is based is not only grotesquely outdated, but it is contributing directly to some serious social evils. And so it now strikes me that continuing to support commercial publishing, is, frankly, unethical.There was a time when the dissemination of scholarly work required the help of publishers, and so it made sense for academics to transfer various rights to these businesses, and to pay for their services. Now, though, the ability to disseminate research is ubiquitous and free. Ironically, most publishers now work hard to RESTRICT access to the work of philosophers, to those who can pay for it. This may not seem like a problem to professional philosophers at wealthy universities. But it is a problem for students, and for anyone not fortunate enough to be in the financially elite class.”

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Making the Reading Worth Doing

The title of this post was the title of a presentation by William J. Melanson (from University of Nebraska at Oklahoma) at the recent American Association of Philosophy Teacher‘s biannual conference at Coastal Carolina University in Conway, South Carolina.  The problem he addressed is:  how can we encourage students to do the reading, when it is often very difficult (especially for those new to philosophy)?  One thing that keeps them from doing the reading is teaching in a way that makes it such that they don’t have to do it.  For example, some of us (myself included) have taken the strategy of telling students they should do the reading before class, and then spending class time outlining what is in it.This makes some sense, of course, when the reading is complex and the argumentation requires careful analysis in order to make it clear.  But it can also send the message that it’s not necessary to do the reading before class, because after all, the professor will just go over it in detail in class anyway.  What other options are there? Continue reading →

Posters in Philosophy

Just returned from the biannual conference of the American Association of Philosophy Teachers at Coastal Carolina University in Conway, South Carolina.  What an excellent conference with an excellent group of people!  I will be posting a few entries related to presentations and workshops I attended at the conference.

One was by Kristin Schaupp at Univ. of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, who said that in large philosophy courses, one assignment she has used with success is a poster.  Instead of having each student do one, she breaks the class into groups who stay together the entire term.  One of their assignments as a group is to create a poster, similar to those presented at conferences in the social and natural sciences.  They have several “poster days” at the end of the term, so that each group has a chance to show their poster and discuss it with other students in the audience.  Continue reading →

What is a philosopher?

In an already widely-discussed post on a new NYTimes blog called “The Stone,” Simon Critchley answers the question, “What is a Philosopher?” He refers to some of Socrates’ statements in Plato’s Theatetus to explain that philosophers are, unlike those who must spend their time arguing cases in courts, men [always men for Plato, and still frequently men today] who can and do pull away from the affairs of the present day and place and take the time to think otherworldly thoughts:

“Socrates says that those in the constant press of business, like lawyers, policy-makers, mortgage brokers and hedge fund managers, become ”bent and stunted” and they are compelled “to do crooked things.” … The philosopher, by contrast, is free by virtue of his or her otherworldliness, by their capacity to fall into wells and appear silly [like the story of Thales].”
“Socrates adds that the philosopher neither sees nor hears the so-called unwritten laws of the city, that is, the mores and conventions that govern public life. The philosopher shows no respect for rank and inherited privilege and is unaware of anyone’s high or low birth. It also does not occur to the philosopher to join a political club or a private party. As Socrates concludes, the philosopher’s body alone dwells within the city’s walls. In thought, they are elsewhere.”

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Peer Review of papers in large classes

In an introduction to Philosophy course in Spring 2010, which had around 120 students and six discussion sections, I did several experiments. One was with having students do a peer evaluation of each others’ papers. This was pretty tricky in such a large class. It was not as successful as I had hoped, mostly because of the logistical difficulties. Continue reading →

Intensive courses

I am teaching a summer course at the moment (a 200-level course, Introduction to Moral Theory), and I have been impressed with the level of enthusiasm and engagement there is amongst the majority of the 30 or so students in the course, as well as with their philosophical insights.  I’ve been wondering why there should be so many more students who are really engaged and saying interesting things in a summer course than in the regular-term version of the same course (which I’ve taught many times).  Most likely, it has to do with the type of students who sign up for summer courses in the first place, since the major difference here is that this course is during a time when most students do not take courses, only a select few.  Why those few should be different in this regard, I can only speculate (as I am speculating in general that what I’ve seen this once might be a pattern of some kind!).

But I also wonder if there might be more to it than this, given my similar experience with a course that is also time-intensive, Arts One. Continue reading →

Learning to read

Upon reflecting on my own lecture style, I found that it is very common for me to spend lectures outlining arguments from the assigned texts–I present main points in the text as I see them, and the supporting arguments.  I am acting as interpreter of the texts, which is not surprising given the difficult nature of many philosophical texts and the fact that I am often teaching first- or second-year students (many of which have had little to no experience reading such texts).  But of course, in doing this I am discouraging students from outlining the arguments themselves, trying to come to grips with them in the readings before coming to lecture.  Why do careful reading of the text before class if the professor is just going to tell you what the text says (in his/her own interpretation)?  Some students will do so anyway and then be able to ask good questions and offer alternative readings, but many will not. Continue reading →

Student presentations

In small classes in the past, I’ve had students sign up for a day on which to do a presentation to the whole class. They had to come up with several questions for the group to discuss, and present reasons why these questions are important (maybe some background information, connection to larger themes in the texts, etc.). I found that even when students asked excellent questions in their presentations, it was too often the case that few or no other students would engage with their discussion questions. I’d have to push and pull to get people to talk. I began to wonder if this was in part because of the problem of discussion in large-ish groups: it’s too easy to just sit back and hope someone else says something!

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Discussion Stagnation

[Note after writing this: I see that I was asking this question a number of months ago in my blog…guess it’s an unresolved issue and has been for awhile…]
Seminar discussions in my Arts One class this past year were not as lively as they have been in past years. This class meets in a group of about 20 twice a week for 75 minutes, after a 2 hour weekly lecture. This is quite a bit of time for first year students to be responsible for discussion each week. My strategies in the past have been to spend part of the time outlining main points in the readings, then pose some questions that should generate discussion; start with some writing assignment that will generate thought and discussion; ask for student questions for discussion; start with student presentations where they prepare questions before the class. These have all worked okay except “ask for student questions for discussion.”

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