March 2008 Archives

Podcasting and Blogging the Liberal Arts

By Christopher P. Long on March 23, 2008 1:02 AM  | 0 Comments | 0 TrackBacks
A Liberal Arts Education is committed to cultivating habits of thinking and acting capable of responding to the world in ways that open new possibilities for human community.  It is oriented in part by what may be called the reading life and the writing life.

The reading life is animated by an attempt to enter into dialogue with the ideas, thoughts and actions of the past and present.  

The writing life is animated by an attempt to contribute to the dialogue by synthesizing, criticizing and publicizing ideas, thoughts and actions capable of transforming the future.

Technology can play a powerful role in a Liberal Arts education by cultivating the skills associated with the reading and writing life.  Here are some examples of how I have sought to mobilize technology to support the Liberal Arts education.

Podcasting the Reading Life
The Assignment
  • Locate an academic secondary source that presents an interpretation of the assigned section of Plato's Gorgias. Produce a podcast that summarizes the interpretation.
An Example
  • Stephanie Marek's podcast on the Gorgias with Casey Cox.
Expanding the Reading Life
  • Find a picture on the web or take a picture that grows out of your experience reading the Oedipous trilogy. Post the picture to your blog and write a post that explains how the picture relates to your experience with these texts. Present then a "reading" of the picture.
An Example

Blogging the Writing Life
Students in my PHIL204: 20th Century Philosophy course were required to blog each week about the readings we had done.  The criteria for assessment I provided set out that these posts must:
Demonstrate familiarity with the readings
  1. Be well organized from beginning to end
  2. Be well written and edited
  3. Articulate original ideas
  4. Reflect thoughtfully and critically on the texts
An Example

Expanding the Writing Life
One of the goals in using blogs in my philosophy courses was to provide a forum by which philosophical ideas could be brought into more intimate contact with the wider world of politics and culture.

David Klatt did this with his excellent final paper project, An Immigrant Songwriter and Dewey on Language and Citizenship, in which he critically engages a Spanish translation and performance of Woodie Guthrie's "This Land is Your Land" to ask questions about the meaning and nature of citizenship.

I managed to do this in Myth, Tragedy, Politics with posts on Hesiod's Theogony and how it related to the protests by Monks in Burma; in 20th Century Philosophy, I was able to present Merleau-Ponty and Dewey's philosophy of art to bear upon works by a variety of artists like Cézanne, Klee and others.

For more information on my use of technology in the classroom, see my story on the TLT Website.

The Growing Up of an Adolescent Country

By Christopher P. Long on March 19, 2008 10:17 PM  | 1 Comment | 0 TrackBacks
In his 1961 essay, The Dangerous Road Before Martin Luther King, James Baldwin speaks of the death of segregation in America and he raises the question as to "just how long, how violent, and how expensive the funeral is going to be." We have lived the length of the funeral, felt its violence in the assassinations of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, we have paid a price too high.  

Baldwin advocated, however, a quick burial of the corpse of segregation:

The sooner the corpse is buried, the sooner we can get around to the far more taxing and rewarding problems of integration, or what King calls community, and what I think of as the achievement of nationhood, or, more simply and cruelly, the growing up of this dangerously adolescent country (The Dangerous Road ..., in The Price of the Ticket, 248).

Obama's speech on race yesterday was a step toward the maturing of our adolescent country.  His willingness to stand against the firestorm of outrage in the face of Jeremiah Wright's statements and, without wavering, to challenge the American people to live the tension that Obama himself embodies, that we as a nation embody: this took courage.  It was a stand for achieving nationhood, to use Baldwin's words, a move toward genuine community, to use King's.  

TedLoder.JPG
Our response will take courage too.

I am proud to say that I hear something of the courage it will take in today's Philadelphia Inquirer.  There various civic and religious leaders were interviewed about their reaction to the speech.  One voice heard here is particularly dear to me: my step-father, Theodore Loder, retired pastor of the First United Methodist Church of Germantown and long time advocate for social justice.  He has worked his whole life toward achieving the nationhood of which Baldwin speaks.

I have often said that my support for Obama is animated by a concern for the future, but reading Ted's words quoted in the Inquirer, I am increasingly aware of how important this moment and this candidacy is for all those thoughtful, courageous leaders, black and white, who came before, teaching us the hard lessons of what it would mean to grow up as a country. 

With them in mind, I end here as I began, with the words of Baldwin, this time from his 1960 essay, Notes for a Hypothetical Novel:

A country is only as good ... a country is only as strong as the people who make it up and the country turns into what the people want it to become.  Now, this country is going to be transformed. It will not be transformed by God, but by all of us, by you and me.  I don't believe any longer that we can afford to say that it is entirely out of our hands.  We made the world we're living in and we have to make it over.

State College Obama Office Opens

By Christopher P. Long on March 18, 2008 8:34 PM  | 2 Comments | 0 TrackBacks
ObamaOpening.JPGTonight I went with my neighbor and friend, Paul, and his daughter, Caitlin, and with my daughters, Hannah and Chloe, to the opening of the Obama campaign office here in State College.  There were many people of diverse backgrounds, much energy and a good deal of excitement for the Obama campaign.

Chloe, Caitlin and Hannah were quite excited, dancing and singing and, of course, chanting along with the "Fired Up and ... Ready to Go!" call and response.  It was powerful to feel the energy of so many young people and not a few older ones at the office opening tonight.  

There is a lot of work to be done if Obama is to do well and perhaps even win in Pennsylvania next month.  But after tonight I am more confident that it is possible.

My confidence is yet further augmented by Obama's speech on race in America today.  It is a sober, thoughtful speech.  It is a challenging speech, one that asks us to live up to the mature politics of which I spoke here months ago.  It recognizes that America "is irrevocably bound to a tragic past."  And yet, it pushes us to think about how we will respond to this past.  Will we continue to be haunted by it in a paralyzing way, or will we draw upon it even as we move toward a more perfect union?  Or, to use Obama's words:

"This union may never be perfect, but generation after generation has shown that it can always be perfected."

This is a call to action, to live up to a promise so long deferred. Now is the time.


Registering to Vote in PA

By Christopher P. Long on March 15, 2008 11:03 PM  | 0 Comments | 0 TrackBacks
To those readers of this blog living in PA, now is the time to make sure you are registered to vote in the Pennsylvania primary.  

The deadline is March 24th, so if you want to be part of the Democratic primary in April, you need to register by the 24th.  You can register online here: 


Those of you teaching classes this semester, please contact Jessalyn Schwartz at jessalyn.schwartz@gmail.com if you would like to have a student come talk to your class about how to register to vote in the primary. Jessalyn writes of her efforts:

I am a graduating senior working with the Penn State Chapter of Students for Barack Obama as the Academic Outreach Coordinator. With the Pennsylvania primary quickly approaching, we have taken on the task of registering students to vote. The goal of our effort is to turn in more than 8,000 registration cards before the March 24th deadline. 

I am contacting you to ask if you ... would allow one of our members to speak to some of your classes and impart a non-partisan message about the importance of this election and voting as well as inform them of how and where they can register to vote. We are not trying to get more support for our specific candidate and will not be mentioning our position, though we do have to remind them that they cannot be registered independent in order to vote in the primary. Please let me know if you would be interested in allowing us to come in for a few minutes to engage your students or if you have any questions or suggestions of other faculty members that may allow our presence. Thank you for your time. 

I hope people will consider contacting Jessalyn to make sure as many people as possible can participate in the primary on April 22nd.  

Happy Birthday Val/Mom

By Christopher P. Long on March 10, 2008 12:20 AM  | 0 Comments | 0 TrackBacks
Today is Val's 40th Birthday!

To celebrate, Hannah, Chloe and I put together this video.  They wanted me to write: "We love you Momma, because you're so great. Happy Birthday."  

Have a wonderful birthday Val:

PSU for Obama

By Christopher P. Long on March 6, 2008 8:22 PM  | 0 Comments | 0 TrackBacks
A number of graduate students, faculty and Penn State staff have started a Google Group to spread the word about Obama and generate excitement about his campaign. It seems now that Pennsylvania will finally have a chance to weigh in on the nomination.  We will finally have a chance to make a definitive statement that we are ready to move beyond the politics of hate and division and toward a more mature politics at home and abroad.

I was extremely disappointed by governor Ed Rendell's comments last month to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazzette, that Pennsylvania is home to conservative whites who are "probably not ready to vote for an African-American candidate."  Although Gov. Rendell does not yet seem ready, many of us here in Pennsylvania are ready to vote for a candidate who is capable of changing the way politics is practiced in the United States.

Noam Scheiber of the New Republic points to Bryan Curtis's October 2000 report about Gov. Rendell's propensity to harm those he is trying to help.  Although Obama will have to combat Rendell's machine here, he may get some help directly from the mouth of the Governor.  

If you are a member of the PSU community, or just interested in the Obama campaign, come and join the group:

Winter Hike

By Christopher P. Long on March 4, 2008 2:15 PM  | 0 Comments | 0 TrackBacks
On Sunday, Val, Hannah, Chloe and I went on a winter nature hike sponsored by the Millbrook Marsh Nature Center. Although everything was covered with snow, we were about to witness the more dormant side of nature as it waits for spring.

We also made it into the newspaper!  The Centre Daily Times sent a photographer to the event and she captured some excellent pictures.  One of me helping Hannah with her binoculars appeared in the CDT on Monday, March 3rd.  That picture and the others can be viewed from the Centre Daily Times website here by looking at pictures 11-15.

A slide show of the CDT photos of the hike can be seen here.

Laughter

By Christopher P. Long on March 1, 2008 4:13 PM  | 0 Comments | 0 TrackBacks
WNYC's Radio Lab did a wonderful set of stories on laughter recently.  They appeal to Aristotle as having said that human beings "are the only ones of the animals that laugh" (Parts of Animals, 673a7).  I would like to place this along side of those other claims Aristotle made about human beings--that they are "animals with reason" and "political animals."  Somehow, that human beings are laughing animals was lost in the shuffle.

In any case, the Radio Lab episode proceeds to prove Aristotle wrong by showing how Dr. Jaak Panksepp, a psychobiologist at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, discovered that rats laugh when they are tickled.  The story of how he and his research assistants discovered this is quite beautiful.

For my part, however, I think that Aristotle would not have been too surprised by laughing rats, although I imagine that he himself would have been tickled by the discovery.  He always insisted that human beings are part of the animal kingdom and the continuity of phenomena between human and other animals would likely have struck him as natural.

But what I loved most about the Radio Lab stories was the laughter.  So here is my contribution, or that of my daughters:



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