Welcome to GED 500 Online! Taking an online course is very different from taking classes in person. In many ways, you have much more freedom. You can be “in class” at midnight in your pajamas or during your lunch break at work. At the same time, an online course requires much more discipline and time management than an in-person course. And in fact, studies on online learning suggest that students who do well in online courses actually spend more time on an online class in comparison to an in-person class.
Based on all of the feedback from previous cohorts, I’ve made some very important changes to this online course to make it more manageable for you. The first is weekly accountability. Last semester I let people do the Blog posts at their leisure. What happened is that many ended up waiting until the last week of school to catch up and posts were (1) um, kind of crappy and (2) I got slammed so much that it was overwhelming to keep up with grading (which, I’m sure you can appreciate as teachers yourselves). I’m not doing that any more. Blog posts are due on Sunday night at midnight and if you miss that deadline then that Blog is dead to you. You can’t make it up. Disqus notifies me every time anyone Blogs or posts and gives me the exact date and time of your posting, so this will be very easy to monitor.
I don’t use Blackboard, only www.professorsapp.com and https://disqus.com for Blogging.
I’m not making you purchase a textbook (Yeah Me!). All of the readings will be posted here.
I’ll break up each session into several parts. Educational Research PowerPoints to read. Bullshit articles to read. Blogs to respond to. And tasks for you to do for assignments.
Let’s get started!
Bullshit Readings
Introduction to bullshit. What is bullshit? Concepts and categories of bullshit. The art, science, and moral imperative of calling bullshit.
READ Brandolini’s Bullshit Asymmetry Principle.
READ Harry Frankfurt (1986) On Bullshit. Raritan Quarterly Review 6(2).
Supplementary Readings (No, you don’t have to read these. They’re just for fun.):
G. A. Cohen (2002) Deeper into Bullshit. Buss and Overton, eds., Contours of Agency: Themes from the Philosophy of Harry Frankfurt. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.
Philip Eubanks and John D. Schaeffer (2008) A kind word for bullshit: The problem of academic writing. College Composition and Communication 59(3): 372-388.
J. L. Austin Performative Utterance, in Austin, Urmson, and Warnock (1979). Philosophical Papers. Clarendon.
Tasks
This is a reading-heavy course, folks. But the readings are good and interesting in my opinion. I mean, come on, they’re on bullshit!
Read the two articles and do Blog #1.