Category: Uncategorized
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I Taught Philosophy for 20 Years. Here’s What I Learned.
[Apologies for the clickbait title!] I taught philosophy for at least 20 years. Long enough to become reasonably confident in what I was doing and then realise that at least some of that confidence was misplaced. We tend to think we are teaching philosophy when we explain arguments, optimistically set readings, and guide students through…
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Against Nihilism, For Appetite: Why Teaching Still Matters
Cross-posted from my LinkedIn posts, where I mostly put stuff these days.. “In these troubled times” is a phrase we hear often, sometimes in a darkly humorous, sarcastic-not-sarcastic tone. At other times it feels like mere rhetorical habit. And yet it persists, because the underlying feeling it gestures towards persists too. The nihilism that Nietzsche…
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Why Being Polite to AI Matters (And Not For the Reason You Think)
Cross-Posted from where I put it on LinkedIn: I am writing a longer piece on politeness to AI and ethics, but in light of Sam Altman’s recent comments – I asked Claude GAI (very nicely) to extract a 250 word summary from my draft – which I have (quite heavily) edited and is here: We…
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GAI Podcast on Desire in Pali Buddhist Canon
NotebookLM and podcast generation: A test… So – to really test NotebookLM’s function of generating a ‘Deep Dive Conversation’ , I uploaded my book on Desire in Pali Buddhist texts, and asked it to generate the conversation – and it took under 5 minutes – and here we go – a 20 minute (US- accented)…
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THES Digital Universities – reflections
On 20th May I took part in the Times Higher Education Digital Universities Week 2021 event entitled: ‘What could university look like for the class of 2030? Despite the last year changing higher education in ways we never thought possible, there are still years of transformation ahead of us.” Below are some of my reflections, both…
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Don’t cut yourself on all that edge
Contrarian Scepticism as pro-level passive-aggressive performance. This was a Twitter thread, now posted here, trying to reflect on, extend and reconstruct a talk I gave at ‘Question Criticality’ Symposium at Leeds @CentreCelt in November 2019 about criticality/critical thinking in HE and wider contexts We often laud critical thinking, seeing a lack of it as socially…
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Reflections on Decolonising the Curriculum
I posted this as a Twitter thread – but am popping it here too – and to remind me that I want to expand on the of details of classroom practice. I have been thinking, sat in Teams meetings obviously, about decolonising practice in Universities. I think I understand why the most common way to…
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Short video about Remote Learning
I recorded a short piece of video, I think aimed at our students, about remote learning. 5 minutes of me talking into the void…
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All I write are emails: (Not) A Lament.
All I write are emails. I should join my generation in a mass bemoaning. A wailing of would-be scribes. Denied our space to craft lyrical whimsy by neoliberal templates. But I won’t. Because I don’t really write emails. I write missives of reassurance. To a colleague, straining under anxiety who needs kindness. Compassion between the…
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Podcast about shifting to remote/online learning
I spoke over the weekend to philosopher Dr Pat O’Connor, from the Thales’ Well podcast, about the move to online learning. As he said on twitter, “We talked of different aspects of #eLearning like synchronous and asynchronous delivery, managing expectations, value of structure, segmenting on-line classes and other practical tips.” The podcast is live at…
Dave Webster 