Laptop policies: Getting beyond 'yes or no'

Tomorrow's Prof blog has a nice post summarizing some recent research about student use of laptops (and like devices) in the classroom. Some main findings:

• More than half of students at least sometimes bring a laptop to class.
• The number of questions asked in class increases when students can ask questions via their laptops.
• Most students report that laptops, their own and those of other students, are sometimes a distraction in class.
• 35% of the students report that when they have their laptops available, they spend at least 10 minutes per class period using e-mail and social networking sites.

How to teach independent projects

For the past two years, I've been overseeing the students in my department who are writing senior theses. This is now required for all of our majors. 


For the most part, this is a very positive teaching experience. It's gratifying to see students begin with ideas for their theses that are embryonic (or less charitably, half baked) and arrive at an intellectually credible piece of philosophical scholarship. I also enjoy being able to see the learning going on — to witness their struggles to identify an argument for a claim they find plausible and so on. And in general, I find this sort of teaching, which is closer to coaching, more my style than classroom theater.


Still, overseeing these theses presents various teaching challenges, and I'd welcome advice from those who oversee theses (or similar independent student projects) about how to meet these challenges:

IRB Approval of Philosophy Courses?

I recently attended a seminar on IRBs (Institutional Review Boards) for Human Subjects Research. It was said that if students were doing any "research" in their courses involving human subjects from outside the course, this would likely need IRB approval. Sounds good, but I asked if this approval is needed even if the "research" is very informal, e.g., if students are presented with these sorts of assignment prompts: "Ask at least 3 people what they think about this topic," or "Ask at least three people what they think are common reasons to think p or not p (e.g., that doing X is wrong, that we have free will, that there is a God, etc." and so on: casual inquiry into what people think about philosophical issues.It was told that these potentially common learning activities might require IRB approval: it was pointed out that students might videotape their "research" and who knows what might come from that; perhaps people would somehow be harmed by being asked these sorts of questions.

I suspect that many philosophy instructors attempt to get students to do these sorts of informal surveys and/and, at least, encourage them to discuss class issues with people who are not in the class. My question, then, is whether anyone has encountered this issue and has done much to determine whether approval is indeed required for such activities, at least at their school. Thanks.

The future of teacher education?

I'm pretty unsympathetic to the MacIntyre/Williams criticisms of modern moral theories (I think the Kantian/Korsgaardian has more than enough resources to do justice to ground projects/real human flourishing and I have significant doubts that society suffers at all from leaving behind aretaic theories of virtue) but there is still a lot of value in what Higgins has to say about the struggle to maintain a good, integrated life while participating in the practice of teaching.

In Chapter 8, we finally get to the bottom of what Higgins thinks teaching is all about: reflective questioning. Education, he writes, is "the ongoing conversation taking place in the space opened by the question of what best facilitates human flourishing; it consists of the implicit and explicit answers, described and enacted by those theorists, practitioners, and theorist/practitioners who feel called to join the conversation." (258) All education is necessarily concerned with human flourishing in one form or another, and assumes some account of what human flourishing is. (Also, for the record, don't miss his very insightful account of teachers surrounded by textbooks and tests suffering from "pedagogical Stockholm Syndrome" on p. 256.)

It probably goes without saying that this is a pretty romanticized notion of education.

Tittle on non-philosophers teaching applied ethics

Peg Tittle has absolutely no patience for non-philosophers teaching applied ethics. Is she right? Here's her case:

1. "As far as I can see, business ethics taught by business faculty, ethics programs run by managers, and so on – any applied ethics taught by non-philosophers – is superficial at best.  First, following a code is just an appeal to custom, an appeal to tradition, which philosophers consider a weak basis, an error in reasoning..."

A Wall Street Education

I thought this might be of interest. From a controversial  blogpost by Ezra Klein:

"For many kids, college represents an end goal. Once you get into a good college, you’ve made it, and everyone stops worrying about you. You’re encouraged to take classes in subjects like English literature and history and political science, all of which are fine and interesting, but none of which leave you with marketable skills. After a few years of study, you suddenly find it’s late in your junior year, or early in your senior year, and you have no skills pointing to the obvious next step.
What Wall Street figured out is that colleges are producing a large number of very smart, completely confused graduates. Kids who have ample mental horsepower, incredible work ethics and no idea what to do next. So the finance industry takes advantage of that confusion, attracting students who never intended to work in finance but don’t have any better ideas about where to go.
....
So it seems universities have been looking at the problem backward. The issue isn’t that so many of their well-educated students want to go to Wall Street rather than make another sort of contribution. It’s that so many of their students end up feeling so poorly prepared that they go to Wall Street because they’re not sure what other contribution they can make. "

And a response.

Department Facebook Page

One of the principal areas for improvement that our department honed in on as a result of our assessment survey was communication with majors. Majors rated the usefulness of our website and communication quite low. Our department has some challenges in improving on this point. First, our majors tend to take longer to complete the program, with many taking extensive breaks, and the college doesn't have a very high-tech or consistent way of helping us keep track them. For example, we can only see who has declared philosophy as a major but we have no way of accessing who has it as a double major, minor, or dropped out. Second, we are constrained with how we can change our website and the process for doing so is onerous. Finally, many students do not use their assigned college e-mail address. Therefore, the most obvious methods--an e-mail list or remodeling our site--are not good options to reach our majors.

We debated whether to create a blog or a Facebook page and ultimately decided going for the latter. The only reason being that students would have to either subscribe to the blog rss feed or manually check it every time they want department news, whereas with a Facebook page they would get news from the department on their friends feed. We just launched our Facebook page and are trying to get students to 'like' us. I've e-mailed my colleagues and encouraged them to send their students to the Facebook page. But I was wondering if anyone out there had advice on how to get an active community on a department Facebook page? What sorts of things should we post besides events?