Some of you will recall that a while back I announced that I was available for zoom visits in classrooms wherever I was wanted. Last Thursday, I spent a delightful hour and a half with some students at Laurentian University in Canada. I have just finished two hours with a marvelous group of people my own age in Eugene, Oregon as part of an OLLI course taught at the University there by retired Bates College Prof. David Kolb. In several weeks I will be appearing at Georgia State University in Atlanta to talk about Charles Mills’s book The Racial Contract.
This is fun!
7 comments:
Good to hear. As you find it enjoyable, perhaps this is the best way for you to continue teaching. I've recently seen waste water testing results from around the nation and it seems concerning. We seem to be headed towards another Covid wave.
I can testify that our OLLI discussion group in Eugene was energized and inspired by your talk today. Thanks for your enthusiastic concern for people and ideas.
I'm seeing more and more items on YouTube preaching we should get used to hybrid in-person-plus-online meetings; they will be the coming new expectation. Feels right to me, and provides yet another venue for philosophy.
BTW, is it viewable or are there student privacy concerns?
The sessions are usually not recorded, partly for privacy concerns and partly not to inhibit discussion.
I thoroughly enjoyed your appearance yesterday in Eugene. Your use of Marcuse to advance the main themes on philosophy of art was immediately provocative and very interesting, and gave all of us out here a lot to think about and incorporate in our ongoing philosophy salon with Prof Kolb. Thanks so much!
By the way, your stories were also fascinating and fit well with the theme and the contexts provided by our class's questions to you. I didn't jump in as I have had too little time to think and a lot of distractions. i saw your cat bound by at one point in the class, and mine is ill and concerns me a lot, and lying near me.
Your tangent on fugues was informed me philosophically (ultimately thanks to your school mate Bert Dreyfus) as i have been reading Iain Thomson's book on Heidegger and art and Heidegger's attempts in a few of his more mysterious texts to philosophize in what Thomson (another student of Bert's, a while later than me) describes as a fugue-like way. All very interesting to me, especially to see a younger philosopher take some of Bert Dreyfus's brilliant analyses and run with them.
Yes, Prof Dreyfus infected me with that heideggerian virus, and i have had "long heidegger" symptoms since those wonderful classes back in the early 1980s.
Once again, Prof Wolff, thanks for 2 hours of a fine philosophy salon.
BTW, I would appreciate your comments on Geuss's forthcoming book as well. I traipse through his little book on 'what is critical theory?' every so often, making a little headway, and i enjoyed his essays in "Changing the subject."
It is good news that you can continue philosophy by the zooming into class method. I do not have technicians to work with at UPEI or the proper classroom technology to do this visiting prof experiment.
However, another possibility which might also give you human contact with (struggling undergraduate) students (in my case), would be to use the Moodle systems or online forums in the philosophy courses. I have discovered that my students enjoy the following kind of Moodle forum: ask the professor any questions about subject X (Charles Mills) that has not already been asked by a previous student in this forum. Since there are about 20-40 active students in the class, this would mean about 30 questions to answer. The professor gives an initial answer, then the student must reply or interact one time further in response. The students would have already had a lecture on subject X, and would be instructed to ask philosophical questions related to the course. It takes me about 8-10 hours to thoughtfully answer a set of about 30 student questions (thinking and composing time).
In the case of visiting professor/guest interlocutor, the Moodle techs would send you a link, adding you to the class list so that you could see what the course was about and where you were speaking within the larger dialectic. You get added as a non-editing participant in the course and then you can write in the Moodle forums of the course as you see fit or not (you could observe, watching entry-level students struggle with authentic philosophy is always educational even for the prof). I have had senior philosophy majors work as my Moodle Forum assistants and help the students learn to argue. The students themselves told me that they like this type of forum the best of any that I do.
This method of interaction might be more leisurely and allow more interaction with the whole class than a zoom method of meeting the class over an hour. You could also combine a Zoom visit to a class for an hour and then allow students to interact further through a Moodle forum exercise that continues your discussion. The biggest problem that I currently have is that my online courses have become so large in content or research I have posted online to supplement the actual lectures, that having 30 students write arguments and replies over 6 Moodle forums in a course, increases the amount of reading and interaction time extraordinarily, giving us all extreme digital overload.
We have to learn to use the online methods of interaction to improve educational flexibility and make it cheaper, freeing students to work as they get educated or from gouging by textbook companies and other costs. The greater the flexibility built into the course's schedule, the greater the workload in marking and ensuring that students are following instructions and learning appropriately. It is excellent that you are involving yourself in these educational experiments in higher education and I hope that other philosophers seeking to continue their work in a safe space as pandemic conditions continue to affect the world take proper note of your contribution and do something similar.
I am delighted that you enjoyed it as much as I did Henry Sholar. How fortunate you are to have Bert Dreyfus as a teacher! I have a host of stories about him from the time when we were fellow students. In fact, I met my first wife when I was coming in to town on a military pass just to see and pass some time with his girlfriend (he was in Paris studying with Merlau Ponty).
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