OREM, UT - At the Utah Valley University, there is a strong commitment to engaged learning. In what follows, I try to offer a model by which social media technology can be used to cultivate the active engagement of students in their own education.

This model is based on two insights:

1. Learning is social and so it is most effectively pursued in communities of education in which teachers and students are actively engaged together.
2. Social media technologies are transforming education because they are able to open dynamic communities of learning between teachers and students.
   

The power of new social media technologies for education lies not in the information they deliver, but the communities they can create.

Let me begin with a short presentation on the pedagogy of blogging and why I think it is particularly powerful in cultivating dynamic communities of engaged learning.


In order to speak in practical terms about how faculty might begin to cultivate such a dynamic community of learning in their classrooms, I would like to highlight the structure of my course on Ancient Greek Philosophy at Penn State.

This course focuses on the question of Socratic politics and is driven completely by our course blog, Socratic Politics in Digital Dialogue.  All the writing for the course except for the final research paper is posted to the blog.

Here is the syllabus for my PHIL200 Ancient Greek Philosophy course in pdf format.

There are no specific writing assignments. Students write when they are moved to write by the texts we are reading. As faculty, I have clearly set out the expectations for the course in the Blogging rubric (.pdf), which is the key to the success of this model.

The other way I try to cultivate the active participation of the students is through the Weekly Round-up podcasts they produce in teams each week.  The goal of these podcasts is for students to reflect upon the week of class and to highlight readings, aspects of in-class discussion, blog posts and to connect them to issues of contemporary social-political concern.

Highlighting Success
Here I have gathered some links that highlight some of the ways we have been successful in cultivating a community of learning this semester:

• Cody Yashinsky and Pam Dorian produced a weekly round-up podcast that focused on the media's influence on Philosophical discussion, the question of the Good and specific blog posts of the week.

Listen to Cody and Pam on Weekly Round-up #2

• Themes and topics emerge organically as students gravitate to issues of common concern.  This semester some of those issues have included:

• The question of the Good, exemplified by the robust comments received by Jordan Sanford's post Why Should We Be Good?
• The issue of piety and how it is related to the life of philosophy Socrates lives: here is a post from Cody Yashinsky entitled "Is Religion Part of the Good?" that typifies the sort of discussion this issue has generated.
• We encouraged Marina McCoy from Boston College to invite her students to participate in our discussion when we realized that they were reading the Phaedrus the week we were.
• Marina's post on Rhetoric and Soul Leading was commented upon heavily by her students and mine.
• The dialogue between my students from Penn State and hers from Boston College was excellent.  Take a look at the response Pam Dorian received on her post about the Charioteer Allegory in the Phaedrus.

• Critical to the success of this model is how the blog is integrated into the classroom discussion.  I use Evernote to highlight specific posts and comments in class for discussion.
• This is a great way to get the students who are more reticent to talk in class to contribute to the discussion: call up their post and ask them to summarize it for discussion.
  

These examples beautifully illustrate the power social media has to cultivate a dynamic community of engaged learning.

I look forward to seeing what UVU might develop in this regard, as I am encouraged by the way UVU is already using its web presence to aggregate their social media activities through the UVU Social Media Directory.

SUNDANCE, UT - Today I participated on a panel for the honors program at the Utah Valley University, whose director, Michael Shaw, invited Marina McCoy and me to present papers for a panel dedicated to Women in Sophocles.

Michael and Marina joined me for Digital Dialogue 20 (available on December 1) to discuss the panel and the honors program at UVU.

Marina gave an excellent paper entitled Exile and Blindness in Oedipus the King and Oedipus at Colonus in which she argued that Theseus is the real hero of Oedipus at Colonus because he shows himself to be capable of genuine compassion and is open to the persuasive words of those around him.

My paper entitled, A Father's Touch, A Daughter's Voice: Antigone, Oedipus and Ismene at Colonus, traces three moments of touching in Oedipus the King and Oedipus at Colonus that mark the emergence of a politics other than that of patriarchal domination. 

Here is a brief overview of the itinerary of the paper:

This paper pursues a path marked by three moments of touching in Oedipus the King and Oedipus at Colonus, each of which articulates something of the logic of what I call the politics of the between and the economy endemic to the community it opens. The first occurs when Oedipus reaches for his daughters at the end of Oedipus the King. It marks the institution of a community between Oedipus and his daughters no longer dominated by patriarchal sovereignty.

The second moment of touching occurs in Oedipus at Colonus when Ismene and Antigone embrace Oedipus after their abduction by Creon. In this scene, a constellation emerges that beautifully embodies the very structure of the politics of the between. Here, situated between Antigone and Ismene, Oedipus is bound to a community of reciprocal support born of a trauma that anticipates the resurgence of the politics of violence and retribution that will condition its ultimate demise.

The destitution of this community of compassion between them is marked, however, by a third moment of touching, one that mirrors the first, as Oedipus hands his daughters over to Theseus thus opening the possibility that Athens herself might once again serve as the site of a politics of the between.

For more information on the nature of the politics of the between and my critique of patriarchal politics, see my article: The Daughters of Metis: Patriarchal Dominion and the Politics of the Between, available here as a pdf file.

One of the most difficult things for new Graduate Students to manage effectively is their time. This is in large part because graduate study has built into it large segments of unstructured time that can easily be wasted. One of the most important skills graduate students can learn early in their career is how to structure their time effectively. 

I have gathered here some suggestions that might help students take control of their time so that it can be used most productively.

Know Thyself
I mean this not only in the ancient Greek sense of knowing one's limits--although this is part of it--but specifically I mean: know when you do your best creative work and reserve that time for writing or other intellectual activities that require a high degree of concentration.

• Are you a morning person? Do you do your best work at night?

Time Thyself
One of the best tricks I learned some time ago was to set an alarm on my desktop for a certain amount of time during which I would focus on a single task, be it reading an article, writing notes, free writing or editing.  Focus on nothing other than the task at hand until the alarm goes off.

• Here is a link to Unclutterer's discussion of desktop timers which has some suggestions about free alarm clocks for the PC and Mac.
• About.com suggests a nice little timer trick in which you focus on specific tasks for shorter, 20 minute periods.
  

This timing strategy does on a small scale what you should also do on a larger scale: set deadlines for yourself. You can do this with self-discipline or shame; for the latter, try making an appointment with a colleague or professor in which you will discuss some element of your work that will be complete by that time. You'd be surprised how motivating it is not to want to seem clueless in front of others - this is part of what motivates many of us teachers to prepare like crazy.

Take Control of Email/Social Media
Studies have shown that each time you check your email it takes an average of 15 minutes to return to your original task. You need to take full control of when you give yourself over to checking email and other forms of social media.

• Turn off the automatic alert on your email, IM service, etc.

Get Organized
You need to have a reliable calendar that you can easily use to keep track of all your appointments.  You also should have a dynamic way to track and prioritize what you have do. There are many computer programs that can help in this regard.

With regard to ToDo lists, it is helpful to be able to organize them according to projects that keep the work in various courses and other academic and personal projects separate.  I have been using Things lately, and like it quite a bit.  A nice, free, but less involved, list maker is available at Zenbe.com.

I have also been making excellent use of Evernote, which allows you to keep notes of all kinds in the cloud and syncs with multiple computers and smart phones.

A Quiet Space
It is not always easy to find a good, quiet space to work; one with few distractions.  It is critical to locate one, be it in your apartment, on campus or in a cafe.  If you are working in public, it is often helpful to have your earphones in your ears even if you are not actually listening to anything through them.  Earphones can function as earplugs, filtering out distracting noise and fostering concentration. Plus, people are less likely to interrupt you if they think you are listening to something.

Down Time
I often see graduate students who are exhausted and over extended.  People don't often realize that intellectual activity is often as tiring as physical exercise. Make sure you give yourself down time as it cultivates creativity and increases productivity.

• Get enough sleep: it seems that less than seven hours a night cripples productivity, memory retention and creativity.  See this article on How Much Sleep Do We Really Need? on the website of the National Sleep Foundation.
• Allow your mind to wander: I know it sounds strange for me to suggest this, but allowing your mind to go where it will as you perform menial tasks can help you work through a particularly difficult question or issue.
• Move: when your body is healthy, your mind becomes stronger, so be sure to get out from behind the desk and walk or exercise. This is not wasted time, but part of an overall strategy of success.
• Reward yourself with something fun you like to do when you have accomplished something; or use it as an end toward which your work is directed.
  

Some Resources

•  Unclutterer.com is a blog about getting and staying organized that has some good suggestions about time management.
• 43 Folders is a blog about finding the time to do your best creative work.

Two weeks ago, I was asked to present my model for Integrating Teaching and Research with Technology.  Although today I return to that material in my presentation to the University Information Technology Faculty Advisory Committee, three exciting new developments have occurred that must here be emphasized. 

These developments concern the manner in the community of learning we have cultivated on the Socratic Politics in Digital Dialogue blog has expanded beyond the boundaries not only of the classroom, but also of the institution itself.

1. Marina McCoy, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Boston College has encouraged the students in her course entitled Rhetoric: Truth, Beauty, Power, to comment on our blog. Since we welcomed the BC students to our digital community last week, the conversation on the blog has exploded.
   
2. In order to encourage dialogue across universities, I worked with TLT here at Penn State to add Professor McCoy as a co-editor of the blog so she could write posts of her own.  She published a post on the question of the meaning of soul leading which generated a lot of commentary about contemporary political speech.
3. The Digital Dialogue, the podcast I have been producing dedicated to cultivating the excellences of dialogue in a digital age, now has a Facebook page and Professor McCoy has again invited her students to comment specifically on the latest episode, number 15 with Holly Moore, a former Philosophy undergraduate student at Penn State who received her PhD from DePaul University in mid-October.  My digital dialogue with her focuses on her dissertation. Professor McCoy has encouraged her students to subscribe to the Digital Dialogue via iTunesU [link opens iTunesU] and respond to episode 15 by commenting on the blog.

• This has generated a very interesting discussion around Dr. Holly Moore's work.  Although my favorite comment is the one that compares my "radio voice" to that of Peter Sagal, the most exciting thing about this is that we have on our course blog a class from BC engaged with a visiting Professor and recent PhD currently at Colby College engaged in dialogue about philosophical issues of mutual concern.
  

ARLINGTON, VA - The search for a job in any field in the midst of an economic downturn can be harrowing; for those seeking jobs in a field like Philosophy where even in good economic times, the competition for jobs is stiff, the job search can be especially demoralizing.

Here I have gathered some resources for the graduate student who attended the Graduate Student Colloquium at the 2009 Society for Phenomenology and Existentialist Philosophy (SPEP) where I spoke on a panel entitled "The Job Market in Today's Economy."

The Situation
There is no question that the job market in Philosophy and the Humanities is tightening.  Inside Higher Education emphasized in their article, The Tightening Humanities Job Market, published at the end of last year the particular difficulties in the discipline of Philosophy. Last spring, the New York Times was reporting that Doctoral Candidates Anticipate Hard Times, and it looks like we are seeing that play out in the list of job offerings in Philosophy this year.

On a more positive note, a number of institutions with which I am familiar, particularly the large state universities, have received substantive funds from the Stimulus Bill passed earlier this year.  This will allow them to proceed with some hiring this year. However, we might need to anticipate another downturn in job opportunities in two years when the stimulus money dries up.

Of the 140 jobs listed in the October 2009 Jobs for Philosophers, only 4 explicitly mention an interest in continental philosophy.  So SPEP students will have to position themselves to compete for jobs in areas that are not explicitly announced as "continental." This will not be difficult as the large majority of students at SPEP have a broad range of interests and expertise.

Good Preparation
There are a number of concrete ways to improve your chances on the job market:

• Write a marketable dissertation.  Decisions about what to write your dissertation on are complicated.  Primary consideration needs to be given to your passion for and interest in the topic.  However, such decisions ought not be made in a vacuum and one important consideration will be the degree to which you will increase your opportunities for placement by writing such a dissertation.
  
  Specifically, it is advisable to write a dissertation that goes into some depth with regard to a specific thinker or theme that cuts across a broader spectrum of traditions and is able to speak to a wide range of approaches.  Even if you don't orient your own work by those other approaches, be aware of them and able to articulate and position your work in relation to them.
  
  
• Publish something in a well-respected journal.
• Give a Paper at a Conference where they use blind review.
• Develop Pedagogical Excellence: work on your teaching, teach as much as you can, write your one page teaching philosophy, develop a teaching portfolio.
  
• Ask yourself: what distinguishes me from other candidates, what do I bring to a job that others don't?

Cultivate an online, digital identity
As we experience the transformative possibilities new social media opens for education, it is important for students to begin to think intentionally about how this media can be use to further the pedagogical and intellectual ideals of philosophy. With regard to placement, the question as to one's online, digital identity becomes critical.

• Use Facebook, Twitter, blogging, etc., to articulate a serious, academic and engaged voice of your own.
• Leigh Johnson: readmorewritemorethinkmorebemore
  
• Joshua Miller: anotherpanacea
  
• Participate in social media related to Academia generally and Philosophy in particular:
• Academia.edu is a site where faculty, graduate students and institutions can establish profiles to highlight their work.
  
• Philosophywiki.org is a site where you can set up a profile about yourself and your work.
  

Opening Other Options
Post-doctoral Fellowships
Below is a list of a few post-doctoral fellowships that might be relevant to graduate student and early PhD members of SPEP working in contemporary continental philosophy and related areas in the history of philosophy.

• German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) for students doing work on German thinkers and topics related to German Philosophy who intend to spend time at a German University.
  
• Henry Frank Guggenheim Research Grants are given to research that can increase understanding and amelioration of urgent problems of violence, aggression, and dominance in the modern world.
• Fulbright, Council for International Exchange of Scholars offers a wide range to funding opportunities for US Scholars, both post-docs and graduate students.
• The Spencer Foundation has fellowships for doctoral students and post-docs working in research areas related to education.
• The Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation has a dissertation research awards available for students working in Ethics and Religion (Charlotte W. Newcombe Fellowship) and Women & Gender (Woodrow Wilson Dissertation Fellowship in Women's Studies).
• The American Association of University Women has dissertation and post-doctoral fellowships for women US citizen from accredited institutions.
• The Alexander von Humboldt Foundation has post-doc fellowships for work related to German philosophy.
  

Fixed term positions at home university or local colleges
Despite the economic situation, teaching still goes on, students are applying to college and colleges are offering classes. Many colleges and universities are offering fixed term positions for their students or for students from other institutions.

• Ask department chairs, directors of graduate studies if such opportunities exist at your institution.
• Talk to faculty such possibilities at the institutions of their colleagues.
  

Some Resources

• SPEP has introduced a jobs announcement section of the website, but this seems only to be as good as the institutions who submit. It does provide insight into which institutions are interested in the work being done by members of the society.
  
• American Philosophical Association publishes, of course, the Jobs for Philosophers; they also have a Job Seekers Database, which seems to be under construction at the moment, but which students should use when it is up.
  
• The Philosophy Jobs Wiki lists jobs offered by many institutions and is updated by the users.  It is only as accurate, of course, as the users are engaged and reliable. My experience, though, is that it is often very accurate, although it is important to recognize that it is not to be taken as the official mode of communication from colleges and universities.
• Penn State Philosophy Department Best Placement Practices page was developed to help our students think about how to position themselves to success on the market.  The suggestions are available for all interested students.
• Shortened URL for this post: http://tinyurl.com/spepjobpanel09

Contact Information

Christopher Long
longc@psu.edu

"The Voice of Singularity and a Philosophy to Come: Schürmann, Kant and the Pathology of Being," Philosophy Today 53, supplement (2009), 138-150.

This article traces what Schürmann calls the "double comprehension of being" in Kant in which the sense of being as pure givenness is said to be recognized but denied by Kant as his thinking undertakes its Copernican turn. Schürmann insists that this can be heard in the ambiguous ways the German terms "Position" and "Setzung" are used in Kant. Schürmann shows that these two terms point at various moments in Kant either to the notion of being as a category that arises from the transcendental operations of the subject or to being understood as pure givenness external to the transcendental subject.  Schürmann argues that this second sense of being threatens to undermine the entire transcendental project and so must be denied by Kant.

Drawing on this reading, I attempt to show that Schürmann's own deep skepticism about philosophical language and particularly his insistence that language always involves the violent suppression of singularity is undermined by his own suggestion that the singular comes somehow to language in the tension between Position and Setzung in Kant.

By attending to the voice of singularity as it expresses itself in Kant's texts, this essay seeks to open the possibility of a "philosophy to come" that remains attuned to the dynamic between natality and mortality that is always at play in articulation.

The full text of "The Voice of Singularity" in pdf format is made available here by the generous permission of Philosophy Today.

This presentation is based on two insights that have grown over time but came into sharp focus over the summer of 2009 during which time I was a faculty fellow at Teaching and Learning with Technology here at Penn State:

1. Education is being radically transformed by technological advances that allow communities of learning to grow in ways that cut across time, space and philosophical perspective.
2. In higher education, these technological innovations can be leveraged to integrate scholarly research and teaching at both the graduate and undergraduate levels in ways that extend the reach of research and deepen the scholarly roots of teaching.

The Project
The figure of Socrates who appears in the Platonic dialogues is shown to practice a very peculiar form of politics: he enters into dialogue with each individual he encounters, attempting to turn their attention to the question of the Good, the Beautiful and the Just. My current research focuses on the various dimensions of the Socratic practice of politics and specifically on the question of how to cultivate the excellences of dialogue that open possibilities of human relation that are socially and politically transformative.

The Structure of Integration
I use my blog, the Long Road, which has been redesigned in as three blogs in one, to integrate my research and teaching.

The blog platform offers me a dynamic digital environment in which to develop a community of learning that roots my teaching in my scholarship and infuses my scholarship with new insights and connections that emerge out of the living dialogue of the community.

• The Pedagogy of Blogging
• Blogging Rubric (pdf)
  

The Community of Learning

• The Digital Dialogue - a podcast dedicated to cultivating the excellences of dialogue in a digital age. (Subscribe via iTunes)
  
• Invites scholars from around the country working on issues related to ancient Greek philosophy, social and political theory, the question of deliberative democracy ...
  
• Generates interest in the work, cross-pollination of ideas, and attempts to model the excellences of dialogue it seeks to theorize.
  
• Socratic Politics in Digital Dialogue - a blog that hosts the Digital Dialogue, my undergraduate course (PHIL200: Ancient Greek Philosophy) and my graduate seminar (PHIL553: Ancient Greek Philosophy).
• Undergraduate Teaching: blog rubric (pdf), weekly round-up podcasts, the emergence of a community of learners engaged with the material:
  
• Jordan's Why Are You Here? post generates self-reflection
• Participants from outside the class: Holly Moore, Asher; UPDATE Nov. 2, 2009: Marina McCoy, Associate Professor from Boston College, has encouraged her students to join our digital community.  See my presentation to the IT Faculty Advisory Committee where I discuss how we are blurring the boundaries between institutions.
  
• Dynamic and substantive commenting on posts about: Religion, typical post with comments;
  
• Integration of video: Conan, Big.
• Graduate Teaching: more sophisticated level of discussion, community of scholarship via Zotero - allows for collaborative collection of references: Socratic Politics Group.
  
• Integrating the blog into the classroom: using Evernote to identify posts and comments on which to focus in-class discussion.
  
• The Search for Justice video - an attempt to provoke responses from a wider audience and to encourage those who watch it to consider: What is Justice?
  

On October 9th, 2009, I received official word that my manuscript, The Saying of Things: The Nature of Truth and the Truth of Nature in Aristotle, was accepted for publication at the Cambridge University Press.  I am excited and honored to be part of a tradition of publishing that extends back 475 years to when King Henry the VIII first granted the University of Cambridge Press a "Letters Patent" that allowed them to print "all manner of books."

The manner of my particular book involves taking up the thinking of Aristotle in a way that challenges the traditional understanding of the meaning of truth as the correspondence of idea and object. The Saying of Things is rooted in a reading of Aristotle as a naturalistic phenomenologist who is able to help us understand truth as co-response-ability, that is, as involving an ability to respond to the expression of things in ways that do justice to what it is they are.  Thus, the book attempts to think truth in terms of justice even as it recognizes that justice is rooted in the attempt to give voice to the truth of things.

Specifically, the book draws on the traditions of American naturalism, particularly that of Woodbridge, Randall and Dewey, and Continental phenomenology, particularly that of Heidegger, in order to offer a dynamic and novel reading of Aristotle that has important implications for our ongoing understanding of the relationship between human-being and the natural world.

ALTOONA, PA - Today I gave the keynote address at the West Virginia Philosophical Society being held at Penn State Altoona.

This presentation is drawn from the penultimate chapter of the manuscript for my book, The Saying of Things: The Nature of Truth and the Truth of Nature in Aristotle. In the book, I draw on Aristotle's naturalistic phenomenology in order to articulate truth in terms of the ability to respond to the ways things express themselves. This understanding of truth as co-response-ability is rooted in Aristotle's recognition that human-being is natural being and its ways of saying naturally co-operate with the logoi of things, the manner in which things express themselves. This allows me to argue that truth is a question of doing justice to the saying of things.

The chapter from which this presentation is taken is designed to suggest the degree to which truth as justice must not only be rooted in concrete encounters with individual things, but that it also must attempt to articulate things within the larger context of the whole to which they and we belong. This chapter, then, attempts to account for the peculiar way in which human-being is bound up with and related to the manner in which the whole expresses itself as beautiful and good.

"... we're in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven't seen since Greek civilization."

-- Andrea Lunsford, in Wired article "Clive Thompson on the New Literacy"

Preface
The web log, or blog, opens up new possibilities for teaching and learning by cultivating social communities of education. The power of blogging as a pedagogical practice is rooted in the recognition that meaning is made and knowledge created in social interaction. As Dewey put it in Democracy and Education: