I have larger misgivings about moving more and more of higher ed online (which I’ll explore soon), but this talk given earlier this fall found me beginning to explore its costs and benefits in light of my experience teaching a fully online Western Civ course last summer. This past summer my colleague Sam Mulberry and … More Best of The Pietist Schoolman: A Field Report from the Digital Frontier
Here • We’re on Facebook! It’s a fun format — a chance to share links even before Saturdays, plus books I’m reading or teaching. I might do a bit of microblogging there on items that don’t seem to require 500-1500 words of commentary here. And we get spontaneous conversations like the one yesterday afternoon about … More That Was The Week That Was
This past summer my colleague Sam Mulberry and I taught the first online version of one of Bethel University’s more venerable courses: GES130 Christianity and Western Culture — a team-taught, multidisciplinary, one-semester Western Civ course taken by something like two-thirds of Bethel students as a foundational experience in the Global Perspectives pillar of Bethel’s gen … More A Field Report from the Digital Frontier: My Experience Teaching Online
There’s been plenty of criticism of massive open online courses (MOOCs) in recent months, a small fraction of it linked in my Saturday wrap-up posts. But I haven’t seen much that consciously takes on the problems of MOOCs from a faith-based perspective. So Jonathan Malesic’s piece a couple of weeks ago in the Chronicle of … More A Christian Case Against MOOCs
Here… • What kind of financial support do evangelical colleges and universities receive from their sponsoring denominations? • Short answer: Data are sketchy, but… not as much as they used to. Case in point, Bethel University. • Are these good measures for ranking colleges: The mid-career salaries of alumni? How meaningful they find their work? … More That Was The Week That Was
On Friday I led our department’s welcome sessions for new majors. For a while now I’ve made sure to dedicate part of that time to preemptively addressing the concern, “What do I do with a History major?” We’ve got better at making what sound to us like effective arguments — ruthlessly pragmatic explanations of the … More Christian Liberal Arts as Cathedral-Building
Here… • Pride and Prejudice, going strong after 200 years. • Re: my post on the music of Monty Python… Did I mention that I was such a devoted fan in high school that I convinced a group of friends to come over to the house for a marathon viewing party that took us through … More That Was The Week That Was
Here… • I concluded my series on patriotic songs in American hymnals: part two introduced a few songs that never made it into more than one or two hymnals; part three asked why even very popular patriotic songs fail to appear in many hymnals. • No, Pope Francis did not promise “get out of purgatory … More That Was The Week That Was
Here… • I shared answers to the first two of many good questions that I was asked via Skype by an 8th grade history class in Kalispell, Montana: Did my history teachers make me want to be a historian?; and Who’s my favorite historical figure? • Paying tribute to Dallas Willard, who died of cancer … More That Was The Week That Was
Here… • Medieval wisdom that could have saved some moderns. • I closed my series on the recent history of college closures. • Then three brief follow-ups on earlier posts about higher education: what professors do with their time, the role of competitive sports in colleges, and questioning the applicability of “return on investment” to … More That Was The Week That Was
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