Weblogs in Higher Education
Devoted to the uses of weblogs and wikis in higher education.
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RSS FEED IDEMS: Weblogs in Higher Education
- Humanizing knowledge, continued
. . . from yesterday . . . See, for example, The Lives of Others, last year's Academy Award winner in the Foreign Language Film category. In this excellent film about the East German state police, the Stasi, their surveillance of nearly everyone is captured through the story of a group of writers and... - Humanizing knowledge
Pierre Hassner tells a story of poet Czeslaw Milosz's 1951 flight from Communist Poland. The poet recalls that few Western intellectuals welcomed or assisted him, a notable exception being Albert Camus. Due to what Hassner calls ideological commitment, many academics failed to see the relationship between their ideas and the lives people were actually living in places like Poland. Milosz says this failure created a great gap between them and the people of Eastern Europe;... - Only connect
A colleague wrote to ask the department about one of the goals in our first year writing course, the one in which we ask students to discuss two readings together -- to connect them in a single paragraph, say. Many teachers wrote back. Here is my reply: Why connect? Because of that word, connect, a scene from Howard's End jumps to mind, in which one character uses the word to try to explain the ethical requirement of seeing outside yourself into... - Catalog and narrative
Malcolm Gladwell's article on criminal profiling, a psychological technique that aims to reveal the character traits of a person based on clues from a crime scene, begins with a paragraph-long history of the "Mad Bomber," a person who committed a series of pipe bombings over many years. Notice how the efficient narrative is also a catalog of incidents that suggests psychological clues while it reveals the mounting urgency of the police hunt for the killer. For those two reasons,... - Writerly risks of an expert culture
We are especially vulnerable to certain kinds of experts, Henry Schneider suggests, based on his unusual economics research. Schneider took a carefully-prepared car into several dozen repair shops and kept track of the skill and honesty of the service he was offered there. Originally interested in our dependence on the advice of health care experts,...
