Category: education

• November 19, 2012

  Giving an honest self-inventory; or, how to be post-ironic

  The literary scholar Christy Wampole has called ours an “ironic age” in which “directness has become unbearable to us,” and in “How to Live Without Irony,” her New York Times Stone essay that appeared in this Sunday’s Review, she provides some clues for how we could live in a post-ironic manner.  These clues include saying what…
• November 15, 2012

  The end of the university: Udacity’s mounting case

  We’ve been considering the case of Udacity, the larger case that it is mounting. In my mind’s eye, I’ve been imagining a bee hive cracked into, with bees and flowers and unimaginable things fluttering out. Now, any serious threat to the status quo may do more than show that it presents a novel solution. More importantly,…
• November 14, 2012

  The challenge posed by Udacity

  I agree with the New Media writer Clay Shirky that the time is right for a massive disruption of higher education. In his blog, “Napster, Udacity, and the Academy,” Shirky explores how higher ed content is–like music after what’s been dubbed the ‘Napster moment’–set to become ‘unbundled.’ Udacity’s power play is to ‘decouple’ the course…
• November 13, 2012

  Love of love

  What’s love got to do with it? Yesterday morning, one conversation partner spoke of wanting to “love life without limit.” We spoke about how to draw out the meditative aspects from the ordinary run of life. In the afternoon, Cheyenna Weber, Interim Director at the New Economy Network and Founder of SolidarityNYC, told me that,…
• November 8, 2012

  Lines composed the morning after the Noreaster (Plotinus, Ennead 1.6)

  Lovers love the beautiful. Plotinus inquires what about the beautiful makes it so. Early on in Ennead 1, he says (pace the Stoics) that it is not the mere proportions of the thing that make whatever the thing is beautiful, hence not the proper relations of part to whole. For cannot a line be beautiful and cannot a…