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Scaffolding: The Virtue Template, revised
Some months ago, I posted a template I provided to students in my engineering ethics class, to assist them in thinking about virtues and vices in considering various options for responding to a complex problem situation. This, I explained, is an example of scaffolding, which is a crucial element in problem-based learning: it is an… Continue reading
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Why I Don’t Want to Get STEAMed
STEM education is all the rage: Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics, the collection of disciplines regarded as the most desirable, the most likely to lead to financial success for individuals and economic growth for nations, the obsession of universities and policy makers alike. I don’t know who was the first to consider the possibility of… Continue reading
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Adventures in Applied Actor-Network Theory
The first step is to admit you have a problem, right? Well, I have a problem with computers or, more specifically, with broadband Internet service: my capacity to wallow in distraction seems almost boundless. I can sit for hours, hopping from site to site, tracking this blog and that, contributing to that discussion thread or… Continue reading
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On Quitting Social Media . . . Again
I offer no manifesto here, no call to arms against the evils of technology. I note only in passing that the pendulum is swinging the other way, and I find myself inclined to disengage from the internet, for a while, to see if it’s still possible to focus on other things . . . like… Continue reading
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From the Archive: A Bizarrely Inexplicable Post
A mention of the work of Douglas Adams in The New York Times, this morning, has prompted me to go back to the archives of my earlier blog, The Ethics of Metropolitan Growth, for a post from December 20, 2011. **** As long as I am acknowledging my intellectual debts, I should pay tribute to… Continue reading
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The Aims of Education
My approach to teaching could be described as “outcome-based education,” given the emphasis of my courses on helping students to develop particular skills of moral cognition. For me, this narrower, short-term aim has always been tied to a broader vision of the humanities, or of liberal education, or of human life in the world. It… Continue reading
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Being on the Same Side
I use a rubric in assessing my students work, set out in tabular form: each row is one of the criteria from the learning outcomes, while the columns indicated degree of mastery, with stronger performance on the left. When a student comes to see me about an assignment, usually concerned about the final grade –… Continue reading
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Design Flaws
As I’ve noted before, I adopted a problem-based learning (PBL) approach to my practical ethics classes in Fall 2012: after a summer of planning and preparation, I jumped in to the deep end with two courses structured entirely around groups working on messy, practical problems. (I’m looking back over my history with PBL in preparation… Continue reading
