Dreaming

I've got two of my three classes for the spring semester ready to go and spent most of the long weekend doing some of the "reading updates" on the third, my Contemporary Issues in Religion course. (Who could possibly imagine that so much stuff would be written on religion and biogenetical issues in one year!) In between reading articles on stem cell research and Michael Crichton's Next (one of this year's required books for the course that I'm 1/3 of the way through rereading), Kathy and I did some garden planning. We decided that, while we'll cut back on the variety of potatoes this year and plant only three kinds--Onaways, Cranberry Reds, and All-Blues-- we'll double or triple the number of hills we'll make.

We're also going to put in more tomatoes this year than last because I really can't stand the tasteless "fake" ones they sell in stores and serve in restaurans during the winter and spring. With more of our own, we'll be able to can some and make sauce from some so that we'll have the real tomato taste during these colder months. We'll go mainly with traditional types--Burbank, Brandywine, Calabash, and Chadwick cherry-- though I ordered a Tigerella (a variety on the Green Zebra that disappointed me last year) and a Yellow Perfection plant (both of which are heirlooms) for some variety and a Stupice so that we'll have tomatoes early in the season as well as late.

We're going to skip cucumbers this year, since no one really liked the ones we grew last year. Instead we'll expand our lettuce varieties. Rather than just green Romaine, we're going to try to grow Red Iceberg, Savoy, Red Romaine, and Formidana-- and we're going to try to start them from seed. We're also going to put in more peppers than last year-- mainly sweet varieties in orange, red, and purple--so that we can freeze some for winter and spring cooking. All of this will mean probably doubling the amount of the tiny back yard we give over to gardening, which I find really exciting!


On top of that, since Kathy would like to grow some berries, we're also going to try to do some container gardening as well, planting Ozark Beauty strawberries and Top Hat blueberries in medium sized pots and keeping them on our back porch.

Now to begin the two month countdown until I can begin to prepare the soil!

Trial of Socrates in Second Life

This past week, my Intro to Philosophy classes spent their time together conducting modern day trials of Socrates, bringing him up on more contemporary charges like treason and seditious conspiracy rather than impiety and corrupting the youth. Each time we do such a trial, my classes—even those that seem weak during the rest of the semester—really shine. Students who are playing the witnesses seem to have really internalized their characters—their lives and their interactions with both Socrates and Athenian society as whole. The lawyers have clearly combed the Platonic dialogues (which we use in place of depositions) and other literature and events of the day (as well as later scholarship) to prepare their arguments. The students who choose to be jurors are harder to engage, though the individual jury opinions they write up work better in doing this than the group jury opinion I used to have them do.

This year, for the first time, my online Intro class also did a trial of Socrates together by creating avatars and conducting the trial in Second Life. I’d been lucky enough to have a classroom space and trial furniture donated to me by another college—Buena Vista University—that had an island (such generosity on their part). The students learned—to various degrees of competency- to get around in Second Life. Lawyers and many of their witnesses met “in world” several times before the day of the trial for trial preparation.

And then we did the trial. It was slower than when we do it F2F. Because most of the students don’t have mics, we had to do the “speaking” by typing rather than voice and most of the lawyers didn’t seem comfortable doing “cut and paste” typing for the questions they’d previously prepared, but typed things out all over again. And about 45 minutes into it, because of glitches in its new update, Second Life decided to do a “rolling reboot”, which meant that all of us had to either sign off for a few minutes or move to another island and then teleport back to our trial room. But despite that, the trial went well and gave the class a chance to interact in new creative ways. Several members of the class actually created their avatars to look like the witnesses they were going to be during the trial (a Second Life bonus that we’ve never successfully pulled off well in F2F classes). And students also had a chance to argue their case in front of more than just other Mercy College students, since several of the Buena Vista students and faculty participated as jurors, and faculty from institutions as far away as University of North Dakota who belong to ISTE (the International Society for Technology in Education) and came to observe the way in which we did the trial.

Here are a few pictures from various parts of the trial:

The trial setup

Prosecution's opening remarks

Defense Attorney examining Crito

Anytus on the witness stand

Defense attorney examining I.F. Stone


Socrates on the witness stand

The jury

I'll be asking students to fill out a more detailed report of the pluses and minuses of doing a trial this way in an online class but from the comments I've received already they seem to have both enjoyed and learned from it.

Plato's Cave in Second Life

At this point, about 3/5s of my online philosophy class have created avatars and ventured forth into Second Life. So far folks in the class seem to be very intrigued by it. In the meanwhile, I've been scouting around for some interesting SL experiences for them. Among those that now look like exciting options is the possibility of partnering with a freshman computer science class from Buena Vista University (Iowa) that's exploring cyberspace to create Plato's cave in SL and then explore the meaning of that section from the Republic. Now if Mercy can only get SL up and running in the labs so that the other students in my class (who have computers running Vista or have poor graphics cards) can get on, we'll be all set.

New Days, New Ways

I've just finished the first week of a new semester of teaching both F2F and online classes. I've spent a lot of the time "out of the classroom" helping individual students get set structurally for the courses they're taking-- showing them how to make blogs of their own, walking them through the process of creating avatars in Second Life, helping them access podcasts, etc. As I've been doing it, I've been thinking of how different this is from the days when I first started teaching. Then the prep was stuff like "buy three textbooks that are in the bookstore" and "when you write a paper for me, type it double spaced so I have a place to comment".
I've become aware that, not only was the updating of ways to do assignments and dialogue with each other needed, but so are the examples I use in order to connect the course material with everyday life. In one of my Intro to Philosophy classes this week, for example, I was trying to explain the ancient Greek world in which Socrates' thought should be placed. I referred to Homer's Odyssey. Not one of my students had heard of it, much less read it. I explained it contained, among other things, Greek mythology. I asked what Greek myths they knew. Only one student had ever read a Greek myth. So I moved on to movies to try to illustrate my point, asking if anyone had ever seen "Clash of the Titans." No one had. I was feeling pretty frustrated, since what should have been a small point in building a worldview was taking so long for the class to connect with. Then it dawned on me to ask "Has anyone ever seen the Disney movie Hercules?" About half the class had. "Anyone ever play one of the Age of Mythology"videogames?" A few more hands went up.

So that's where I start this semester, needing to rethink not only the process of how students learn but also the examples that will connect with what they already know. Heraclitus is clearly right-- it's all change these days.

How Shall We Teach Them (and Us) Not to Tiptoe?

When I went out for a walk this morning with Chase and saw the first fallen maple leaves lying on the grass, it hit me that summer is really coming to a close. It finds me right in the middle of seriously revamping my classes at Mercy and writing church school curriculum for the kids at South. As I do so, I'm trying to keep this quote from Shane Claiborne's The Irresistible Revolution in mind:

“I am convinced that if we lose kids to the culture of drugs and materialism, of violence and war, it’s because we don’t dare them, not because we don’t entertain them. It’s because we make the gospel too easy, not because we make it too difficult. Kids want to do something heroic with their lives, which is why they play video games and join the army. But what are they to do with a church that teaches them to tiptoe through life so they can arrive safely at death?”

Revamping Intro to Religion

I’ve spent a large portion of the last two days getting my fall Relg 109 Introduction to Religion class set. I’ve redesigned the course requirements so that class work is a mix of reading, writing, exploration, oral presentation, discussion (both F2F and online), and collaboration. I’ve created a new blog for the class (Check it out at relg109dfb.blogspot.com) that will include work done in class as well as links to individual students’ blogs. I’ve put the syllabus up on the Mercy College Blackboard page. And I’m about half way through revamping assignments. So far I’ve designed assignments that will send students farther out into the real world and assignments that will put them into the virtual world, assignments that can be done individually and assignments that will require networking, assignments that require analysis of an ancient text and assignments that require creative design of new religious images.