Teaching

Via “PZ Myers”:http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2006/09/its_such_a_quick_read_too.php, “What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts? The Graphic Novel”:http://faultline.org/index.php/site/comments/whats_liberal_about_the_liberal_arts1/.

Peter Levine has a post objecting to my argument in chapter 6 of On Education that schools should not teach patriotism. Peter makes the case for patriotism (understood as “love of country”) being a legitimate feeling in itself, and that it has various instrumental benefits, in particular that it encourages citizens to participate in the affairs of the nation, and that it can play an important role in moral development, training the sentiments to attach beyond the confines of those we are immediately attached to, and therefore helping our characters to learn the virtue of impartial justice. (See also, Sigal Ben-Porath’s nice new book, Citizenship under Fire : Democratic Education in Times of Conflict ). He then tackles two of the main arguments I make against teaching patriotism; that if its agencies promote love of country the state interferes with the development of authentic, legitimacy-producing, consent, and that using, say, History teaching to produce patriotism can conflict with other more academic goals of History teaching (like, e.g., getting the students to learn the truth!). He points out that learning the full truth about Rosa Parks’s involvement in politics can increase one’s sense of attachment to the nation (as it did his) and describes an interesting hands on history project with black students in a local school which was aimed in part at cementing their attachment to their own communities.

Peter’s post is lengthy (if concise), and rather than reproduce it I’ll assume that readers have followed the link and done the reading. Here’s my response:

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Today’s Lifehacker special is a piece I wrote on “Public speaking do’s and don’t’s”. I list ways in which one can prepare for a talk and suggestions for how to make the most of a presentation. I welcome additions to the list, in the comments here or to the original post.

Before it seems like CT is becoming nothing but a pointer to content we have posted elsewhere, I thought I’d mention just one of the issues I bring up in the piece. One of my biggest pet peeves when it comes to presentations has to do with most people’s inability to stick to the time they have been alloted for their talk.

Few people are such amazing speakers that the audience can’t get enough of listening to them so it is best to wrap up a speech on time. One of the most common pitfalls is to add “brief” introductory remarks to one’s prepared talk. There is usually nothing brief about such comments. Moreover, given that most conference presentations – the ones with which I tend to be most familiar – are supposed to take about 15 minutes, adding just three minutes of intro uses up 20 percent of the time allocation. However, most people are already short on time so this way they get even more behind.

I have considerably less experience in industry and other realms. Is this better elsewhere?

A related pet peeve concerns moderators who are unable to tell people that it is time to wrap up and give the next person a chance to speak.

One of my students asked whether it would be possible to receive a hard copy of students’ blogs for the quarter. This is a nice idea. I don’t know how long the course blog will stay online (and some of it will probably start anew next time I teach the class) so such a solution could be nice for archiving the material. (The Web Archive hasn’t picked up their blogs yet.) I had created archives of the blogs from last year using HTTrack, which is a handy tool, but an additional hard copy would be nice.

I have been looking around and although I have found some options, I am interested in finding some more. I know that Qoop has a Blog Printing service in beta, but it doesn’t seem to be open to just anyone (plus it is not clear whether they are supporting all blogging software at this point). In any case, given my experiences with Qoop’s Flickr photobook printing, I would rather explore some alternatives first. (The result was okay. The cover was very nice, but the rest seemed more like a notebook than a book per se. For that, the price seemed a bit too high.)

It looks like LiveJournal users have a ready-made solution. But I need something for WordPress. This person seems to have done a nice job printing a book (or “blook”), but the process seems extremely tedious. Does anyone have experiences with BlogBinders? (I don’t like the idea that they strip out the images from the blog.)

Has anyone done this? Any recommendations? Any thoughts on what to avoid or what not to forget?

My preference would be for paying a bit more if it meant having to do less work on it.

If you are or were at some point in a doctoral program then you have probably heard the following before: The best dissertation is a done dissertation. But how to get it done?

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For your weekend reading pleasure, my Internet & Society course blog links to 25 students’ class blogs. They are required to blog about their readings (which already leads to some interesting posts), but additionally, several of them have gotten inspired to blog about class-related (and sometimes unrelated) topics above and beyond the required assignments. From interviewing grandparents about their radio uses to reflecting about their obsessions with IT they have covered lots of topics.

Extras have included discussions of the “What Would Jesus Blog” movement, the Facebook banned at a university, Tuvalu’s .tv domain name (also discussed briefly in class once) and frustrations with software installation. One student blogged about a run-in with someone regarding a copied identity on MySpace. Blogger ELVIAJERO has a series on Weekly Musical Leanings. Another student blogged about an upcoming movie that a friend is producing. Some students also get inspired to add images to their posts, which adds a fun component when you’re reading through a couple dozen of these blogs. (And yes, they are careful about not hotlinking and using up others’ bandwidth.)

In case you’re wondering about the curious blog names, I encourage students to blog without their real names for privacy (and in compliance with FERPA guidelines).

I’m sure they’d be delighted to get some comments from people outside of class so if you have a moment please stop by and say hello. That said, many of the comments on the posts are closed due to spam protection we have implemented on their blogs. We use both the auto-close comments plugin for WordPress and an additional spam guard to protect against unwanted junk. I recommend both if you’re a WordPress user.