Nov 17, 2014

A New Class: Philosophical World Views and Values

This marks my fourth year teaching classes in Philosophy and Religious Studies for Marist College.  The last three years have involved a mix of face-to-face and online classes -- this current academic year, however, I decided to switch entirely to teaching online for Marist.  There's a whole story behind that decision, which perhaps I'll tell in a later post -- suffice it to say that one of the main reasons was to afford me greater flexibility and more time to devote to doing more innovative work in Philosophy -- bringing it into practice, and putting it before a broader public.

In early December, I start teaching a new 10-week online course -- World Views and Values.  It's essentially a variation on Intro to Philosophy, but it's one which transfer students have traditionally taken in place of Intro (which has since been renamed "Philosophical Perspectives"!), and it bears a different course description: 
This course will help students to ask basic questions about the ultimate meaning of life, to take a comprehensive and holistic world view, and to articulate a coherent values system. The basic methodology for teaching the course is comparative and socioanalytic. 
So really, a lot of leeway there for doing what one would like with the course.  I decided to put a lot of thought into designing precisely the sort of course I think might be most useful and interesting for the students -- and enjoyable for me to put together and teach.

Nov 12, 2014

A New Critical Thinking Channel!

Last month, near the end of October, after a lot of planning and preparation, we opened the doors (metaphorically) to a new institution -- my second YouTube channel:  Critical Thinking, Logic, and Argumentation.  At present, we've released just eight 10-20 minute videos, all associated into a playlist on the informal fallacies.  But we've (and by that, I mean ReasonIO, consisting of Andi Sciacca and I) got some pretty big plans for the channel.

I picked informal fallacies to start with because they provide a relatively easy, and popular, set of topics. It's materials I've been teaching about for over a decade, and you can find discussions of these common failures in argumentation not only in Critical Thinking textbooks and classes, but in an entire range of disciplines -- Communication, English, Political Science, Civics, just to name a few.  So, focusing on them seemed like a great way to start the channel off -- provide something that students, lifelong learners, and even instructors might be able to make immediate use of.