Cut Pine Moon

cutting a tree

seeing the sawn trunk it grew from

tonight's moon

Matuo Basho

on the intended ambiguity of poetic imagery

from "The Heart of the Haiku" by Jane Hirshfield read by John Freed:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MlP-_-jFMAU&feature=mfu_in_order&list=UL

A Happy Christmas Present:The best access to free cultural & educational media on the web

“Open Culture” is truly what it self-advertises – “The best free access to cultural & educational media on the web.”

It is the richest and easiest to navigate treasure trove that I have come across for open access to complete major university courses, to streaming classic films, to textbooks, ebooks and audio books as well as language and science lessons that are free for use by instructors or learners or the merely indulgers of art, science and global cultures.

If Tolstoy could learn to ride a bicycle at age 67 without the endless resources of the internet, just think of your unlimited possibilities with them. 

Dr. Freed's Caution: Once you start examining the virtual gems discoverable in “Open Culture,” you might never return to the real world.

Finding Equality Through Logic

Yvette Doss

Pasadena, CA

What follows is a link to my featured speaker of the week, Yvette Doss, for my LBSU 402 class at Brandman University -- "The Ways and Rhetoric of Knowing" from NPR's "This I Believe" series.

This is the prologue for the class.

Listen to Yvette's essay "Finding Equality Through Logic" by clicking on the following URL: http://thisibelieve.org/essay/12393/ .

At Curriki - A Survivor's Guide to College Writing

Free Instructional Materials for Teachers and Texts for Students

Aligned with Meeting State Educational Standards

Here is a New York Times article that will introduce you to "Curriki" -- a great, free curriculum materials resource that can be aligned with individual state standards-- for teachers.

What follows is the URL to the posting of my expository writer's handbook on the "Curriki" website for your edification and re-distribution -- "A Surviver's Guide to College Writing."

You're on your own to explore the rest of "Curriki's" instructional riches.

A Survivor's Guide to College Writing

by Dr. John Freed

click on the following link for this free writing guide:

Curriki - A Survivors Guide to College Writing

What Dr. Freed did for his sanity this Summer

click on the image to enlarge

"Tend your own garden, Candide."

Happy Hundredth Birthday, Mr. Tennessee Williams

http://www.actorstheatresf.org/

My dear wife, Stacy, gave me the best gift this past week -- a ticket to a truly riveting performance of Tennessee Williams' Pulitzer Prize winning play, "A Streetcar Named Desire" at the Actors Theatre in San Francisco.

Rachel Klyce as Blanche and Jennifer Welch as her sister Stella did the maestro proud.

The following link is to all of the Bay area's current (Spring - Summer 2011) theatrical productions with bargain ticket pricing to boot.

http://www.theatrebayarea.org/index.jsp;jsessionid=DEDF2CA1553DEF6E16FE1E09C6B3A380?hi=1

The Internet as Gift Economy: Exemplar 2

OpenOffice with full MS Office compatibility for free

http://download.openoffice.org/

OR

MS Office Suite 2010 for $279

The following is an article on why you might want to consider using OpenOffice 3.3.0 for free instead of paying $279 for MS Office:

http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/5-myths-about-openofficeorg-libreoffice

Pass it on.

The Internet as Gift Economy: Exemplar 1

Rosetta Stone Language Study – one language for $599

The Gift of Language Study

Choose either:

Rosetta Stone Language Study – one language for $599

http://www.rosettastone.com/holqb3?pc=sehol10&cid=se-gg&gclid=CM6JnNf_6aUCFcQH3wod7FG00g

versus

BBC Languages for free

http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/

or

LiveMocha Languages for free

http://www.livemocha.com/

Here is an article on why the free LiveMocha is better than the $600 Rosetta Stone:

http://www.livemocha.com/better-than-rosetta-stone

Pass it on.

Where to Acquire a Library of over 3,000,000 University-Level Books on the Internet:

The University of California at Berkeley Doe Library

University of California's copies of mass-digitized books and serials have been loaded into the HathiTrust, and are discoverable there. In addition, our digitization partners (Google and Internet Archive) also host copies of the UC books they have digitized. In all cases, copyright status determines whether books can be viewed in full. There are many access points where Google and Internet Archive books are surfaced. The following are details of access points for UC items in particular. Over 3,000,000 books have been digitized and are eligible for free downloading. Click on the hyperlinks below to search for and acquire them..

HathiTrust

University of California Libraries books and serials in the public domain in HathiTrust are open to all researchers whoever and wherever they may be. Content in HathiTrust is discoverable through both bibliographic and full-text search with no authentication, login, or password required. As it becomes possible to expand access to the materials through permissions or other agreements, other materials will be made available.

Google Book Search

UC Libraries books and serials in the public domain are generally fully viewable and downloadable. UC Libraries volumes made available through Google Book Search that are in copyright are subject to limited views. Google indexes the full text, but does not serve or display the full-sized digital image or make available for printing and/or download unless Google has permission or a license from the copyright owner to do so

Internet Archive

UC Libraries books and serials in the public domain are generally fully viewable and downloadable. Internet Archive offers a variety of viewing options, including the Flip Book reader which recreates the experience of reading a printed book.

Another Holiday Present -- Mark Twain's Autobiography vol. 1

One of the biggest events in academic publishing this year is the release of volume 1 of Mark Twain's Autobiography by the University of California Press. The hardcover edition is currently out of stock at Amazon.com and discounted at $19.22. The Kindle ebook version is available for wireless downloading at $9.95.

But the best news is that the entire electronic book, along with scholarly editions of "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" and "Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer Among the Indians" is available free of charge at the following University of California Library website:

Mark Twain Project online .

This is my additional holiday present for my blog followers.

Have a Happy Christmas!

John Freed

The Media Distraction Factor in Education

Every prospective teacher or parent of middle to high school-aged children should watch the following video:

The Media Distraction Factor in Education

from The New York Times:

"Fast Times at Woodside High" (Nov. 20, 2010)

http://video.nytimes.com/video/2010/11/20/technology/1248069313108/fast-times-at-woodside-high.html

Tour of Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel

Click here for a 360 degree tour of the Sistine Chapel in Rome.

Patrick Stewart in "Macbeth" and Ian McKellen in "King Lear"

Macbeth on PBS

Click on the following URL for the complete PBS performance of “Macbeth” starring Patrick Stewart.

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/gperf/episodes/macbeth/watch-the-full-program/1030/

Click on the following hyperlink to watch the full episode.

Watch PBS's "Hamlet"

Watch PBS's Great Performances 2010 Production of "Hamlet"

Patrick Stewart as King Claudius in "Hamlet"

Here is the link to the performance: Great Performances -- Hamlet

Also Watch "The Making of PBS's Hamlet":

Watch the full episode. See more Great Performances.

A Reading by Jamaica Kincaid at MIT

Jamaica Kincaid

A Reading by Seamus Heaney at MIT

Seamus Heaney

You Need This -- Open Access Navigation to Media on the Web

This link will get you started to over 400,000 internet accessed videos:
Connect to Clicker.

This link from PC World explains what it is and why you need it" Clicker Hands-On: Web Potatoes, You Need This

Open Access Educational Resourcing from Columbia University

For an in-depth explanation of the issues and best practices for using open content media for educational purposes, link to the following URL:

http://ccnmtl.columbia.edu/opencontent/index.html.

It's the entire 2007 conference on video.

JF

Happy Christmas, 2009!

Click on image to enlarge card.
photo collage by John Freed

A Lunar Christmas Gift Link

from John Freed courtesy of Jeanette Winterson and the BBC

in commemoration of the 40th Anniversary

of the first U. S. moon landing and an
exemplar of a noted novelist's integrating art, culture and science

A Poem Be

I'm one of the ones who constantly hear the music in poetry and smile at the words.

What follows is a nice explanation of the "thing in itself" that good poetry is by Billy Collins and the violations that most bad teachers and students of poetry so often inflict upon it. With an appreciative acknowledgment to Jeanette Winterson. Her fruitful website is located here: http://www.jeanettewinterson.com/.


INTRODUCTION TO POETRY

by Billy Collins

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a colour slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem’s room
And feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.




As Archibald MacLeish so adroitly put it, "A poem should not mean / but be."

Exactly the same thing should be said about music.

JF

Summer Gifts from the Internet for My Media Courses

Chapman University College

(July 2009)


Examples of "iTunes University" and Free [Gift] Economies of New Media

1. Summer Mix gifted by partnership of iTunes and Stanford:


http://itunes.stanford.edu/summermusicmix/




2. Stanford on iTunes:

http://itunes.stanford.edu/



3.Media Convergence documentary for Harry and the Potters:

http://www.hulu.com/watch/62149/we-are-wizards




4. Chris Anderson, editor of Wired Magazine, state of New Media's Gift Economy: (free audio version of the book “Free.”

http://www.longtail.com/the_long_tail/2009/07/free-audiobook-on-itunes-free-natch.html


5.The State of Media Education in Canada:

http://www.media-awareness.ca/english/teachers/media_education/media_education_overview.cfm

Dr. Freed Comments on Edutopia Question

What is so patronizing about this week's Edutopia question [“Does teaching low-performing and high-performing students together benefit the whole class?”] is that it contains a caste-ing notion of "low-performing" and "high-performing" students as if they were genetically determined.

Learners are simply "learners" with the success of their performance often having more to do with the quality and imagination inherent in teacher assigned tasks and their readiness for them and interest in them than with individuals' supposed aptitude.

Bill Gates and Steve Jobs would have surely washed out of their doctoral programs, for example, while most Ph.D.'s don't even realize that anything exists outside of tiny measurable boxes.

I teach adult-learners who wish to complete their undergraduate and / or graduate educations. Nearly all of them were labeled at one time or another "low-performing" students. And I'm sure that tattoo across their foreheads was an impediment to their return to higher education. Their current learning profiles, however, equate to the honor students I have previously taught at traditional universities.

As Shakespeare wrote, both the "readiness" and the "ripeness" are more necessary for actualization than the "groupness." Ok, ok, he never used the word “groupness,” but you get my drift.

Observe and Listen to James's Faith

Observation / Listening Exercise:

An effective observation/listening assignment is to have my class transcribe all of James's statement in this video and comment on the quality of his faith in God as well as the following questions:

Is he a nobody and therefore not credible or someone that we all could learn from relative to dealing with adversity? Is James a manifestation of Richard Wright's “Man Who Lived Underground” --“I am the statement”?





The YouTube link to James is the following URL: www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRvdsTVgQ6M.

Video used with permission by its creator, my wife, Stacy Alexander Freed.

Farewell Gifts to my Chapman Classes

Learn a Language for Free: Another Gift from the Internet

“I personally use both of these resources to learn Spanish. It is my parting gift to my Chapman classes at Walnut Creek and on-line this year.”

endorsement by John Freed. Ph.D.




1. BBC Languages / Spanish – “Mi Vida Loca”:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/spanish/


2. LiveMocha / Language plus Social Interaction:

http://www.livemocha.com/

A Gift from the Internet

The most delightful free service that I have come across on the internet is Pandora Radio.

You can exactly match your background music to your mood.





JF

A Gift from New Media for Educators

As part of a recent fund raising pitch by San Francisco’s premier public radio station KQED, the announcers directed their listeners to this site on the radio’s web-page which I had previously not known about.

I found this a particularly effective way to raise contributions since it demonstrated how much KQED was itself “giving back” to the community.

It is a perfect example of new media’s “Gift Economy” at work. From KQED - San Francisco click on KQED Education


Note that contributions to public radio and television are actually referred to as gifts and are both voluntary and tax deductible.

JF

A Very Important Alert for Higher Educators

The following is a "reprint" of a commentary piece from The Chronicle of Higher Education:

What Colleges Should Learn from Newspapers’ Decline

By KEVIN CAREY

Newspapers are dying. Are universities next? The parallels between them are closer than they appear. Both industries are in the business of creating and communicating information. Paradoxically, both are threatened by the way technology has made that easier than ever before.


The signs of sickness appeared earlier in the newspaper business, which is now in rapid decline. The Tribune Company, owner of the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune, is bankrupt, as is the owner of the The Philadelphia Inquirer. The Rocky Mountain News and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer are gone, and there's a good chance that the San Francisco Chronicle won't last the year. Even the mighty New York Times is in danger — its debt has been downgraded to junk status and the owners have sold off their stake in the lavish Renzo Piano-designed headquarters that the paper built for itself just a few years ago.


All of this is happening despite the fact that the Internet has radically expanded the audience for news. Millions of people read The New York Times online, dwarfing its print circulation of slightly over one million. The problem is that the Times is not, and never has been, in the business of selling news. It's in the print advertising business. For decades, newspapers enjoyed a geographically defined monopoly over the lucrative ad market, the profits from which were used to support money-losing enterprises like investigative reporting and foreign bureaus. Now that money is gone, lost to cheaper online competitors like Craigslist. Proud institutions that served their communities for decades are vanishing, one by one.


Much of what's happening was predicted in the mid-1990s, when the World Wide Web burst onto the public consciousness. But people were also saying a lot of retrospectively ludicrous Internet-related things — e.g., that the business cycle had been abolished, and that vast profits could be made selling pet food online. Newspapers emerged from the dot-com bubble relatively unscathed and probably felt pretty good about their future. Now it turns out that the Internet bomb was real — it just had a 15-year fuse.


Universities were also subject to a lot of fevered speculation back then. In 1997 the legendary management consultant Peter Drucker said, "Thirty years from now, the big university campuses will be relics. ... Such totally uncontrollable expenditures, without any visible improvement in either the content or the quality of education, means that the system is rapidly becoming untenable." Twelve years later, universities are bursting with customers, bigger, and (until recently) richer than ever before.


But universities have their own weak point, their own vulnerable cash cow: lower-division undergraduate education. The math is pretty simple: Multiply an institution's average net tuition (plus any state subsidies) by the number of students (say, 200) in a freshman lecture course. Subtract whatever the beleaguered adjunct lecturer teaching the course is being paid. I don't care what kind of confiscatory indirect-cost multiplier you care to add to that equation, the institution is making a lot of money — which is then used to pay for faculty scholarship, graduate education, administrative salaries, the football coach, and other expensive things that cost more than they bring in.


As of today, there's no Craigslist busily destroying the financial foundations of the modern university. Teaching is a lot more complicated than advertising, and universities have the advantage of sitting behind government-backed barriers to competition, in the form of accreditation. Anyone can use the Internet to sell classified ads or publish opinion columns or analyze the local news. Not anyone can sell credit-bearing courses or widely recognized degrees.


But the number of organizations that can — and are doing it online — is getting bigger every year. According to the Sloan Consortium, nearly 20 percent of college students — some 3.9 million people — took an online course in 2007, and their numbers are growing by hundreds of thousands each year. The University of Phoenix enrolls over 200,000 students per year. In one case, the dying newspaper industry itself is grabbing for a share of the higher-education market. The for-profit Kaplan University is owned by the Washington Post Company.


And it would be a grave mistake to assume that the regulatory walls of accreditation will protect traditional universities forever. Elite institutions like Stanford University and Yale University (which are, luckily for them, in the eternally lucrative sorting and prestige business) are giving away extremely good lectures on the Internet, free. Web sites like Academic Earth are organizing those and thousands more like them into "playlists," which is really just iPodspeak for "curricula." Every year the high schools graduate another three million students who have never known a world that worked any other way.


Some people will argue that the best traditional college courses are superior to any online offering, and they're often right. There is no substitute for a live teacher and student, meeting minds. But remember, that's far from the experience of the lower-division undergraduate sitting in the back row of a lecture hall. All she's getting is a live version of what iTunes University offers free, minus the ability to pause, rewind, and fast forward at a time and place of her choosing.


She's also increasingly paying through the nose for the privilege. Few things are more certain in this uncertain world than tuition increasing faster than inflation, personal income, or any other measure one could name. People will pay more for better service, but only so much more. And with the economy in a free fall, more families have less money to pay. The number of low-cost online institutions and no-cost alternatives on the other side of the accreditation wall is growing. The longer the relentless drumbeat of higher tuition goes on, the greater their appeal.


Institutions that specialize in their mission and customer base are still well positioned in this new environment, much as The Chronicle is doing a lot better than the Rocky Mountain News (RIP). Tony liberal-arts colleges and other selective private institutions will do fine, as will public universities that garner a lot of external research support and offer the classic residential experience to the children of the upper middle class.


Less-selective private colleges and regional public universities, by contrast — the higher-education equivalents of the city newspaper — are in real danger. Some are more forward-looking than others. Lamar University, a public institution in Beaumont, Tex., recently began offering graduate courses in education administration — another traditional cash cow — through a for-profit online provider, with the two organizations splitting the profits. It's an innovative move and probably a sign of things to come.

But the public university still looks like something of a middleman here — and in the long run, the Internet doesn't treat middlemen kindly. To survive and prosper, universities need to integrate technology and teaching in a way that improves the learning experience while simultaneously passing the savings on to students in the form of lower prices.


Newspapers had a decade to transform themselves before being overtaken by the digital future. They had a lot of advantages: brand names, highly skilled staff members, money in the bank. They were the best in the world at what they did — and yet, it wasn't enough. The difficulties of change and the temptations to hang on and hope for the best were too strong.


That's a problem for more than just newspaper shareholders. A strong society needs investigative journalism and foreign bureaus. It needs knowledgeable local reporters who can ferret out corruption and hold public officials to account, just like it needs faculty scholarship and graduate programs and even an administrator or two. Undergraduate education could be the string that, if pulled, unravels the carefully woven financial system on which the modern university depends.


Perhaps the higher-education fuse is 25 years long, perhaps 40. But it ends someday, in our lifetimes. There's still time for higher-education institutions to use technology to their advantage, to move to a more-sustainable cost structure, and to win customers with a combination of superior service and reasonable price.
If they don't, then someday, sooner than we think, we're going to be reading about the demise of once-great universities — not in the newspaper, but in whatever comes next.

Kevin Carey is policy director of Education Sector, an independent think tank in Washington.

http://chronicle.com
Section: Commentary
Volume 55, Issue 30, Page A21
________________________________________

My article about the Polish Director Krzysztof Kieslowski (click on images for larger size)

This article was published in OneWorld Magazine in New York.

My article about the Chinese Director Yimou Zhang (click on images for larger size)

This article was published in OneWorld Magazine in New York.

Great Lecture and Series from Yale University et. al.

Here is a video lecture on Machiavelli's "The Prince" by Dr. Steven Smith at Yale University.

I recommend that you explore all the other lectures from Ivy League level schools that the Academic Earth website contains.

Brain A is listening to a class. / Brain B is working on the web.

How best to use electronic [internet accessible] media materials for instructional purposes

by John Freed, Ph.D. freed@chapman.edu

University College of Chapman University

Walnut Creek Campus

1. Be very contextual with the material clearly relating it to a specific learning objective for the class.
2. Be highly selective about the quality of the material itself. Do your homework about the reliability of the particular source for the material as well as the content of the material. Produce your own electronic materials when appropriate from other less accessible media.
3. Be sure to critically question all virtual authority (Wikipedia case in point vs. Encyclopedia). A very specific assignment focused on this very issue should be incorporated early on with the actual use of an electronically accessible source. [Point out the essential difference between what a university library collects and distributes and what the internet gathers and provides open access to.]
4. Be very specific and current with the actual hyperlinks that you provide. The goal should be direct connection with a single click. Check them out personally immediately before you direct students to them.
5. Be sure to supply the “So What” epilogue to the exercise.
6. Be sure to provide a re-accessible [asynchronous] environment for everything above. This invites an opportunity for review, reflection and later synthesis of the learning. This environment might part of a course-specific BlackBoard site or a more generally accessible professional blog.
7. Be sure to expand the common-wealth of resources by contributing as well as borrowing – (join a viral academic community such as Rice University’s Connexions or iTunes University or post your own professional blog linked to iTunes or not [CF . Google’s blog creation site -- https://www.blogger.com/start].

Examples Sheet for Instructional Uses of Electronic Resources

1. The Open-Access Instructional Resource project at Rice University:

a. Richard Baraniuk: “Goodbye, textbooks; hello, open-source learning”: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/25

b. Rice University’s Connexions: Sharing Knowledge and Building Learning Communities: http://cnx.org/

2. Example of Electronic Primary Sources:

Ian Johnston’s The Iliad and links to other class primary resources:

http://malaspina.edu/~johnstoi/homer/iliad_title.htm

and Ian Johnston’s Translation of Homer’s Iliad reviewed on NPR:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6849615

3. Example of a Professor’s Professional Blog – (Expanding instruction beyond the classroom) such as this one.

4. Second Language Learning and Free University Courses:

1. LiveMocha Free Language Courses:

http://www.livemocha.com/ [This site can also be used to refresh learning of Standard English as well as connecting globally to other English Language Learners.]

2. BBC Spanish Course:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/spanish/

3. BBC Chinese Course:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/chinese/

4. General Language Resources:

http://degreedirectory.org/articles/Ranking_of_Foreign_Language_OpenCourseWare_Education_Sources.html

5. English as a Second Language Remediation:

http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/678/01/

5. Guide to University College of Chapman Library Resources:

http://www1.chapman.edu/library/centers/GuidetoLibraryResources.pdf.

6. Ubiquitous Web Search Engine and Google Resources such as News, Books, Scholar, etc.

http://www.google.com/

7. All Purpose Developmental Writing Tutorials

a. for Non-Purdue Instructors and Students:

http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/679/01/

b. for use with Diana Hacker’s Handbook

http://bcs.bedfordstmartins.com/pocket5e/player/pages/Login.aspx?sViewAs=S&userid=

8. APA (American Psychological Association) Documentation and Style Guide (fifth edition):

http://www.vanguard.edu/faculty/ddegelman/index.aspx?doc_id=796

9. Academic Integrity (How to avoid Plagiarism):

http://www.indiana.edu/~istd/

10. Mathematics / Statistics:

a. Mathematics Tutorials from Beginning Algebra through College Algebra and GRE prep:

http://www.wtamu.edu/academic/anns/mps/math/mathlab/

b. Basic Statistics (MATU 203)

http://www.tufts.edu/~gdallal/LHSP.HTM

and

http://davidmlane.com/hyperstat/index.html

11. Miscellaneous Microsoft Office Tutorials:

a. MS Word Tutorial:

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/training/CR061958171033.aspx

b. PowerPoint Tutorial:

http://www.iupui.edu/~webtrain/tutorials/powerpoint2000_basics.html

c. Excel Tutorials:

http://www.usd.edu/trio/tut/excel/index.html

and

http://www.micquality.com/excel_primer/

12. Free alternatives to Microsoft Office software applications.

a. Open Office:

http://www.openoffice.org/

b. Google Docs:

https://www.google.com/accounts/ServiceLogin?service=writely&passive=true&nui=1&continue=http%3A%2F%2Fdocs.google.com%2F%3Fhl%3Den%26tab%3Dwo&followup=http%3A%2F%2Fdocs.google.com%2F%3Fhl%3Den%26tab%3Dwo&ltmpl=homepage&rm=false

13. Other Free College Course Materials:

http://degreedirectory.org/articles/25_Colleges_and_Universities_Ranked_by_Their_OpenCourseWare.html

14. Study Skills and Adjustment to College:

http://www.studygs.net/

Final Note: This listing of open-access electronic resources was prepared co-operatively by Chapman University College’s Division of Arts and Science under the project coordination of John Freed. If anyone has any comments on the usefulness of the material here or suggestions for adding other material, please direct them to Dr. Freed at freed@chapman.edu.

Lera Boroditsky

Listen to a conversation about the inter-relationships between world languages and human thinking

From Stanford University’s

Entitled Opinions

Host Robert Harrison

Tuesday, November 4, 5:00 pm - 6:00 pm, 2008
Guest host Joshua Landy in conversation with Lera Boroditsky about language and thought.

Listen to the show

Click here for instructions on downloading and listening

JOSHUA LANDY is Associate Professor of French at Stanford University. He has written Philosophy as Fiction: Self, Deception, and Knowledge in Proust (Oxford, 2004) and has edited, with Thomas Pavel and Claude Bremond, Thematics: New Approaches (SUNY, 1994). This is his first appearance as host of Entitled Opinions. He was a guest of the show in 2005, discussing Marcel Proust with Robert Harrison.

LERA BORODITSKY is an assistant professor of psychology, neuroscience, and symbolic systems at Stanford University. Dr. Boroditsky grew up in Minsk in the former Soviet Union. After earning a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from Stanford in 2001, she served on the faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the Department of Brain & Cognitive Sciences before returning to a faculty position at Stanford. She also runs a satellite laboratory in Jakarta, Indonesia.

Boroditsky’s research centers on the nature of mental representation and how knowledge emerges out of the interactions of mind, world, and language. One focus has been to investigate the ways that languages and cultures shape human thinking. To this end, Boroditsky’s laboratory has collected data around the world, from Indonesia to Chile to Turkey to Aboriginal Australia. Her research has been widely featured in the media and has won multiple awards, including the CAREER award from the National Science Foundation and the Searle Scholars award.

My Teaching Philosophy – Newly Revised

As part of a senior administrator application process, I was required recently to expound upon my “Teaching Philosophy” in a short essay. Thank goodness for old hard-drives and a compulsion to back-up files. And voila! Up came “My Teaching Philosophy” written some fifteen years ago in another state. A few nips and tucks and then back to other work.

What I wasn’t prepared for was that in this self-reflection I would see a very different teacher’s face looking back at me. Instead of time tested, knock ‘em dead print and lecture materials that I’d used for more than ten years, I saw dynamic electronic resources plucked from the infinite treasure trove freely accessible through Google.

Instead of stage worthy performance virtuosity, I saw facilitations of the expertise of my students and worldwide collegial partnerships through such agencies as Rice University’s “Connexions” project (http://cnx.org/) and AsiaNetwork (http://www.asianetwork.org/). Instead of reaching dozens of students per year at my brick and mortar site, I was reaching hundreds of students by re-authoring my classes and transforming them to an on-line modality.

Instead of building fresh neuronal networks in new-to-college students, I was helping older, returning students restructure their denser neuronal networks into different patterns. My earlier Socratic classroom dramaturgy had mellowed to one that allowed both my students and me more time for consideration, genuine dialogue and changes of mind.

Although the “how I teach” has evolved significantly over the years, the “what I teach” relative to the primacy of the liberal arts really hasn’t changed. No matter what the subject, I still emphasize that nearly all contemporary human problems are more failures of imagination, introspection, observation, analysis/interpretation, common sense, cultural memory, integrity, moral outrage, courage to act, or compassion rather than insufficiencies of material means to solve them. And that the ability to absorb, critique and construct new knowledge is our best indicator of truly college-educated individuals. These are the competencies that engagement with the liberal arts provide. I fully agree with Cicero who said over two thousand years ago, "Not to have knowledge of what happened before you were born, is to be condemned to live your life as a child."

The three most significant indicators of my evolution as a teacher over the last fifteen years are 1) to write a “Lecture Epilogue” delivered to the student electronically a week after each class answering the “So what?” questions and including students’ contributions; 2) to focus on “learning by doing” by spending less time on what I am going to say in class and more time on imagining what the students could do to apply their prior learning and demonstrate their understanding of the material -- to become the change that I was envisioning; and 3) to project the learning beyond the classroom by maintaining an ongoing professional blog for my current and former students as well as my colleagues. This “Common-wealth: Art, Media and Western Culture” blog is my way of doing just that -- http://artmediawesternculture.blogspot.com/.

I also believe that every college class is a writing and critical thinking class and that every college teacher needs to model the highest level of effective communication. Monitoring those ends I wrote the expository writing-across-the-curriculum rubrics that appear on every University College course syllabus template and distribute to all my students and colleagues a brief writer’s guide I wrote entitled “A Survivor’s Guide to College Writing.” As an unsolicited endorsement, my son who had just completed his masters degree in education maintained it was the single most important tool that got him through. Should anyone like a distributable copy, just e-mail me at freed@chapman.edu, and I’ll attach it in reply.

In this brave, new, electronically networked world we’re permitted to act more like teammates than competitors.