gdp's Comments

http://www.personal.psu.edu/cpl2/blogs/thelongroad/blog/ : Collaborative Note Taking on @Twitter - The Long Road

Sun, 14 Apr 2013 12:47:37 +0000

Thanks, Vicky. I agree, you need to curate the tweets and reflect upon them further using something like Storify. That is a key to further amplifying the exchanges and to archiving them for future reference.

http://www.personal.psu.edu/cpl2/blogs/thelongroad/blog/ : Collaborative Note Taking on @Twitter - The Long Road

Mon, 8 Apr 2013 04:13:09 +0000

Thanks, Anne-Marie. If you give me your twitter address, I can curate your tweets into the Storify. Maybe you weren't including the hashtag: #APS13.

http://www.personal.psu.edu/cpl2/blogs/thelongroad/blog/ : Collaborative Note Taking on @Twitter - The Long Road

Mon, 8 Apr 2013 01:20:51 +0000

I know Mary Nichols in particular was grateful for the question you asked. The example illustrates well how face to face conversations can be enriched by a twitter back channel. As for worrying about seeming disengaged, I find tweeting from my iPad or computer is much more socially acceptable and I feel more comfortable than tweeting from my phone, which is how you were doing it. When you are tweeting from the phone, I feel like people think you are texting someone about something else. From my perspective, I could see that you were taking paper notes too and moving back and forth between private paper notes and public digital notes. You always seemed engaged, so that did not seem to be a problem from where I sat.

http://www.personal.psu.edu/cpl2/blogs/cplportfolio/blog/ : Putting the Liberal Arts into Practice @NewmanU - Christopher P. Long\'s ePortfolio

Mon, 1 Apr 2013 19:21:05 +0000

Chuk, I really appreciate your comment here about the importance of ancient ideas and ideals. One thing that struck me during my time at Newman is how important it is for those of us deeply engaged with ancient scholarship to also be thoughtfully engaged with new modes of communication afforded us by social media. I am glad too that you mention Randall, a favorite of mine, and someone who I engage deeply in my book, Aristotle on the Nature of Truth. I would like to hear more about your distinction between scientism and the spirit of science.

http://www.personal.psu.edu/cpl2/blogs/thelongroad/blog/ : What is Public Philosophy? - The Long Road

Fri, 15 Mar 2013 22:31:59 +0000

Dirk, absolutely. We are blurring the boundary between academia and the public here. Members of the public are not only welcome, but encouraged to get involved.

http://www.personal.psu.edu/cpl2/blogs/thelongroad/blog/ : Sente, Mendeley, Zotero: Too Many Sharp Tools - The Long Road

Thu, 21 Feb 2013 14:51:29 +0000

This is a very helpful comment, rickla. In the meantime, I have returned more wholly to Zotero: http://www.personal.psu.edu/cpl2/blogs/TheLongRoa... I need to write an updated post about my workflow now that ZotPad is working well for me.

http://www.personal.psu.edu/cpl2/blogs/thelongroad/blog/ : The Humanities, Stitched - The Long Road

Tue, 19 Feb 2013 17:33:21 +0000

Thanks, Lee, for the comment. The stitching needs to happen in multiple places at the same time, though part of my point was that stitching in one area can have implications for the whole garment - to continue the metaphor Michael used in the Chronicle. Here I was trying to address the specific issue of how we train our current graduate students in the humanities. Your concern about a possible lost generation of trained humanities scholars is an important one too. Part of the stitching there involves establishing fair, reliable teaching positions with specifiable career paths and benefits. It also involves a culture shift in which tenure line faculty become more sensitive to and appreciative of the very important contributions that our lecturers make to the academic mission of our colleges and universities.

http://www.personal.psu.edu/cpl2/blogs/thelongroad/blog/ : Initial Reflections on MOOCs and the College Curriculum - The Long Road

Sun, 30 Dec 2012 21:28:50 +0000

There is a parallel conversation developing on Facebook as well. Here is the link: http://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=...

http://www.personal.psu.edu/cpl2/blogs/thelongroad/blog/ : Initial Reflections on MOOCs and the College Curriculum - The Long Road

Sun, 30 Dec 2012 21:27:56 +0000

Thanks, @Puzzled, for this comment. I should perhaps have been more explicit about the distinction between learning and education that was operating in my mind as I wrote the above post. Courses, be they MOOCs or not, can be taken haphazardly by anyone, independent of a coherent curriculum designed, as you say, to expose students to the breadth of a field or the depth of a tradition. No one would deny that learning can happen in such courses; and often that learning is transformative. But what I want to emphasize is that an excellent education is always rooted in a holistic and thoughtfully crafted curriculum in which individual courses build on one another and the student is drawn into a deeper understanding of the field. Many autodidacts craft curricula of their own, and to great effect. But part of the point I was trying to make in the post above is that universities and those of us who are faculty members are well positioned to transform haphazard learning into a coherent education by virtue of our ability to craft coherent, relevant and dynamic curricula. MOOCs challenge those of us in higher education to craft such curricula, even if those curricula might include MOOCs themselves. So I am denying neither that a MOOC can be a valuable learning experience nor that it can be an important part of a curriculum. But when we unbundle courses from the curriculum into which they are integrated, like a song from an album, the education our students receive is impoverished.

http://www.personal.psu.edu/cpl2/blogs/thelongroad/blog/ : Twitter, Community and the First Year Experience - The Long Road

Mon, 3 Dec 2012 15:39:59 +0000

David, thanks for this thoughtful response. I agree with you that pauses are needed for reflection and response, and I like the idea of trying to work opportunities of that into the structure of a lecture. One thing it's important to emphasize is that the twitter feed did not work the way I intended it to work when I was crafting the lecture/experience. I wanted the tweets to be moderated so that you needed to demonstrate a certain degree of thoughtfulness to get up on the big screen. When there was no bar for participation, the lowest common denominator prevailed. If there had been a bar, I was hoping that a virtuous circle would develop in which students would try to say something thoughtful or insightful and relevant in order to get on the big screen. I wanted to leverage their desire to be public to create a more enriching public ... that was the plan at least. The discussion and the twitter feed was much more insightful on Friday when some sections of the FYE course were organized into small groups with discussion questions. My approach in this case was the opposite of your approach to teaching students a different way of paying attention, though I fully endorse your approach too and think it is necessary to proactively reflect critically upon "our device-centric culture." But in this case, I wanted to use that device centric culture to illustrate its dangers and its possibilities. I was also interested in amplifying the public nature of a technology like twitter, because its publicness is easily forgotten: a very private gesture of clicking "send" on a tweet is a public act with lasting and wide reaching implications. All this said, I have learned a lot in the past week about the limits and affordances of the technology and of my own attempts to create a public space in the context of a keynote address. I am now much more interested in experimenting with slight changes in the set up to see how the results might differ.

http://www.personal.psu.edu/cpl2/blogs/thelongroad/blog/ : Twitter, Community and the First Year Experience - The Long Road

Fri, 30 Nov 2012 20:18:29 +0000

Great question, Dirk. As an educator, I think I need to believe deeply that students can and will integrate what they experience in contexts like those described above into more enriching and healthy response-abilities. I saw some of that already this morning as I interacted from a distance with students in Liz de Mahy's courses. She used twitter to reflect upon the #cuafye experience, and the students in her courses were thoughtful and very reflective about the experience. This leads me to think that my belief in the power of a liberal arts education is more than blind or naive optimism. We need more opportunities in college to practice the virtues of liberty - that is one reason why an education in the liberal arts is so important.

http://www.personal.psu.edu/cpl2/blogs/thelongroad/blog/ : Twitter, Community and the First Year Experience - The Long Road

Fri, 30 Nov 2012 13:59:29 +0000

Thanks, Debbie, I agree that much of the value of the experience lies before us in how we respond to the shared experience we had. Some faculty at CUA will be discussing the lecture this morning in their classes. So, follow the #cuafye feed for more as I am going to try to participate.

http://www.personal.psu.edu/cpl2/blogs/cplportfolio/blog/ : Keynote Address: Liberal Arts and Politics - Christopher P. Long\'s ePortfolio

Wed, 28 Nov 2012 06:10:40 +0000

Thanks, Sam, for the high praise. Actually, what you do weekly with your 700+ students in SOC119 has given me the courage, perhaps delusional, to try to live tweet a lecture with 900 freshmen. I am going to draw strength from your willingness to take risks in front of large crowds ... I may need a big hug when I return.

http://www.personal.psu.edu/cpl2/blogs/thelongroad/blog/ : On Live Tweeting Your Own Lecture - The Long Road

Sun, 18 Nov 2012 02:49:04 +0000

Thanks, Kyle, for this comment, and for scrolling all the way through the Storify to make it. I was worried about being distracted, but since the tweets were pre-written and sent as I moved through the Keynote slides, I did not have to attend to them during the lecture itself. Nor did I respond directly to the twitter feed as it happened, only after the lecture itself. As for those who were attending the lecture, some did express frustration multi-tasking, but it certainly kept people engaged and it led to some great conversation. I imagine people will remember more about my lecture because of this use of twitter than they would if they just heard a traditional lecture.

Socratic Politics in Digital Dialogue : Digital Dialogue 58: Love of the World - The Digital Dialogue

Sun, 11 Nov 2012 22:13:02 +0000

Yes, I gesture to a phenomenology of reading at the end of my forthcoming book on Socratic and Platonic Political Philosophy. It needs to be fleshed out further, and your comments here help with that. I embrace the vocabulary of ethoi, but not so much that of spirits.

Socratic Politics in Digital Dialogue : Digital Dialogue 58: Love of the World - The Digital Dialogue

Sun, 11 Nov 2012 15:29:50 +0000

@Dirkusa, your comment is well taken, and it resonates with a longer conversation that emerged from my presentation on Plato and the Politics of Reading a few weeks ago in San Francisco. In the Storify I created of the conversation that emerged there, @alexanderzane in discussion with @DulceFlecha, made a similar point: we cannot ascribe an ethos to the text itself, but rather it is readers that bring the ethos with them to the text. Here is the link to the Storify, its under the heading "A Longer Conversation." http://storify.com/cplong11/plato-and-the-politic... However, I want to defend the notion that the text has an ethos as well; it is rooted in the ethos of its author, but not fully determined there, because the meaning of the text, what it has to say, is bound also up with the history of its provenance, and the manner in which it is taken up by, as you say, "the social arrangements/interests of particular readers." Nevertheless, the ethos of the text can no more be reduced to those arrangements and interests than it can be to the intentions of its author. There is something in a text that is uniquely its own, independent of the author who gave it birth or those of us who, reading it, breath new life into it again. This unique ethos of a text is what holds every reading of it accountable to the truth it has to articulate.

Socratic Politics in Digital Dialogue : Digital Dialogue 56: God and the Organism - The Digital Dialogue

Thu, 4 Oct 2012 13:09:25 +0000

It must be a bit surreal for you as you were the one who originally pointed me to the posting on the APPS blog. Thanks for doing that and for your continuing support of these attempts to engage is public dialogue about philosophical issues of substance.

http://www.personal.psu.edu/cpl2/blogs/cplportfolio/blog/ : "The Politics of Truth" at University of Kansas - Christopher P. Long\'s ePortfolio

Tue, 28 Aug 2012 02:10:35 +0000

Thanks for commenting @SEO Houston. I don't think it is necessary (or possible) to decide if humans are inherently good or bad. Far the better approach, I think, is to leave such speculative and undecidable questions to the side, and to work together to articulate an account of the good and the just that will enrich the lives we live together. It is the attempt to articulate what is good and just in a given context that will bring us closer to both ideals. That process is difficult because we do have differing visions and interests, but navigating those differences has always been part of the attempt to speak the truth to and with one another.

Socratic Politics in Digital Dialogue : The Book as Ecosystem of Scholarly Dialogue - The Digital Dialogue

Wed, 27 Jun 2012 02:52:49 +0000

Thanks, Dirk. I have appreciated your consistent presence here on the blog and your feedback throughout. As I mentioned on G+, I have had some good conversations with the press and feel hopeful that we can do something innovative here once the book is vetted. https://plus.google.com/107683579018281167341/pos...

http://www.personal.psu.edu/cpl2/blogs/thelongroad/blog/ : Literacy in Bloom - The Long Road

Fri, 15 Jun 2012 14:57:07 +0000

What a great quotation from C.S. Lewis. The capacity for reading to transform the world is under appreciated.