Apparently there has been an (unofficial) National Day Of Reason every May 2nd since 2003, clearly intended by its Secular Humanist founders to counterbalance the National Day Of Prayer, governmentally sponsored since 1952. Personally, I would have preferred the National Day Of Reason to come on some day other than the National Day Of Prayer, since holding the two on the same day sets up a quite unnecessary competition, at least if ‘prayer’ is interpreted to include ‘meditation’. But, given that the government has decided to favor prayer over reason, and it certainly could decide to officially designate some other day the National Day Of Reason, I suppose that the Humanists have a point.

So, if you missed the National Day Of Reason on May 2nd, I urge you to celebrate it on any other day you like, as often as possible, simply by being reasonable. It would take a truly unreasonable person to be against that.

Here’s an article from today’s Chronicle of Higher Education on the stand a few stouthearted philosophers at San Jose State University are taking against their administration’s suggestion (eventual requirement?) that they incorporate at least part of an EdX MOOC into their courses. I recently posted on my concern that MOOCs might eventually endanger intellectual diversity, particularly in the Humanities and Social Sciences; this article focuses on pedagogical concerns-

By Steve Kolowich

Professors in the philosophy department at San Jose State University are refusing to teach a philosophy course developed by edX, saying they do not want to enable what they see as a push to “replace professors, dismantle departments, and provide a diminished education for students in public universities.”

The San Jose State professors also called out Michael Sandel, the Harvard government professor who developed the course for edX, suggesting that professors who develop MOOCs are complicit in how public universities might use them.

In an open letter this week addressed to Mr. Sandel, the philosophy professors decried a dean’s request that the department integrate a MOOC version of “Justice,” the Harvard professor’s famous survey course, into the curriculum at San Jose State.

“In spite of our admiration for your ability to lecture in such an engaging way to such a large audience,” the letter’s authors write, “we believe that having a scholar teach and engage with his or her own students is far superior to having those students watch a video of another scholar engaging his or her students.”

The letter is part of a brewing debate about how MOOCs might deepen the divide between wealthy universities, which produce MOOCs, and less wealthy ones, which buy licenses to use those MOOCs from providers like edX.

The authors say they fear “that two classes of universities will be created: one, well-funded colleges and universities in which privileged students get their own real professor; the other, financially stressed private and public universities in which students watch a bunch of videotaped lectures and interact, if indeed any interaction is available on their home campuses, with a professor that this model of education has turned into a glorified teaching assistant.”
…
In a statement to The Chronicle, San Jose State said it intends to leave faculty members in control of their courses, even where it is encouraging experimentation with edX materials like Mr. Sandel’s course.

“In the interest of clarity, our collaboration with edX does indeed locate the responsibility for the course solely with our faculty members, who will determine how much, or how little, of the edX course materials they will incorporate into their blended courses,” wrote Ellen Junn, provost and vice president for academic affairs.

“The administration would never impose or mandate these teaching methods on faculty members,” Ms. Junn continued.

But the authors of the philosophy-department letter are nonetheless worried about what could happen in the future. “Let’s not kid ourselves; administrators at the CSU are beginning a process of replacing faculty with cheap online education.”

Don Ross and Jimmy Wahlsteen are, separately, extraordinary solo acoustic guitarists. Since both record for CandyRat Records, it’s not particularly surprising that they recorded this duet of Ross’s “Klimbim” back in 2010 to publicize an upcoming tour. What is amazing, however, is how tight the performance is, considering that they’re recording live on a sidewalk in Nova Scotia. At one point a fire engine comes blazing by, siren wailing; it hardly fazes them.

Really, except perhaps for the location, this is at least one way steel-string acoustic guitars were always meant to be played.

Spring in Wisconsin…

Dear Senator Ron Johnson-

I read in the Oshkosh Northwestern (our hometown newspaper) today that, as part of your official duties as a U.S. Senator, you are producing videos of people that have been harmed by government intrusion or red tape. The paper went on to describe the subject of your first video, the sad story of Steve Lathrop, “a man who bought an old dump in a flood plain and converted it into a lake to prevent future flooding”…

The nearly three-minute video says the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers subsequently threatened Lathrop with fines and jail time unless he converted the land back because the Army Corps had designated the area as wetlands. The video said the Corps of Engineers also referred Lathrop to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for prosecution, but the EPA declined to charge him. Lathrop instead planned to follow EPA guidelines to create new wetlands on the adjacent farm, which required a permit. The permit still has not arrived from the Corps of Engineers even though Lathrop applied for it 14 years ago, the video said.
…
Johnson is inviting people who watch the first video to click on a link and share other stories that could provide the basis for future installments.

Waiting for a permit for 14 years! What an injustice! How intrusive!!

Well, if you really want to expose intrusive government, there’s really no need to wait for people to click on your link. There are 305 stories just begging to be publicized over at The Innocence Project. These are stories not of people that have been waiting for a permit (to do something that they apparently don’t want to do anyway), but rather of people that have been convicted by the government of crimes they did not commit, and as a result have rotted away in prison for, in some cases, over thirty years. I suggest you direct your keen eye for intrusive government at them; here are a few of the most egregious cases to get you started-

My trip to New Orleans last month inspired me to put together this rendition of Mingus’s “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat” to accompany some of the photos I took of the French Quarter and a cemetery in the Garden District.

While it’s certainly not for everyone, Chris Marker’s 1983 film Sans Soleil (Sunless) is like nothing else I’ve ever seen. Part travelogue, part prose poem set to moving images, the film ruminates at a leisurely pace on – among other things – time, history, memory, Japanese culture, post-colonial Africa, technology, Animism, Hitchcock’s Vertigo, film making, sex, and (of course) death. I found it mesmerizing, but I can also can understand how others could find it unbearable. Here are a couple of representative samples, the first a largely silent meditation on weary faces in a Japanese train and shopping mall, the second an almost poetic treatise on a civil war in Africa (warning: this clip has some very disturbing images).

Portrait of an unknown (at least to me) street artist, taken on a recent trip to New Orleans… with a bit of Photoshop’s Rough Pastels filter added for atmosphere…

Here’s a literary quote for a late Saturday night…

It was always my hope, in writing novels and stories which asked the question “What is reality?”, to someday get an answer. This was the hope of most of my readers, too. Years passed. I wrote over thirty novels and over a hundred stories, and still I could not figure out what was real. One day a girl college student in Canada asked me to define reality for her, for a paper she was writing for her philosophy class. She wanted a one-sentence answer. I thought about it and finally said, “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” That’s all I could come up with. That was back in 1972. Since then I haven’t been able to define reality any more lucidly.

Lately I’ve been thinking a bit about MOOCs – “massive online open courses” being offered by elite institutions like Harvard and Stanford. I think it’s great that those who can’t afford to enroll in such schools have a chance to learn from watching videos of lectures. However, politicians, business leaders, and some journalists have started making MOOCs sound like the future of higher education, and if they are right, our culture is in for some serious trouble. MOOCs might be fine for teaching basic courses in science, math, and engineering. But for even elementary courses in the humanities and social sciences, in which the vitality of the discipline essentially depends on intellectual and pedagogical diversity, the idea that everyone should learn the same material in the same way from a few elite professors is a recipe for disaster.

Those of us who are actually in the trenches – dealing with students every day in classes that are already too large at 50 or 60 – know that one-way instruction aimed at tens of thousands is no panacea for the ills afflicting higher education. The role of MOOCs in the college ecosystem will take some time to work out, but academics need to be fully engaged in the debate to counter-balance the politicians and corporate executives who view the situation only through a lens of economic efficiency.

Here’s an excerpt from a useful contribution to the debate by Siva Vaidhyanathan at The Chronicle of Higher Education-

The strangest thing about this MOOC obsession is the idea that something that very wealthy private institutions offer for free, at a loss, as a service to humanity, must somehow represent the magic numbers in the higher-education lottery. It’s new, it’s “innovative,” and it’s big, the thinking goes. So it must be the answer.

Let me pause to say that I enjoy MOOCs. I watch course videos and online instruction like those from the Khan Academy … well, obsessively. I have learned a lot about a lot of things beyond my expertise from them. My life is richer because of them. MOOCs inform me. But they do not educate me. There is a difference.

For the more pedestrian MOOCs, the simple podium lecture captured and released, the difference between a real college course and a MOOC is like the difference between playing golf and watching golf. Both can be exciting and enjoyable. Both can be boring and frustrating. But they are not the same thing.

… MOOCs cost a lot of money, do not in any way simulate a classroom experience, and constitute—at best—the efficient yet static delivery of course content. The delivery of course content is not the same as education. And training students to perform technical tasks, such as doing basic equations in calculus, is not the same as education. Teachers get this, of course. So do students.

If we would all just take a breath and map out the distance between current MOOCs and real education, we might be able to chart a path toward some outstanding improvements in pedagogical techniques. But we can’t do that as long as the rich people who run university boards conduct their research by reading David Brooks columns and proceeding to lop off the heads of institutions who don’t seem to be following the mania of the moment.