While the sessions of the American Philosophical Society I described yesterday covered work I hadn’t directly studied during my One Year BA (albeit by philosophers I had taken courses on), the last session I attended dealt directly with something first discovered through a MOOC course: The Trolley Problem. For those unfamiliar with it, the Trolley […]
Final Exam
I’m typing this on my way back home from the 2013 Eastern Division conference of the American Philosophical Association, a conclave where over a thousand philosophers (mostly professors and graduate students) gathered in Baltimore to ponder the universe, torture job-seekers and fret about funding for the field. Before the holidays, I argued that one method […]
The One Year BA! – The Defense
Before explaining why I think taking 32+ online courses in twelve months might be the equivalent of a four-year BA’s worth of learning, I’d first like to ask readers to take a blank sheet of paper and write down the names of every course you took while in college. Depending on your age and memory […]
The Pragmatic Maxim
Time again to take a look at MOOC and other forms of free learning from the perspective of another one of the subjects I’m studying: Pragmatic philosophy. I’ve been learning about Pragmatism through a second attempt at a self-study course, one which is going much more smoothly than the first, probably because excellent resources are […]
Yes I Kant
It’s been a few months since I tried my hand at applying some of the subject matter I’ve been studying to issues arising out of the existence of massive open online courses. I previously used course topics such as economics, utilitarianism and entropy as a springboard for discussion of meta-matters related to MOOCs, but today […]