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How Democracies Die
Inspired by a particular speech at this year’s Democratic National Convention, I have gone back to read the founding documents of the United States, starting with the Constitution. Well, let me step back and give some context to this. I am scheduled to teach a course in political philosophy, this fall, an assignment made both… Continue reading
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Learning and Enjoyment
“It is a sign of wasted effort if an activity from which students are expected to learn is not enjoyable for them. It means that they are only learning the wrong things, namely that they can’t succeed in learning what they are trying to learn – and also, probably, that they don’t really want to… Continue reading
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Courses with the Lid Off
I’ve started to have panic attacks about my summer teaching. The Spring term ended last week and Summer term begins next week, so I’m in the midst of a too-quick turn-around. Still, I think I have enough time to get my syllabi and other documents in order before I step back into the classroom on… Continue reading
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Life Is Strange: Video Games and Moral Imagination (Spoilers!)
I’ve spent a little too much time, in the past week or so, playing a game on my computer. The game in question, with the deceptively trite title Life Is Strange, is an example of what may be an emerging genre in video games: a graphic adventure game that amounts to an especially rich and… Continue reading
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Doing New Things in Teaching (with more words added later)
(Explained using only the ten hundred words people use the most often, just like at that one not-real place I found with my computer. I wrote this using a thing the guy who makes that not-real place made to help people to write more simply.) I work at a big college (the kind that has… Continue reading
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Theoretical Commitments
I have long thought of myself as something of an agnostic on matters of moral theory. From the beginning I have concerned myself with practical decision-making, first with environmental ethics and policy and more recently with engineering ethics. I am now mainly concerned with how best to teach ethics to undergraduate students in engineering degree… Continue reading
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Scaffolding: The Utility Template
As previously noted, scaffolding is an important element in problem-based learning: it is an external and somewhat artificial version of a thinking process that is usually carried out internally. The idea is to direct students’ attention from the outside until they learn to direct their own attention themselves, from the inside For drawing students’ attention… Continue reading
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Where Have I Been?
Well, most recently, I’ve been at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Ethics Across the Curriculum, just up the road in Greenville, SC. Some conversations I had there made it clear that there might be good reason to resume posting to this blog, if only because people expressed interest in seeing updates on my… Continue reading
