Critical Review of Lackey’s “Learning from Words”
I was invited to write a critical review of Jennifer Lackey’s book Learning from Words. I just submitted a draft to Philosophical Books for review, but I still welcome comments/feedback. In short, despite the fact that I disagree with Lackey on a number of issues, I think this book is excellent.
Warning: It’s a long one. This is a full-blown critical review, and my limit was 8,000 words.
Google-is-awesome-aside: This is also the first paper I wrote from start to finish entirely inside of Google Documents. It was great. Google may well have their hooks in yet another area of my life.
Filed under: educational technology, epistemology by Andrew Cullison
Hi Andrew,
This is in response to your “aside”… Over the summer I tried using Google Docs in my Intro classes. I’ve developed fairly extensive study guides for the texts we read, and in these classes I “shared” them with my students using GD. I then assigned small groups the task of working together to complete the relevant portions of the study guides prior to each class. This promised to be a big improvement over having people emailing chunks of text around so that one unfortunate person could attempt to compile everything into a single document right before class. The major drawback, based on feedback from my students, seemed to be that Docs becomes agonizingly slow at certain times–presumably high-traffic periods, or when more than one person was editing a given document. I wouldn’t have been surprised if this were an occasional occurrence, but it happened so much that I don’t think I’ll repeat the experiment this fall. Any thoughts on how to deal with this? Thanks for any help….