Recently in Education Category

On Wednesday, September 28th at 4pm eastern, we in the Liberal Arts Undergraduate Studies office will take another step out into the great technological unknown by recording an episode of our Liberal Arts Voices Podcast live on a Google Plus hangout.

I hope that anyone interested in what we are doing in the Liberal Arts Undergraduate Studies office will join us. Here is a link to my Google Plus profile where you will find the Hangout when it is available.

The official guests on the episode will be leaders from the Liberal Arts Undergraduate Council, a dynamic group of student leaders who have always been willing to engage with new technologies with me in interesting and enriching ways. That they will be with us for this experiment is only proper since they have helped us grow our community through Twitter and Facebook.

The impetus behind this experiment is first to perform what we preach about the importance of practice in learning about new technologies. We will see what Google Plus adds to our discussions on the Liberal Arts Voices podcast, and we will experience directly what it takes away.

It happened without warning, without any hint that the end was at hand. Suddenly, there it was: May 27th, the day after the last day of the preschool year, the announcement that St. Andrew's Episcopal Church would close the Preschool that was born, lived and thrived within and around its walls over the past 40 years.

Death often comes that way, unbidden, suddenly. But we expected more from a church that had until that date, served as a caring site for an educational community that nurtured generations of young State College students. 

This image captures a poignant moment in the Flash Forum in Response to the Arizona Shootings held by the Center for Democratic Deliberation on January 21 at Penn State. The panelists are listening to a student accuse them of being irrational left wing ideologues who are attempting to blame right wing rhetoric for the shootings. 

I am happy to report that Mendeley has developed an iPhone app that brings us a step closer to the digital research model I hope to implement in the months to come.

Before I mention a few of the limitations of the application, I want to celebrate its very appearance. This is a huge step forward in mobile bibliographic and reference computing.

About three years ago, I had a phone conversation with a person in the sales department at Thomson Reuters, the company that makes Endnote. The purpose of my call was to see if they were developing a version of Endnote for the recently released iPhone. They told me that they did have plans, once Apple released the Software Development Kit, to develop a mobile version of Endnote. Already at that point, I could see the value of having my references so easily accessible.

Although that application has yet to materialize, I shifted, in the meantime, to Zotero because it facilitated the sort of collaborative research I hoped to put into practice with my students. As I mentioned in my previous posts on digital research more generally and on the way I use of Zotero in particular, a significant limitation to all the bibliographic software was the inability to use anything other than the web browser to interface with my reference libraries when using my iPhone and iPad.

I turned to Mendeley in the hope that I would find an application that would have all the collaborative functionality I required even as it allowed me to organize, read and annotate pdf files in a way that would integrate with my word processing software. I am very happy with Mendeley when I am sitting in front of a desktop computer. However, it is critical to the model of digital research I am trying to establish that all my references be accessible to me on all my devices wherever I am.

This is where the new iPhone application, even if it is tantalizingly labeled 'Lite', adds substantive value to my research workflow. The application syncs with my Mendeley libraries beautifully and allows me to read any of the pdf files I have posted to it. In the photo on the right, you can see the collections exactly as they appear in the Mendeley Desktop application and on the web.

It is widely recognized among educators that student engagement is a key to academic success. Disengaged students erode the social dynamics in the classroom, have a negative impact on their peers and drop out at a high rates. Thus, it is no surprise that the desire to move students from a disengaged attitude to one of engagement has become a major goal of our pedagogical practices.

Cole Camplese and I were invited to be part of this year's Learning Design Summer Camp at Penn State. The presentation topic that was proposed to us was strong in and of itself, but when we got together to really flesh it out we thought we would try something that modeled the ideas we really wanted to cultivate in the PSU learning design community.

Both of us were very fond of the work done in the Hacking the Academy project at George Mason and wanted to explore how our own community could be part of a much larger initiative. When we really worked to explore our thinking, the Hacking Pedagogy concept was born. Although there is risk in depending on the community to collaborate with us in this endeavor, we felt the only way to truly model what a cooperative learning event could look like was to take that risk.

To move from a teaching practice centered on the pure dissemination of content from teacher to student to one rooted in truly cooperative practice should be the new ideal for us as a teaching and learning community. Our goal is to provide a kind of field guide that is cooperatively developed and edited over time so that we as a community of educators can draw upon the wisdom of this group. Over the next two weeks, culminating with a cooperative session at the Learning Design Summer Camp, we will ask you (the Internet) to share with us evidence that education can be transformed, that it can be designed to empower a shared sense of ownership among participants, that it can be improved when learning spaces are made into genuine learning communities.

We know this evidence exists across both the Penn State and social web. We know this because we read, listen, watch, and engage with it each and every day as we do our work. What we feel it lacks is a center of gravity that serves to coalesce it into a working resource that can be continually mined, edited, added to, and utilized to guide new forms of teaching, learning, and design practice. The recognition that we as a community have more to offer than each of us can contribute individually will guide our cooperative session at Summer Camp.

The content of this series will be created collaboratively in an attempt to perform the dynamic, open and responsive pedagogical practices for which it advocates. Such an approach recognizes the intimate, reciprocal relationship between theory and practice, process and product, student and teacher. The very processes by which the texts, podcasts, videos, and images brought together here are gathered, culled, edited, revised, discussed and disseminated afford us an educational opportunity. Our product itself will be a compelling expression of the power of cooperative pedagogy.

How to Collaborate

It is really easy to be a part of this ... we are simply asking you to lend us your content by tagging it with the tag psuhack across the social web or with the #psuhack on twitter. We will spend time looking through the submissions and see if we can identify a handful of overarching themes around which we can organize our content. At Summer Camp we will present the themes and introduce you to the loosely curated artifacts so that we can hopefully come to a shared vision of how to organize our publication. It is our hope that during Summer Camp you not only think critically about how this can impact your work, but consider adding new submissions live during the session.

Again, our goal is to both model the emergence of a cooperative learning environment and to create a living "field guide" that can serve as an ongoing form of inspiration as we go forward with our work. Even now, you can start to see the Hacking Pedagogy contributions flowing in by visiting the PSU Voices page. We talked a bit about it on ETS Talk 61 as well. Here is the feed from the most recent things being posted as "psuhack" on the Blogs at Penn State platform:

I have been living with the iPad for only a few days, but I am beginning to feel the power and limitations of the device. My comments here are impressionistic and rooted in my own peculiar use case as an Associate Dean and a faculty member who teaches philosophy with technology at Penn State.

It is already clear to me that the iPad does not replicate the experience of the iPhone even though many of the apps serve the same functionality.

The iPad is much less intrusive in collaborative contexts than either a laptop, which tends to come between members of the group, or an iPhone, which isolates individuals, severing each from the dynamics of the whole.

Because the iPad is more like a notepad, it feels more natural and legitimate to use it in the context of a meeting or as a device on which to take notes during a lecture.

Impact on Pedagogy
These factors suggest already how the iPad should find a comfortable home in the classroom.

The number one reason my students tell me they don't bring a laptop to class, despite my encouraging them to do so, is that it is too heavy and they don't want to carry it around with them throughout the day. 

It will be easier for students to carry an iPad in their bag all day.  Further, because it does not intrude on face to face conversation, it will allow us to blur the boundary between the online and in-class dimensions of a course, opening a more porous and dynamic relationship between digital and embodied communication in the classroom learning community.  Information from the internet will be more easily integrated into the in-class discussion without disrupting the dynamics of the discussion itself. That discussion too will find its way into the various modes of digital expression online. 

I can imagine students easily referring to online information, participating in the back channel discussion via twitter, posting comments on a blog even as they remain engaged in and indeed add to the classroom discussion itself. The fact that the iPad can only do one thing at a time might actually be a benefit in a classroom context with regard to keeping students focused on the material at hand.

Increasing Productivity Across Platforms
In my educational role as an administrator, there are a number of very positive advantages of the iPad.  I use Evernote to keep all my notes in sync across various platforms - a PC, an iMac, a MacBook Pro, an iPhone and now an iPad. This gives me easy access to all sorts of information that is easily searched on the fly. 

Further, having all my email accessible on the device is excellent. I use Penn State's IMAP email service, so all my mail remains on the server no matter which device I use to access it. I am very much looking forward to the evolution of Dropbox so that I might be able to use it to sync files on which I work in Pages for the iPad.  (See the short conversation about this Cole Camplese and I had on his blog.) 

You will also see a copy of Things on my screen capture.  I am a big fan of this program as it allows me to keep track of multiple aspects of a wide diversity of projects.  I am decidedly not a fan of paying $20 for the iPad version after paying $49 for the desktop version and $4.99 for the iPhone version.  Added to this is the fact that they are still working on implementing cloud sync and I would have given up on Things if it did not allow me to implement my email strategy which involves keeping my inbox clear by doing triage on incoming email by either responding, deleting, filing or adding it to a project or new To Do in Things.

For those at Penn State with an iPhone or iPod touch, integrating the iPad into the WiFi network is fairly straightforward, although I am always surprised to see how many people just turn off the WiFi service on campus with the iPhone because they don't follow these instructions: http://kb.its.psu.edu/article/1310 that describe how to install the wireless 2.0 certificate on their iPhone.  The iPad is easy to set up for the Cisco VPN on the pennstate wireless network too: just follow these instructions for the iPhone on the iPad.

In the end, I am happy with the iPad despite some limitations that always come with the early adoption of a new device.  I think the iPad will open up a compelling set of new possibilities for educating with technology in the months and years to come.

Over the past few days I have been thinking more intensely about the meaning and nature of academic transformation.

In the wake of the TLT Symposium at Penn State last weekend, I traveled to Orlando to participate in the National Center for Academic Transformation's Redesign Alliance conference. I have been struck by a contrast that disappoints me from a national perspective even as it  encourages me at local level.

The TLT Symposium was a dynamic, vibrant and innovative event that used technology and face to face communication to engage participants - faculty, administrators and students - by challenging us to think critically and imaginatively about teaching and learning in a digital age.  NCAT has been a rather traditional conference in which faculty and administrators rehearsed some of the ways course and program redesign have been able to "increase efficiencies" and "improve learning outcomes."

The contrast between the two gatherings was striking from the moment I began listening to Kay McClenney, Director of the Center for Community College Student Engagement, give the opening keynote address at NCAT. Although she had a number of important reminders, most notably that engagement matters and that we "need to do education differently with technology," one point she emphasized struck me as unfortunate: "Students don't do optional."

This was infelicitous not only because it has become an oft repeated mantra at the conference, but also because it amplifies and reinforces what seems to be a common underlying assumption that students must be coerced to perform academically. This became palpably clear when McClenney reported the results of a survey of community college student attitudes in which 90% of students themselves say they have the motivation to succeed and 84% say they are academically prepared. The audience of administrators and faculty responded to these data with derisive laughter.

Allan Gyorke has blogged a bit about the session and he makes the point there that some students DO optional, reinforcing it with concrete examples from student engagement at Penn State. I, however, would like to emphasize here that when faculty respect and empower their students, new and often surprising possibilities of engagement open. We close ourselves to those possibilities when we enter into relation with our students skeptical of their motivation and disdainful of their degree of preparation.

It is no excuse here, as I heard in one session, that we are inheriting twelve years of bad educational habituation. This was said in a session in which faculty were at a loss as to what else they might do to engage students in psychology beyond an allegedly innovative redesign in which frequent quizzing with random questions "at least gave the students the structure necessary to retain the information" they needed to proceed. Upon hearing this response, I was completely deflated.

Contrast this with the elevated sense of optimism I felt hearing the ways some my colleagues at Penn State and others, like our keynote speaker, Michael Wesch of Kansas State, are using technology to empower students to take ownership of their own education. The power of the models these colleagues are developing lie in the way they use technology to relinquish some traditional sense of faculty control in order to regain authority, as Wesch so nicely put it, through student discussion. To do this well requires recognizing that students have something to say and that they want to make their educational experience relevant.

I have seen the educational power of relinquishing some control to empower student engagement in my own philosophy courses.  I hope that all our efforts to redesign courses and programs are guided by the overarching goal of transforming ourselves and our students in ways that make them and us able to live more meaningful lives.  That endeavor must be, at its core, cooperative and practiced.

Despite my frustration, I will end on this positive note and leave you with links to some of the strategies I learned about that might help us redesign education along the lines I suggest above: Learning Emporium model, Buffet model, Calibrated Peer Review.

Upon reading the 2010 Horizon Report from the New Media Consortium, I was struck by how the key trends in technology they identify might help us meet challenges they articulate.

Let me mention a two challenges in particular and suggest how three recent trends could in fact help cultivate abilities that help us meet these challenges.

First, they rightly recognize that "the role of the Academy - and the way we prepare students for their future lives - is changing" (4). Under this general heading, they emphasize that it is incumbent upon educators to "adapt teaching and learning practices to meet the needs of today's learners" (4).

The second challenge involves the manner in which digital media literacy (I would substitute "fluency" here) is becoming a "key skill" in every discipline and profession. Because of this, they go on to say that educators who do not help students develop digital media literacy skills are putting their students at a disadvantage. More specifically, they insist that "digital literacy must necessarily be less about the tools and more about ways of thinking and seeing, and of crafting narrative" (5).

The talk of "skill" here strikes me as too limited, for we are really speaking about a whole set of abilities, indeed, of actively cultivated habits of thinking, learning, acting and teaching. If we understanding the challenges as involving abilities in this more active sense, then the key trends in technology the NMC identifies can be seen as holding some of the keys to the very challenges we face.

Here is what I have in mind.

Take three of the main trends:

1. "people expect to be able to work, learn, and study whenever and wherever they want to;"
   
2. "the technologies we use are increasingly cloud-based, and ... decentralized;" and
3. "the work of students is increasingly seen as collaborative by nature" (4).
   

Current trends are leading us toward and habituating us to a digital world in which learning and teaching are ubiquitous, decentralized and collaborative.

It seems to me that if we can cultivate the habits of teaching and learning in such an environment, we will be well on our way to "adapting our teaching and learning practices to meet the needs of today's learners." I would insist, here, however, that faculty too should be included under the heading "today's learners." 

If teacher and student alike can enter into digital community with one another in collaborative and dynamic ways, we can cultivate together the abilities to think and see things differently, to tell new narratives and to respond to one another in more relevant and productive ways.

It may just be that the key trends in social media technology are cultivating in us, when they are used in imaginative, innovative and nuanced ways, the very habits we will need to meet the challenges we currently face.

The Rock Ethics Institute has taken a lead in cultivating a real dialogue about the Penn State's energy future. 

On November 18, 2009, Nancy Tuana, the Director of the Rock Ethics Institute, moderated a roundtable discussion of Penn State's energy future with students, faculty and members of the Office of Physical Plant.

The Institute has produced and published a number of interviews from those involved on their YouTube site. There you will find the full range of views about how we might move forward in a responsible and sustainable way to ensure that Penn State's energy needs are met in the future.

Viewing these interviews, I was struck by how thoughtful and concerned each of the stakeholders are as they talk through ideas about how to act as good stewards for the institution and the environment.

It seems to me that this is a model of dialogue in which academics, students and engineers come together in a thoughtful way to address an issue of common concern.  Our community is enriched by it.  Whatever we ultimately decide, we will know we have done the difficult work necessary to make an informed and thoughtful decision together.

I embed here the video from my friend Paul Moser, Superintendent of Steam Services, who is about as thoughtful a person as I know on these issues:

After talking to trusted people, thinking things over and otherwise working through the transition I am making to Associate Dean for Undergraduate Studies at the College of the Liberal Arts, I have decided to embrace the model that Dean Chris Brady uses over at the Schreyer Honors College at PSU and tweet in two voices.

So, you can now find me at:

http://twitter.com/LAUSDeanLong

And, as always, you can still follow me at:

http:/twitter.com/cplong

Both twitter accounts will be written by me, but the LAUSDeanLong will be used to speak directly to undergraduate students, highlight the things we are doing in the Office of the Associate Dean of Undergraduate Studies in Liberal Arts, and reach out to alumni.  LAUS is Liberal Arts Undergraduate Studies.  The cplong account will continue to be the more personal voice I have cultivated over the past few years of twittering.  I hope many people will follow both voices.

Now, there is another transition I am making on this Long Road.  It is time to allow my daughters to determine their own web identities, so I have asked them what they would like to be called as I talk about them online.  We have determined that my five year old will be referred to here as ArtGirl because, as she says, "I am into art."  My four year old will be "DancinGirl" as she loves to dance.

These changes reflect the changing dynamics of my web presence as I move into a new professional role.  Although I will continue to blog about my life as a father here, I have started a new password protected Posterous account to chronicle some of our everyday activities.  For those who are interested, please email me for the password.

Twenty years ago today, I can remember the buzz that spread among my American student colleagues at the Institute for European Studies in Vienna when we learned that the Berlin Wall had fallen.

Just two weeks before, a group of us had been in Prague where we met a number of students from Czechoslovakia, as it was then called. They told us in no uncertain terms that something momentous was happening. At the time they and we did not know whether this was something to welcome or fear. 

Upon our return to Vienna, we discussed the question in our European History course.  The professor was a former Ambassador who assured us that whatever changes may or may not be underway, the overarching paradigm that held European powers in the grips of the Cold War would not change in his lifetime. (This marked an early realization of a truth that has borne itself out over the course of the last twenty years: professors don't always know what they are talking about and the more certain they appear, the less their words should be uncritically accepted.)

Two and a half weeks later, many of us were on a train to Berlin to witness first hand the fall of the Berlin Wall.

In Berlin the excitement those of us gathered at the wall felt that day remains palpable. Borrowing a sledgehammer from a local German, I can still feel the thrill that came as I knocked off the large chunk I still have set upon my bookshelf.

I recall too, a discussion I had with a very thoughtful and earnest young Lutheran pastor from East Germany who watched the scene unfolding before us with trepidation.  His hope, as he expressed it to a young American student genuinely concerned to try to put a context to the history that he was witnessing, was that the West would not simply view this development as an opportunity to impose capitalist values and culture on the Eastern bloc.  It was, of course, unclear precisely how things would progress, but there remained a sense that a genuine meeting of the best ideas of the East and West might have an opportunity to converge.

As I think back on those days, I am once again made aware that ideas have the power to transform reality. 

But for me, this had less to do with the fall of the Berlin Wall, than with the students and teachers I encountered and the experiences I had during my semester abroad in that fall of 1989.  To meet students and educators who actively sought to imagine what life was like in another culture, to learn a new language, and to open themselves to the transformative possibilities of education was of decisive importance to me at a formative time in my life.

And although I did not take a philosophy course when I was in Vienna, when I returned, I was convinced that my course would tack toward education and that philosophy was the path it would have to take.

One of the great privileges of my summer faculty fellowship has been the opportunity to work with creative and thoughtful educators and designers who were able to help me think more holistically about my identity on the web.

I have been blogging here on the Long Road since June 10, 2007, attempting to give voice to certain dimensions of my personal, political, academic and teaching life. Over time, however, it has become clear that my attempt to "blog the philosophical life" involves multiple dimensions that are somewhat separate even if fundamentally integrated. 

Perhaps this is simply the digital articulation of the deeper, existential question of personal identity.

In any case, the redesign of the website that we have rolled out in the course of the last few weeks grows out of an ongoing dialogue with all the great educational designers and IT managers at Education Technology Services, but in particular with two who deserve special mention and thanks here: Brad Kozlek and George Webster.

George has patiently and expertly worked with me to design the font, colors, look and feel of the site.  He was always willing to change things I found problematic and willing too, to change them back when I realized that the way we had it first was best.

The design itself is based on this image of an antique map of the arctic I found online as I was searching for an inspiration for the colors and feel of the site. The map captured the spirit of the central metaphor around which the long road is organized: the attempt to chart in words the course of a life.

The long road is now composed of three blogs feeding a main home page, which serves as a pathway into the larger site. George worked with me to design the icons that go with each dimension of the site.

 
the long road is the site on which you will find my attempt to put things personal, political, remarkable and mundane into words.

digital vita is the site that gives voice to my academic life, including information and resources related to the various presentations I make.

socratic politics in digital dialogue is the site related to my research and teaching regarding the nature and practice of Socratic politics. It hosts the Digital Dialogue.

One of the main purposes of redesigning the site was to host the Digital Dialogue, the podcast I developed during my faculty fellowship. The Digital Dialogue is designed to generate discussion around questions concerning but not limited to the nature of digital dialogue, its political possibilities, the excellences associated with it and the impact it might have on our pedagogical practices.

Brad added the Yahoo! player to the site so that people could easily listen to episodes of the Digital Dialogue right from their browser.  Everyone can also subscribe to the podcast through iTunesU by clicking this link which opens iTunes on your local computer.

I hope everyone enjoys the new look of the site and continues to return frequently. You are, as always, warmly invited to comment on anything that appears here should you be so moved.

Many thanks to George and Brad for their great work on the site.

Dear Chloe:

Today you begin a great and wondrous journey. Today, you begin Kindergarten and with it, the formal education that will open you to a world of ideas and experiences that will shape the person you become.

Your Mom and I have sought over the course of these five years to prepare you well for this adventure. You know your colors, your letters, your numbers; you are empathetic and thoughtful, reflective and open. You make friends easily after you wisely assess them in their relations to you and others. You worry, but not too much. You have a passion for art, for new experiences, for writing, and for sharing your life stories with others. You try new foods with joyful anticipation and are not less willing to taste new things after you have experienced something bitter. You have a wonderful imagination and welcome others, especially your sister Hannah, into the worlds you create. You love easily but not indiscriminately; and you are fiercely loyal to those who have won your affection.

So, you are ready for this journey.

As you begin, know that your Mom and I, your sister and your family, are with you even when we are not physically present. We are there in the classroom when you feel uncertain; on the playground, when you need to stand up for yourself or your friends; in your heart and mind as you are enriched by the educational experiences that will sustain your life.

Yet although we are here to support you, now it is time for you to step into a new phase of the journey and to make a meaningful and fulfilling life for yourself.

I am so proud of you and love you more than I can say. I look forward to the adventure to come as I have delighted in your life thus far. You have taught me to see the world anew and the world is made better by your encounters with it.

Go now into this next phase with the joyful integrity that has marked your life from the beginning.

Love,
Dad

Over the last few months, I participated on an Educational Technology Services "hot team" that focused on researching the educational significance of grassroots video. If you don't know what grassroots video is, check out our white paper, which gives a good summary. 

I am beginning to notice something about my course blog for PHIL298H: Patriarchal Force and Political Power. As we discuss the material we have been reading for class and engage with one another online through the blog we are creating a communal document, a digital artifact of our work together this semester.  I am struck by this more this semester because of the structure I am using in which we all co-edit one blog rather than each editing a blog of our own.

For those of you who have noticed a lack of postings here recently, this is largely because I am doing a lot of blogging with my honors class over at the course blog for an honors course in Philosophy I am teaching on patriarchal politics. 

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.

One of the many great privileges of teaching here at Penn State is the opportunity I have to work closely with faculty and staff committed to thinking creatively about teaching and learning. One place where there is a vibrant and exciting community of people dedicated to thinking creatively about innovative teaching techniques is the office of Education Technology Services (ETS). Cole Camplese, the Director of ETS, has cultivated a culture of creative experimentation that is transforming the pedagogical use of technology here at Penn State.

As part of the Teaching and Learning with Technology (TLT) unit, ETS supports faculty willing to try new technologies to determine what does and does not work in the classroom. For the past two years, I have been using blogging and podcasting in my philosophy courses to encourage students to articulate and disseminate their ideas in ways that relate the philosophical content we discuss in class to a wider community. I will present some of my experiences at the Spring 2008 Symposium for Teaching and Learning with Technology here at Penn State.

To hear more about my approach, see the story about my use of blogging in my philosophy courses posted on the TLT Symposium Website at: http://tlt.its.psu.edu/success-stories/christopherlong.

To view my course blogs, with links to blogs written by my students, see:

• http://www.personal.psu.edu/cpl2/blogs/PHIL083/
• http://www.personal.psu.edu/cpl2/blogs/PHIL204/

Nat Jackson and David Yanofsky have taken it upon themselves to reactivate the Penn State Atheist, Agnostic Association that was started two years ago by Richard Jeffery, a former philosophy major here at Penn State. Two years ago, the group focused largely on debating people with views different from theirs, including Gary Cattell, known as the Willard preacher. The goal then was to open up a dialogue about religion and belief.

Nat and David have something similar in mind as they reactivate the group, though dialogue is only one dimension of the group's mission. They seem also committed to the idea that the best argument against the notion that atheism and agnosticism are nihilistic positions that annihilate the values on which good deeds are done is to work with other religious organizations and charities to be a force for positive change in the local community.

I am very happy to see that they and the group are receiving substantive and fair coverage in the student newspaper, the Daily Collegian. It is disturbing, however, to hear that Nat and David have been threatened with physical violence as they held their sign that reads "Non-believers Unite in Disbelief" by students claiming to be Christians. The irony of such threats does not lessen their repugnance.

My experience as the faculty adviser of the Atheist, Agnostic Association is that the students involved in the group are responsible, thoughtful and dedicated people who embody one of the most important dimensions of life at the university: the willingness to investigate tenaciously and evaluate critically one's own core beliefs and the beliefs of others.

The quotation from Nat that concludes today's piece in the Daily Collegian bears repeating here: "People say 'what meaning can life have if there is no God?' But I believe that this one life is all we have. There is no permanence and that makes it more meaningful."