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New Category

Posted February 27, 2007 By Dave Thomer

I’ve added an education category to the site. Given how much time I’m spending on the topic, I figure it’s about time. There will continue to be some crossover with philosophy, but this section will be more about the nuts and bolts of teaching.

I did a brief “microlesson” presentation in one of my education classes tonight – about 30 minutes on Descartes and the hyperbolic doubt thought experiment. Just as I got rolling my time ran out. One of the other students felt like I had left the class on a cliffhanger – setting up the experiment, but not having time to actually talk about Descartes’ findings. Leave ’em wanting more, I suppose.

But it got me to thinking about something that’s been occupying my thoughts a lot lately – there seems to be a real tension between the Deweyan approach I say that I want to take, and the way I actually teach. I try to initiate class discussion a lot, and I think I’m reasonably successful there. (Although I can get better.) But in order to to try and give the students a shot at understanding some of the admittedly cryptic texts we read, I spend a lot of time doing lecture and boardwork. I’m starting to wonder if I should try and be less text-centered, to push the students to develop their own approaches. But that might mean giving up on exposing them to some really thought-provoking material. I dunno. I’m still muddling through this.

Filed in Education

Responsive Government? What’s That?

Posted February 26, 2007 By Dave Thomer

A bunch of threads are colliding against each other in my head right now. Reuters is reporting on a new poll that shows a majority of Americans want a timeline to withdraw troops from Iraq. In the meantime, there have been numerous reports about the Congressional Democrats’ problems coalescing behind any particular proposal to try and stop the war before Bush leaves office. (Here’s Dick Polman from the Inquirer on the subject, and right now the front page of MyDD.com has several competing perspectives on the subject.)

Meanwhile, I’m putting together review material for my American Philosophy students, and going over some of the Anti-Federalist writings that opposed the Constitution because they thought the new national government was too powerful and insufficiently responsive to the people – some thought that the checks and balances that we all learned about in grade school would just gum up the works and keep the government from doing what the public wanted. Which was precisely what folks like Madison and Hamilton had in mind, of course. And many times I think that’s a good thing. Right now, though, maybe not so much.

Filed in Public Policy

Taking the Rest of the Day Off

Posted February 25, 2007 By Dave Thomer

Got a new chair. Still getting used to it, so no deep thoughts tonight.

In the meantime, here’s a YouTube clip of Neil Finn playing the song “Silent House,” which he cowrote with the Dixie Chicks. The song is apparently on the upcoming Finn/Crowded House album. There’s a compare and contrast for you.

Filed in Culture and Media

I Will Not Sit Still for This

Posted February 24, 2007 By Dave Thomer

Minimal posting and computer activity tonight, because when I pulled my chair back from desk to sit down, the back of the thing fell right off. So I’m gonna have to go to an office supply store and get a new, relatively cheap chair that I can start to destroy, all the while dreaming of Herman Miller ergonomic wonders.

Filed in Life in Practice

National Primary in 3 . . . 2 . . .

Posted February 23, 2007 By Dave Thomer

Pennsylvania is going to hold hearings about moving its primary up to Feb. 5, along with, oh, roughly every other state. On the one hand, I would certainly love to have the chance to actually vote in a contested presidential primary. On the other hand, this is the sort of thing that makes people say these primary campaigns may be looking at spending $100 million each. Those fundraising issues apparently motivated Tom Vilsack to drop out of the race for the Democratic nomination today. Which, perhaps paradoxically, suggests that all of us have a vote to make this year. If a candidate can’t make the case that he or she is financially viable, that candidate might not even make it to Iowa. So small-donor contributions from the Web in 2007 might heavily shape the 2008 race.

Filed in So Now What?

A Standard Post

Posted February 22, 2007 By Dave Thomer

I did a lot of writing today, so I’m a bit tapped out. Fortunately, I think one thing I wrote is worth sharing. I had to write up a response to Pennsylvania’s academic standards for civics and government in grades 1-12. SHort version: I wasn’t too impressed. Want the long version? See below.

Read the remainder of this entry »

Filed in Life in Practice

From the Den

Posted February 21, 2007 By Dave Thomer

My brain is not working at all at the moment, but allow me to point you to this web page, where Denny O’Neill – who wrote the socially conscious Green Lantern/Green Arrow stories Robn mentioned a while back – responds to the Green Lantern Theory of Geopolitics, which I still think is my favorite thing to come out of the political blogosophere in the last year. (Here’s the original post laying out the theory.)

Filed in Special Order Speeches

I Was Young and Foolish Then . . .

Posted February 20, 2007 By Dave Thomer

Once upon a time, as I was trying to figure out the whole being-a-grownup thing, I spent a fair amount of time reading about investing and the financial markets. I particularly enjoyed the message boards at the Motley Fool website, which were a very interesting mix. The Amazon forum in particular was a fascinating conversation between bears and bulls, but I eventually stoppped reading the forums and the site as they went to a subscription model – I wasn’t sure I was really cut out to be doing a lot of heavy duty investing, so there wasn’t enough value in the site for me to pay for it. (If you were to go there and read the archives, you’d see me expressing skepticism a lot of the time, but then sometimes getting caught up in the same euphoria that drove the tech stock bubble. It’s one of those humbling things I like to remind myself of from time to time.)

At any rate, I bring this story up because one of my all time favorite posters at the Fool was RJ Mason, who had a tremendous ability to blend analysis, clear writing, and humor. And as I was checking out my WordPress dashboard yesterday, I discovered a link from a site I didn’t recognize, which turns out to be RJ’s blog. These days RJ’s a roboticist, but he still has time to put the occasional witty cartoon and/or comment on his blog or his website. So go take a look.

Filed in Special Order Speeches

Fixing the Voting System, Take Two

Posted February 19, 2007 By Dave Thomer

Not News launched right before the 2000 election, and so it should not be too much of a surprise that we spent a lot of time in our forums in November and December talking about what do about the voting system. And at the time, I was a proponent of using electronic voting machines, ideally ones with photographs of candidates.

Well, the execution of that idea hasn’t exactly proven me prescient. There have been reports of buggy code, impossible-to-verify record trails, buggy code, and all sorts of other problems. So Rush Holt has reintroduced H.R. 811, an amendment to the Help America Vote Act that would mandate that every voting system produce a paper record.

I will say this: I still think electronic voting systems have potential. Every paper system of balloting has problems with spoiled ballots, and I’d like to see those reduced. Truth be told, I’m not sure I was ever really able to verify that the big machine with the levers was actually recording my vote, either. But in 2000, I imagined that a country that’s managed to make ATMs ubiquitous would be able to come up with better interfaces than we’ve gotten. I was wrong. So adding one more layer of verifiability through paper receipts is probably a good idea. But if we do put a whole new system into place, again, can we please put the time and money into making sure it works thsi time?

Filed in Public Policy

Campaign 2.0?

Posted February 18, 2007 By Dave Thomer

I am tapped out tonight, and can’t think of a whole lot to say. I did spend some time over at Hyper-Textual Ontology talking with Robn about the Edwards blogger snafu.

Then, as I was continuing to make my blog rounds, I noticed that Mark at Educational Technology and Life has a post on the Obama campaign website and its use of social-networking elements. I’m not completely upto date on the whole Web 2.0 idea, so you should probably just go check out Mark’s thoughts on the subject. I am going to need to ask him how he thinks Obama’s site compares to John Edwards’ OneCorps concept.

I’d say it’s interesting that I ran across both of these posts on the same day, since they both touch on the current presidential campaign and the posters’ previous periods of political disinterest, but that’s a linking device created mostly by the fact that I didn’t get around to checking blogs as much this week.

Filed in Special Order Speeches
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