Innovations in online education under the umbrella of expanding access

What follows is a summary of a set of innovations I have crafted in online education that may be grouped under the umbrella of expanding access—expanding the range of influences on the students’ learning and expanding access to the learning materials from courses.

Online Synchronous Teaching

When students participate over the internet in regularly scheduled class meetings, discussion and small group interactions needs to be structured so that they feel as included and engaged as they would if they were students in a classroom. In other words, teachers should follow the Slow Ed Tech guideline of “modeling computer use on best practices to ensure learning without computers.” Appropriate practices include:

Life has more possibilities and joys when…

Thinking about the question posted to commentators on this recent PBS show: How to make sense of Elizabeth Warren getting tangled by how she addresses her Native American heritage, while Trump’s innumerable prevarications are not a problem for him and his supporters. My first response was that there are many social dynamics going on–If there was one, someone would have named it succinctly and it would have gained wide circulation. After starting to list various dynamics, from the evangelical push for a Christian nation to profit-making by Fox-stream media, I shifted to see that Trumpism might be resisted by acting upon a unifying dynamic:

Reconstructing Rawls and exposing the implicit social embeddedness of theories of justice

Taylor, Peter J., “Reconstructing Rawls and exposing the implicit social embeddedness of theories of justice” (1995). Working Papers in Critical, Creative and Reflective Practice. 4.
https://scholarworks.umb.edu/cct_ccrp/4
This essay (from 1995) prods moral philosophy towards more explicit attention to the political constructions of injustice. I do not appeal to practical or political relevance, but advance a particular kind of constructivist interpretation of moral argumentation (constructivism+) in which our interpretive horizons are extended to include the implicit views of social action, broadly construed—from the macro- to the micro-social, and from the past to the present and the possible—built into philosophical arguments.

The form of Taking Yourself Seriously

The forms (Levine 2015) of Taking Yourself Seriously (TYS) are ones in which the students and participants bring themselves into to grow and develop so that they leave having more self, i.e., more tools in their toolbox, to bring into the forms of work and life outside TYS. The students/participants take up/in the tools by experiencing their use and practicing them in projects of research and engagement, including engagement with themselves, that is, taking themselves seriously.

What relationship does it have to democracy to claim that the outcome of a referendum, such as Brexit, must be carried through come what may?

What relationship does it have to democracy to claim that the outcome of a referendum, such as Brexit, must be carried through come what may?
Consider this: in a representative democracy, elections decide who represents the people. These representatives contest elections, citing positions of policy on various issues, but by no means on every one that might arise in the course of government. Moreover, once the election is over, the Parliament or Congress decides the what and how of policies to enact, drawing on advice from people who have examined the details and evolving circumstances.

“Look everywhere for stories of where ordinary people are making a positive difference in others’ lives”

A Canadian friend turning 70 later this month asked this gift of her friends: “look everywhere for stories of where ordinary people are making a positive difference in others’ lives, and capture them. Tell the stories in your own words, and write them down.” Here is what I sent her.

Manifesto

A synthesis of elements from a course or workshop, selected and organized so as to inspire as well as inform your efforts in extending the course/workshop topic further. An excerpt from an example, then some elaboration:

Plan for Practice

A plan with two dimensions:
How you will put into practice in your work, community and other settings the tools, processes, and knowledge being learned
How and with whom you will practice putting these into practice. Given that things are surely not going to work out perfectly the very first time, include how you will take stock of how well your Plan is working so as to adjust and improve.

Re-districting without gerrymandering

A serious proposal as well as an opportunity for critical thinking: What holes or objections can readers identify?

Proportional representation eliminates gerrymandering by treating the whole state as one district and assigning multiple seats in that state according to the proportion of the vote gained by a given party. But let me put aside that possibility and stay with the traditional subdivision of a state into districts. Here is a way to do re-districting without gerrymandering and to reduce risk that votes for one party will be concentrated into a few districts.