Teaching Philosophy

What is the likelihood of another 9-11?

Presidential Debate 1, Question 8 Static Link

Russia.

Presidential Debate 1, Question 7 Static Link

What is your reading of the threat from Iran?

Presidential Debate 1, Question 6 Static Link

Afghanistan - do you think new US troops should be sent? How many and when?

Presidential Debate 1, Question 5 Static Link

A 59-year old Home Depot employee from West Linn, OR won the Great American Thinker contest last month. I am not familiar with the contest, but it looks essentially like an oratory / essay contest. The web site (linked previously) has the finalist essays - which certainly should be usable in a CT course.

What are you going to have to give up as a result of the financial rescue plan?

Presidential Debate 1, Question 3 Static Link

A  famous blog in philosophy circles recently called for philosophers to be more engaged in pointing out fallacies in presidential debates. Um…. This is new?

I’m trying to collect as many of these speeches for analysis in my CT courses as possible, and I’ve done so for years. If anyone is interested in making comparisons between the rhetoric of the debates in 2008 and 2004, here is my ‘debate browsers’ from 2004:

Debate 1 (Foreign Policy) Static Link

Debate 2 (Foreign & Domestic Policy) Static Link

Debate 3 (Domestic Policy) Static Link

Textbook torrents. It is a site that allows users to share scanned-in versions of their textbooks via peer-to-peer networks.  This really was just a manner of time. There are a number of other attempts out there to fix the textbook marketplace, including my own Inquiry site , Wikibooks, OpenTextBook, TextBook Revolution and (one I didn’t know of until today) Scribd.

Regular readers of this blog will remember my grant proposal from last spring. (FIPSE denied the grant proposal - in fact, they only awarded 6 grants this year! In most previous years, they awarded around 60. I think they are playing hard-ball with congress).

Check out the usedbook Blog for more comments: http://usedbooksblog.com/blog/textbook-torrents/

McDaniel has just been approved for an iTunesU site, and I’m piloting the project in my CT class this semester. If you’re interested, you can subscribe here:

, or if you want to subscribe directly:
http://inquiry.mcdaniel.edu/feeds/videoCriticalThinkingQT.xml.

If you’re interested in how I did it: I used a sympodium to record the screen. Last year, I attempted to do this with Camtasia Studio, but it took to long to save the files at the end of class, and ended up affecting the class-change over. This software is much quicker, and I can save directly to a public share on my desktop machine (thank goodness I moved back to mac land). I have Sorenson media set up to watch a folder on my public share, so it starts encoding for the podcast before I’m even back to my office. All that’s left to do manually is to upload it to my server and edit the XML file. I do that manually - there probably are software packages that will do it automatically, but I prefer the control.

If you’ve considered using podcasts in your own philosophy courses, but don’t know where to start, I’ve compiled some resources here that should help lead the way.

“How-To”

What is a podcast? - a brief introduction to the technology of podcasting, which mentions some instructional benefits and considerations for using this new medium for information delivery

Podcasts in the classroom - an interview with a professor who uses podcasts in his courses (though he’s not a philosophy professor, his message still applies)

Collections of Philosophy Podcasts

Philosopher’s Zone - your “guide through the strange thickets of logic, metaphysics and ethics” by Alan Saunders

Philosophy Bites - podcasts of top philosophers, interviewed by David Edmonds and Nigel Warburton, on bite-sized topics

Philosophy Talk - a weekly, one-hour radio series produced by Ben Manilla. The hosts’ down-to-earth and no-nonsense approach brings the richness of philosophic thought to everyday subjects. Listen to Philosophy Talk for free (requires you to sign up at: http://www.prx.org/user/PhilosophyTalk/)

Ethics Bites - David Edmonds and Nigel Warburton go in search of answers to the big ethical questions in this 14-part podcast.

Philosophy: The Classics - Nigel Warburton reads from his book Philosophy: The Classics

LSAT Logic in Everyday Life - a podcast series from The Princeton Review that applies the logic of the LSAT to analyze the flawed arguments in politics, advertisements, and conventional wisdom

Learn Out Loud - spans from the great ancient philosophers to the great minds of today