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Archive for the ‘Uncovering & Evaluating Sources’ Category

Some preliminary thoughts on our research . . .

Posted in SHP Summer 2010, Student work, Uncovering & Evaluating Sources on July 14, 2010| 8 Comments »

This post will serve as the medium through which students in the Summer 2010 quarter can provide updates on the group work and research that they’re doing to prepare for their interview and/or to write their essay. Updates can include:

    ** Identifying noteworthy research findings, such as new concepts, facts, stories, projects, etc.
    ** Bringing to light useful research methods or sources
    ** Expressing preliminary comparisons and contrasts between different sources
    ** Seeking guidance to help make sense of a source or help find relevant connections between sources
    ** Asking for help to resolve research dead-ends

This comment thread will, ideally, also provide students the opportunity to process some of their research findings in writing. I’ve consistently found it beneficial to jot down thoughts spurred by new information I’ve uncovered. Expressing in writing comparisons, contrasts, and other relevant points often helps me work-through my ideas on the topic which, in turn, helps me compose more appropriate interview questions and more coherent essays.

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Primer on evaluating Internet sources

Posted in Uncovering & Evaluating Sources on July 5, 2010| 1 Comment »

Howard Rheingold provides some useful guidelines to evaluating Internet sources in his article Crap Detection 101.

Rheingold begins:

    The answer to almost any question is available within seconds, courtesy of the invention that has altered how we discover knowledge – the search engine. Materializing answers from the air turns out to be the easy part – the part a machine can do. The real difficulty kicks in when you click down into your search results. At that point, it’s up to you to sort the accurate bits from the misinfo, disinfo, spam, scams, urban legends, and hoaxes. “Crap detection,” as Hemingway called it half a century ago, is more important than ever before, now that the automation of crapcasting has generated its own word: “spamming.”

To summarize Rheingold’s points:

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In response to Bonevac, “Is Sustainability Sustainable?”

Posted in Critiques of Sustainability, SHP Summer 2010, Student work, Uncovering & Evaluating Sources, What is Sustainability? on July 5, 2010| 4 Comments »

This post supplements On Sustainability, Summer 2010 (pt. 2 of 2) and provides reflections from two of my students this quarter on one particular article in this special issue of the journal Academic Questions. Ashley Thorne’s comment to the post Critiquing Sustainability alerted us to the publication of this special journal issue. I plan to post on other articles in this issue of the journal, but the present post will focus on Daniel Bonevac’s “Is Sustainability Sustainable?”[1]

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More sources critical of sustainability

Posted in Critiques of Sustainability, SHP Summer 2010, Uncovering & Evaluating Sources, What is Sustainability? on July 5, 2010| Leave a Comment »

In comments to a previous SHP post (Critiquing Sustainability), Ashley Thorne brought our attention to a special issue of the journal Academic Questions devoted to “sustainability” (vol. 23, no. 1 (March 2010)). This journal is produced by the National Association of Scholars (NAS).

The NAS is “an independent membership association of academics working to foster intellectual freedom and to sustain the tradition of reasoned scholarship and civil debate in America’s colleges and universities.” The NAS was founded in 1987, “soon after Allan Bloom’s surprise best-seller, The Closing of the American Mind, alerted Americans to the ravages wrought by illiberal ideologies on campus. The founders of NAS summoned faculty members from across the political spectrum to help defend the core values of liberal education.”[1] The NAS considers itself to be “higher education’s most vigilant watchdog” on issues pertaining to “intellectual integrity in the curriculum, in the classroom, and across the campus.” The NAS “oppose racial, gender, and other group preferences” while upholding “the principle of individual merit.” Further, they consider “the Western intellectual heritage” to be “the indispensable foundation of American higher education.”

In poking around the Internet, I happened upon another source affiliated with the NAS: A weekly digest of sustainability-related news pertaining to institutions of higher education fittingly called Sustainability News. This digest is composed of “10-20 links to sustainability news stories” that will enable those interested to “keep a finger on the pulse of this movement in its manifestations in higher education.”

Ashley Thorne, as NAS Director of Communications, oversees production of Sustainability News. She also produces the NAS’ online Encyclopedia of Sustainability.

(Soon I will be publishing a post with student responses to one of the articles in the Academic Questions issue cited above.)

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[1] Allan Bloom, the controversy surrounding his book The Closing of the American Mind, and subsequent discussions of this book, are too complex to discuss in this post; see links for places to begin further research on this matter.

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Toward an Understanding of the Historical & Philosophical Antecedants of Sustainability

Posted in History of Sustainability, Quantifying Sustainability, Uncovering & Evaluating Sources, What is Sustainability?, tagged on June 1, 2010| 4 Comments »

In response to the post “Critiquing Sustainability,” Samuel Mann (Assoc. Prof., Otago Polytechnic, Dunedin, NZ) wrote this thought-provoking post of his own. Mann provides an historical and philosophical overview of some aspects of sustainability, finding that this idea “is deeper than a Sustainability = Brundtland conception . . . with precursors stretching back decades and centuries.”

I, in turn, responded with the following:

    I appreciate your help in providing context for our current understanding of “sustainability.” In my class, I lecture on the historical development of the concept and provide a very abridged version of what you discuss above. In my interpretation, the deep roots of sustainability that you discuss focus most heavily on valued environmental resources (i.e., trees worthy of harvest) for the economic benefit of relatively few (i.e., the political and military elite), and, whereas there is an inter-generational element to this kind of sustainability, it remains narrowly focused within these limits. Where these early antecedents differ significantly is that the Brundtland Commission was very explicit in correlating the “three pillars” as co-equal elements of sustainability, and the equity/society pillar includes explicit mention of democracy and open-access (in addition to future generations). It seems to me that tracts of forest resources managed by political, military, and scientific elites specifically for the propagation of a limited set of natural resources does not qualify as “sustainability” as the Brundtland Commission would have it. Important precursors, yes, but falling short of contemporary approaches in critical ways.

I’d like to expand and clarify a bit what I wrote in this comment . . .

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Critiquing Sustainability

Posted in Critiques of Sustainability, SHP Spring 2010, Uncovering & Evaluating Sources, What is Sustainability? on May 27, 2010| 19 Comments »

A few weeks ago, one of my students asked if there existed any identifiable schools of thought that have put forth a world view completely outside of the idea of sustainability. This is a great question. The notion of sustainability the Brundtland Commission report articulated seems to frame the issue completely, to the extent that even those who would critique the notion do so within the contextual universe created by the Commission. Following Marshall McLuhan, this seems to be the proverbial water that the fish could not possibly have discovered, or, following Thomas Kuhn, the current paradigm in which “normal” science (and other work) is done.

After doing a bit of initial research, I haven’t been able to find any evidence that there is a school of thought that does not engage itself in fundamental ways with the Brundtland Commission Report’s definition of sustainability/sustainable development (If there’s anyone in the Internet universe that can provide evidence otherwise, please do comment below).

What I did find, however, seem to fall into two general categories: Critiques of the idea of sustainability itself, and critiques of implementation of Brundtlandian sustainability. (See sources below)

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