Philosophy Teaching on the World Wide Web

Bernhard Weiss

Review

Summary

Philosophers, we are told, 'tend towards the realm of the possible' and for this reason are, perhaps, among the most active explorers of the new technology's potential. Web technology, indeed all technology, once invented cannot be wished away; we must learn to live with it and to choose how to use it.

The internet is not simply a way of disseminating hitherto available information more widely and more quickly than we have ever been able to do before. It is more than that because it enables the construction of novel sorts of text. Hypertext allows a word to have a dual role - it is both a word in a text and a link to another text - and this duality provides a reader with choices in how she reads a given text. Writers need to be aware of the possibilities opened up by web-based texts. So whilst a traditional text directs the readers attention along a specific path a hypertext both does this and makes the reader aware of other possible routes.

The sheer numbers of people who can be reached by the internet poses educators with huge opportunities and new challenges. Academic subjects can now be brought to new audiences. InterQuest was a web-based philosophy course aimed at high school students. One of the main features of it was its use of and promotion of discussion and varieties of different sorts of discussion. Participation in classroom discussions is heavily dependent on time constraints and the numbers of participants: on-line discussions are much less constrained by these factors. Strategies for managing discussion are crucial and InterQuest uses six forms of discussion activity:

  1. Peer-peer exchange: discussions between pairs of students
  2. Inter-group exchange: the class is split into discussion groups
  3. Extra-group exchange: groups are assigned the task of providing comments to other discussion groups
  4. Intra-group exchange: Two or more discussion groups exchange the results of inter-group exchanges
  5. Chain exchange: Students are arranged in chains, they are assigned tasks which must be performed on the result as fed to them by the student preceding them in the chain.
  6. Global exchange: each contribution is made available to the entire group

Peer-peer exchange is recommended as the best place to begin whilst Global exchange is the most difficult to manage effectively but is the simplest to implement technically. Different technical capacities are required to facilitate the different sorts of exchange. The following are possible internet discussion methods: e-mail, listservers (e.g., Majordomo), threaded newsgroup clients (e.g., Hypernews) and chat clients.

Designing a discussion forum and implementing it can both be time-consuming processes. In addition, a given method will require that the students' are processed correctly and understand how the forum will work. Instructions need to be clearly set out and issued at appropriate times. One benefit of some of these teaching methods is that one can go some way towards eliminating passive students who simply observe in silence whilst others engage. But doing so requires implementing strategies which require student participation. When students fail to participate this is obviously potentially hugely disruptive.

The flexibility of hypertext, in particular, the way it calls for decisions on the part of the reader, enables the course designer to allow for different routes through a course. So a course can take into account students' differing outlooks, interests, background knowledge etc. The InterQuest project attempts to implement an introduction to philosophy course which is sensitive to students' philosophical leanings. So, for instance, it provides frameworks for the following outlooks: egoist, holist, religious, relativist and sceptic.

Comment

I found this paper useful in summarising the variety of ways of implementing e-discussion and the problems associated with and potential benefits of each method. Particularly suggestive is the idea that web-courses can and should diverge radically from traditional ones. The flexibility in how one negotiates one's way through a course is potentially a huge advantage, but perhaps not one which should be overstated - books are presented sequentially but can, and sometimes do, specifically allow for different readers to find different routes through them. Making sensible use of hypertext is a pedagogical challenge: its overuse will simply serve to distract the teacher from a clear perception of her aims and the learner from concentrating on and finding appropriate content.


Created on: May 24th 2007

Updated on: June 4th 2007