Doing Philosophy Online
Abstract
My aim here is to write out of the experience of “doing philosophy” with graduate students online through an educational web site template called WebCt. WebCt provides me with the ability to custom design a learning environment in which we can read, think, write and share our experiences, sometimes at great physical distance. Writing is the me-dium of communication for every aspect of my online courses. The specific online course I will describe in this paper is ED 501: Philosophy, Education and Ethics. ED 501 is a core requirement in the Graduate Studies Program in Education at Plymouth State College. At the time of this writing, I am teaching two online sections of this course, each with twenty-five students. I have students in Bangladesh, Saudi Arabia, Honduras and in various areas of the U.S. In the online environment that I’ve designed, “doing philosophy ” is a kind of conduct and that conduct is expressed as writing that we share in various ways. John Dewey wrote in Democracy and Education, “To be the recipient of a communication is to have an enlarged and changed ex-perience. ” Dewey claims that “social life is identical with communica-tion ” and that “all communication is educative ” (1985, p. 8). Although he certainly had in mind face-to-face communication, we accomplish this fact of social life in ED 501 through writing within the online environ-ment. Writing as communication is a form of educative conduct. In a typical semester, ED 501 includes the following writing com-ponents: • personal biographical statements which are made public to the class through posting on the website bulletin board • an e-mail dialog with the instructor which is essentially private, but may be shared with the class as a final project • responses posted on the website bulletin board to core questions and topics about a specific reading
- Journal
- The WAC Journal
- Published
- 2001-01-01
- DOI
- 10.37514/wac-j.2001.12.1.07
- CompPile
- Search in CompPile ↗
- Open Access
- OA PDF Gold
- Topics
- Export
- BibTeX RIS
Citation Context
Cited by in this index (0)
No articles in this index cite this work.
References (0)
No references on file for this article.
Related Articles
-
The Peer Review Sep 2025Moving Against the Grain: Combining Writing Center Theory and In-House Editing Services to Create a Graduate Writing Center ↗Brian Harrell; Brook Wyers; Craig Theissen
-
Pedagogy Apr 2025modern rhetorical theory rhetorical criticism african american rhetorics cultural rhetorics first-year composition writing pedagogy basic writing graduate education two-year college teacher development writing centers technical communication professional writing labor and working conditions digital rhetoric multimodality social media literacy studies race and writing gender and writing community literacy literary studies editorial matter
-
Technical Communication Quarterly Oct 2024“I Feel Like I’m in a Box”: Contrasting Virtual Reality “Imaginaries” in the Context of Academic Innovation Labs ↗Brent Lucia; Matthew A. Vetter; David A. Solberg
-
Technical Communication Quarterly Oct 2024Jo Mackiewicz; Shaya Kraut; Allison Durazzirhetorical criticism discourse analysis first-year composition writing pedagogy graduate education teacher development writing centers technical communication professional writing digital rhetoric multilingual writers grammar and mechanics literacy studies race and writing public rhetoric editorial matter
-
Computers and Composition Jun 2024Personalizing first-year writing course design and delivery: Navigating modality, shared curriculum, and contingent labor in a community of practice ↗Mary K. Stewart; Andrew Kelly Stewart