You're the Teacher – Page 17 – Teaching & Learning, and SoTL, in Philosophy

Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols lecture

For Arts One this term, I gave a lecture on Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols. This is the first time I have read this text in many years, and I found it quite challenging. I only got through part of what I wanted to say in the lecture, so promised the students I’d say the rest of it, and give them the slides from it, on my blog.

You will be able to see a recording of this lecture in about a week’s time, on the Arts One Open site, under “lectures and podcasts” (if I remember, I’ll link to it here when it’s ready…but I might forget).

Here’s a PDF of all the slides, in case that’s useful to students or anyone else: Nietzsche Twilight Slides 2015 (PDF)

And here are the slides from Slideshare (you can download them from there if you want; just click on the link below the embedded slides)

Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols: Sickness and Saviours from Christina Hendricks

Where I got to in the lecture was a discussion of how, for Nietzsche, we deny life through aiming for some other, “true” world as opposed to an “apparent” one, and we were talking about what Plato says in this regard in Republic and also in Phaedo. So we were at the “Nietzsche and Plato” slides.

Up next were these:

My point here is that rather than thinking we should try to get rid of our various perspectives on reality and reach some kind of objective truth about it, which Plato seems to want to do when talking about the forms, Nietzsche argues that such an endeavour is impossible. For Plato, our various ways of thinking about justice, goodness, beauty, courage, etc., are just opinions; they differ from person to person, and even over time within the same person. They are not the essence, the “being” of justice, its form. We need to get beyond those perspectives to what the objective truth really is. But for Nietzsche, this is impossible and even absurd: the quote on the first slide above goes on: “what is demanded here is an absurdity and a non-concept of an eye.”

How is trying to get rid of our perspectives and aiming for some unchanging, objective truth a kind of hostility to life? It’s because it asks us to do what we cannot, in our actual lives, do; it asks us to aim for a world that is better, but that could only be reached if we are not the sorts of beings we actually are.

Sickness and how it happened

When we finished, I was working through what I think Nietzsche takes our “sickness” to be: caused by hostility to the instincts of life, leading to self-hatred for the passions and instincts we have, such as the will to power, that are considered through religion and morality be “bad.” We end up bearing “ill will” towards ourselves, “full of hate against the impulses to live…”, and thus “sick, wretched” (Those Who Improve Humanity, Sect. 2, p. 39).

But Nietzsche also asks why we ended up with moralities and religions that make us sick. Why do we try to eliminate instincts that are after all part of and crucial to life?

Because we have no choice–this is the only morality that makes sense for those who are too weak to control our instincts and passions; we have to denigrate them, condemn them, try to get rid of them.

On the first slide: We have to try to eliminate our ‘negative’ instincts and passions because we are not able to control them. We have altruism as a moral value in part because we don’t know how to act for our own advantage, or we’re not able to. The second point on the second slide suggests that we need to be kind and considerate to each other because we recognize how weak and tender we all are, and this makes the most sense for us.

On p. 73 (Raids, sect. 37), N has another useful quote about altruistic, considerate moral values:

“The amputation of our hostile, untrustworthy instincts—and that is what our ‘progress’ comes down to—is just one of the consequences of the general amputation of vitality: it costs a hundred times more trouble and care to preserve such a dependent and late existence. So people help each other out, so each is the patient to some degree, and each is the nurse. That is then called ‘virtue’—among people who still knew a different sort of life, fuller, more extravagant, more overflowing, it would have been called something else, ‘cowardice’ maybe, ‘pitifulness,’ ‘old ladies’ morality’ ….”

I put Thrasymachus at the bottom of the second slide because the view that we have a morality of consideration, kindness, mutual help, altruism due to weakness and need of help reminds me of what Thrasymachus says in Plato’s Republic about how those who are strong enough to do what seems “unjust” according to traditional morality won’t think that such injustice is a problem. It’s only those who can’t do that and get away with it who will praise the traditional view of justice.

This idea becomes quite clear in Glaucon’s restatement of Thrasymachus’ view near the beginning of Book II of Republic. Glaucon says that those who are unable to commit injustice with impunity or avoid suffering injustice from others agree amongst themselves not to commit injustice against each other. People value justice, Glaucon says (but he’s just restating the Thrasymachean view), “not as a good but because they are to weak to do injustice with impunity. Someone who has the power to do this, however,… wouldn’t make an agreement with anyone not to do injustice in order not to suffer it. For him that would be madness” (359a).

The Problem of Socrates

After this discussion of anti-natural morality and how we have come to it because we are weak, the section on “The Problem of Socrates” makes more sense, I think.

My enduring question in this section is: what is the “problem” about Socrates, actually?

Is the problem that he himself is a problem, that there is something wrong with him? That’s surely part of it–Nietzsche is clear that Socrates belongs to those who judge life to be worthless (Problem, Sect. 1, p. 12). But one might still ask: in what way could we say Socrates judged life worthless?

If we take the Socrates here to be referring to the Socrates in Plato’s Republic, then he could be said to judge life worthless in the same way as I’ve said above that Plato does.
If we take him to be the philosopher who engaged in what is now called the “Socratic method,” who went around showing people in Athens that they do not know what they think they know, by asking continual questions until the person themselves is forced to admit what is wrong with their view…then…is this hostile to life?
- Nietzsche suggests that Socrates’ hostility to life is in his hyper-rationalism, the demand that one give reasons for every one of one’s beliefs, values, actions, which this version of Socrates certainly could be said to have done.
- Perhaps: always having to justify oneself with reasons, with arguments, rather than acting out of instincts or passions…somehow hostile to life?
The Socrates of Republic, certainly, emphasizes reason above all else, the control of the passions through reason as their natural ruler.

But there’s another aspect to the “problem of Socrates” that Nietzsche points to in this section: N asks how it was that he got himself listened to, how it was that people took him seriously (Problem, Sect. 5, p. 14). What did it take for the Socratic view of life, his hyper-rationalism, to become something that made sense? Of course, it didn’t make sense to all right away; Athens did put him to death after all. But his legacy lived on through Plato and many other Greek philosophers.

Nietzsche’s answer: Socrates provided a remedy that was a last resort for the Greeks, for those who were already not strong enough to control their passions and instincts:Those who cannot control their drives in any other way turn to the cure of Socrates (and Plato): attempting to rule them with reason, to conquer them, even (as noted above in the quotes from Phaedo), to eliminate them and the body as much as possible.

Why was this the case at the time? Nietzsche doesn’t explain clearly in Twilight. He just says that “the instincts were turning against each other” (Problem, Sect. 9, p. 16).

To me, this rings a bell (again!) with what he says in Genealogy of Morality (Treatise II, Sect. 16), that when we start to live in societies, we have to start to moderate our “darker” drives, our will to power, and can’t vent it on other members of our societies. Nietzsche refers to this idea in Twilight in What I Owe to the Ancients, Sect. 3: the ancient Greeks, he says there, raised their institutions as “security measures” against their “strongest instinct, the will to power,” “in order to make themselves safe in the face of each other’s inner explosives.” They could and did still vent it against outsiders: “The immense internal tension then discharged itself in frightening and ruthless external hostility: the city-states ripped each other to shreds so that the citizens might, each of them attain peace with themselves” (What I Owe, Sect. 3, p. 88).

So long as they have an expression for their will to power outwards, then it is less likely to be discharged inwards, against themselves, against their own instincts for power. But perhaps, as the older Greek pleasure in conquering, attacking, violence (Nietzsche suggests the world of Homer expressed this well) became reduced, then the instincts for power started turning inwards, and the instincts of the ancient Greeks then, as Nietzsche says, began to turn against each other. This is a speculation, though; I’m not sure it’s what he means.

Socrates, then, provided a way to deal with the instincts attacking each other, for those who had no other means of solving this problem: let’s make a tyrant out of reason to help control these instincts and keep them from tearing us apart.

“The fanaticism with which all Greek speculation throws itself at rationality betrays a situation of emergency: they were in danger, they had to make this choice: either to be destroyed or–to be absurdly rational …” (Problem, Sect. 10, p. 16)

But Socrates as a would-be healer is also a poisoner, as it were:

And this is because Socrates’ cure, like the efforts to condemn or eliminate the instincts and passions, also works to denigrate life. Whereas Socrates (and Plato) thought that Reason = Virtue = Happiness (think about how that’s the case for Plato), Nietzsche argues that this was “not at all a way back to ‘virtue,’ to ‘health,’ to happiness …” (Problem, Sect. 11, p. 17).

But in one of Nietzsche’s characteristic twists (I have found that often, even when Nietzsche seems to be “against” something, he still shows that it has some value), he also suggests that Socrates was nevertheless a saviour in some, albeit perhaps small, sense.

I’m getting this, as you can tell, mostly from the Genealogy of Morality. There, he says that ideals such as religion, morality, the belief in some absolute “truth” that would take us away from this work and this life, nevertheless have value in that they are a means for us to keep living. Such ideals, Nietzsche says in GM, spring from “the protecting and healing instincts of a degenerating life that seeks with every means to hold its ground and is fighting for existence” (Treatise III, Sect. 13). What seems to be a negation of life in cures such as that by Socrates, is actually one of “the very great conserving and yes-creating forces of life” (Ibid).

They key here is that such “cures” at least create a meaning for us, for the suffering involved in life: “Man, the bravest animal and the one most accustomed to suffering, does not negate suffering in itself; he wants it, he even seeks it out, provided one shows him a meaning for it, a to-this-end of suffering. The meaninglessness of suffering, not the suffering itself, was the curse that thus far lay stretched out over humanity …” (GM Treatise III, Sect. 28). And morality, religion, Socratic-Platonic hyper-rationality, and perhaps even Rousseau provide a meaning, a reason for it that makes sense of it.

This is how I make sense of the Epigram from Twilight noted at the bottom of the above slide. What we most need is a “why,” and then we can live with nearly any “how” in life. We don’t need to aim for happiness; suffering will be acceptable with the “why.” (N’s remark about only the English aiming for suffering is perhaps pointing to the English utilitarian philosophers, such as Bentham and Mill, who argue that everything we do is because we are aiming towards what we think will bring us happiness.)

Nietzsche and Socrates

At the end of the lecture I come back to the beginning, to the mirror image at the beginning, where I said that we might consider Nietzsche to be seeing something of Rousseau and Socrates in himself (or at least, we might see them in him).

How might we think of Nietzsche as “Socratic” in some sense? Here I’m thinking of the Socrates of the “Socratic method,” the “gadfly” I mentioned earlier in the lecture, the one who continually shows people that they do not know what they think they know.

On this slide are some aspects of Socrates that I think one might see in Nietzsche. Do you agree?

Might we think of Nietzsche, too, as some kind of doctor as Socrates was some kind of doctor, as aiming to help cure us from a sickness? The two authors I cited on a slide towards the beginning of the lecture, about a “therapeutic” reading of Nietzsche, think so.

The Hammer Speaks

I address this issue in the last section of the lecture, called “The Hammer Speaks,” referring of course to the very last section of the text (which I am both fascinated and yet still puzzled by).

Does Nietzsche offer any sort of “alternative” to the sickness we are suffering from, any way to act differently? Perhaps in his continual references to saying “yes,” to affirming life:

See the sections and pages listed above for examples of when he talks about such yes-saying.

What, though, might this sort of life look like? For that, I turn to the last line of the text before the section on “The Hammer Speaks,” where Nietzsche calls himself “the teacher of the eternal recurrence” (What I Owe, Sect. 5, p. 91). The “eternal recurrence” is a contested concept in Nietzsche scholarship, as there are several things it could mean. One thing it could mean is encompassed in this quote from the Gay Science by Nietzsche:

One interpretation of the “eternal recurrence” is as a thought experiment to explain what it might mean to actually say “yes” to life in a deep way, and whether you could do this. Could you will that the exact same things happen to you, over and over, forever? Remember, the demon comes to you in your “loneliest loneliness,” not when you’re feeling good about your life.

Getting back to our theme (which I think is expressed in the lecture in large part through Nietzsche showing us our past and present, revealing to us our “idols” but in a way that makes them sound different than we usually “hear” them, this is repetition at its extreme.

Nietzsche also connects this kind of deep affirmation of even the most terrible things in life, and the eternal recurrence, to Dionysus. This is, I think, a reference to his first published work, The Birth of Tragedy, in which he speaks of Dionysus as a representation, in Greek tragedy, of forces of life and nature that are destructive, chaotic, amoral, absurd and horrible (opposing this to Apollo as a representation of the ways in which Greek art, and also tragedy, aim for order, clarity, proportion, harmony, and individuation–whereas the Dionysian element destroys individuation, individual identity, unifies us with the whole). The Dionysian rites, Nietzsche states in Twilight, also emphasize sexuality, reproduction, t

he pain required for new creations and new births. In that sense, perhaps, being Dionysian may refer to being able to face the destructive, chaotic, horrible aspects of life, to celebrate sexuality rather than denigrate it.

The last three slides attempt to give a reading of the last section of the text, where the “hammer” speaks. The idea here is to consider how it is that one might become Dionysian, someone who says “yes.”

I’ll leave these last slides here without comment, as I hope they’re fairly self-explanatory. Feel free to ask me any questions about them (or anything else), below!

Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols lecture / You're the Teacher by chendric is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 CC BY

CC licenses posters

I’m participating in a quick, five-day workshop on OER from Dec. 5-10 called Ed Tech Open, and one of the things for the first day (which I’m now two days behind on!) was to look over some resources on creative commons and create something about CC licenses that is itself CC licensed. I thought about making an image, a poster, something like that, but I just don’t have time in this lightning-speed workshop! So I decided to take a look at a few charts/infographics/posters and make a few comments about those. I was wondering what some of the effective ways might be to explain CC licenses visually.

I found the first one, below, from the OER workshop itself, and the others through various web searches. I’ll just saw a few things about how effective I think each one is. BUT, I recognize that such things are quite subjective; what makes sense, seems easy and clear, is going to differ amongst persons I expect.

The following chart, from CC Australia, gives a kind of decision tree for determining which license to use. Here’s the link to the source. This chart is licensed CC BY 2.5 Australia.

The questions on this poster are very helpful, I think–they’re simple and clear. The colours are what confuse me. The explanation on the left says that the pink boxes refer to remixing, the blue ones refer to commercial uses, and the purple boxes are the licenses. That makes sense, but then if you go that route then the first couple of boxes (the green “start” and the red “all rights reserved” boxes have to be different colours, of course. And the effect of all that just feels a bit confusing to me.

I do like the use of red for the “all rights reserved” box, though. It visually indicates that others can’t do things with your work w/o your permission, and it also subtly suggests that maybe one shouldn’t just jump to go that route–red can indicate, to me, a kind of warning, a danger.

One thing I’d like to see in flowcharts like this is some indication of the implications of one’s choices that one might not be aware of. Sure, I may think I don’t want anyone to change and adapt my content, but would I still think so if I knew that meant that people couldn’t even translate it into a different language, that I thereby make it such that my content will be unlikely to be used in many educational contexts, where adaptation to particular circumstances and learning needs is common?

The following poster (link to the original source) comes from Creative Commons Poland, and was designed by Piotrek Chuchla.

CC Polska CC license poster,by Piotrek Chuchla,licensed CC BY 3.0 Poland

I think the strength of this poster lies in the fact that it emphasizes images over text. The text is there, of course, but it’s deemphasized. This might work for those who really gravitate towards images. But for me, it’s really no less confusing because I have to make sense of the images themselves. It’s like it’s adding a new visual “code” that I’m unfamiliar with, and that I have learn to recognize (with the text) before I can decipher the meaning. For me, this is a bit off-putting and makes things more complicated. I feel like I’m being hit with a wall of images on each row that I have to spend a great deal of time figuring out.

A company called Xplore created a chart that is embedded at the following link:

http://www.xplore.net/web_smart/index.htm?articleId=568

I find the format of this one easier to read and clearer, myself. The colour-coded checks under various columns let me know at a glance which licenses allow for commercial use, revision, etc., and which don’t. I also like the brief explanation of each column that follows the chart.

The only thing that’s confusing, though I’m glad they included it, is the row for copyright. There are two problems with this:

The original creator retains copyright in their works when using any CC license. One doesn’t give up copyright.
Everything depends on what permissions the original creator allows for use of the work when asked. The things that are “x” under each column may actually be allowed by the author/creator. It’s just that you have to ask permission first.
The row for “copyright” is under the title “Creative Commons Licenses,” which suggest that there is some CC license called “copyright.”

So I find the “copyright” row problematic. But I’m glad they included the “public domain” row, which many charts leave out. It’s just that they suggest that it’s only for those works whose copyright has expired or forfeited. It doesn’t let people know that they can choose to use CC0, the Creative Commons Public Domain Mark.

Finally, there is a comprehensive infographic on CC licenses by foter.com, here. It’s quite long and detailed, so I’ll just include a couple of screen shots here.

Part of How To Attribute Creative Commons Photos by Foter, licensed CC BY SA 3.0

This image is quite similar to that linked to from Xplore, above. It is of course fine if they based their graphic on the one from Foter (which was published earlier), except that since the one from Foter is licensed CC-BY-SA, then the one from Xplore should be licensed similarly (and the original should be attributed).

Be that as it may, this original from Foter doesn’t have the confusing bit about copyright, and doesn’t suggest that public domain is restricted to works whose copyright has expired, been forfeited, or is otherwise inapplicable.

It’s interesting how they order the licenses from most permissive (top) to least permissive (bottom) even though one might have considered putting the SA’s together and the ND’s together. It’s not that BY-ND is more permissive than BY-NC, though; or is it? That’s actually what this infographic suggests in another part:

Part of How to attribute Creative Commons photos, by Foter, licensed CC-BY-SA 3.0

This suggests that there is a range from most to least permissive, with each license occupying a clear place in that step-wise range. I like the idea here of including the permissiveness/restrictiveness of the licenses in the graphic, but I think the particular order is not exactly clear. Why is ND more permissive than NC? I suppose it is, if one is emphasizing where/how the work may be used, but for OER at least, I think ND is more problematic than NC because to actually be useful in educational contexts one must be able to revise the work.

And of course, why not include CC0 in this list, which would be above CC-BY? I find that CC0 often gets left behind in discussions of CC licenses, with people thinking that the most permissive thing they can do is use CC-BY. But if one doesn’t particularly care about being attributed, then why not use CC0? Some may indeed care, and so then of course CC-BY is the right one to use.

I don’t have any big conclusions to draw from all this, except that I personally find the one from Foter the best in terms of presenting the information accurately, clearly and simply. I’d be curious to hear if others have different reactions!

CC licenses posters / You're the Teacher by chendric is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 CC BY

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!

Lecture on Hobbes’ Leviathan / You're the Teacher by chendric is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 CC BY

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

The “open” in MOOCs / You're the Teacher by chendric is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 CC BY

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…

Forbidden Island (The Tempest and Forbidden Planet) / You're the Teacher by chendric is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 CC BY

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

Presentation on Open Leadership for OCLMOOC / You're the Teacher by chendric is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 CC BY

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.

Open education in Philosophy / You're the Teacher by chendric is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 CC BY

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.

It still happens here (and there, and there, and there…) / You're the Teacher by chendric is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 CC BY

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?

Open and free, redux; Or, yes the words do matter / You're the Teacher by chendric is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 CC BY

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

Presentation on open education at AAPT / You're the Teacher by chendric is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 CC BY