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Primer on evaluating Internet sources

July 5, 2010 by jvhillegas-elting

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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Posted in Uncovering & Evaluating Sources | 1 Comment »

In response to Bonevac, “Is Sustainability Sustainable?”

July 5, 2010 by jvhillegas-elting

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

On Sustainability, Summer 2010 (pt. 2 of 2)

July 5, 2010 by jvhillegas-elting

Below are more student reflections on the second reading response assignment of the summer term. See the post On Sustainability, Spring 2010 (pt. 2 of 2) for the details of this assignment and the citation to Gibson’s article; at the end of this post are citations for the articles that students chose as their second reading. Also, see the post In response to Bonevac, “Is Sustainability Sustainable?” for reflections specifically on Daniel Bonevac’s article in Academic Questions 23:1 (March 2010), 84-101.

(Part 1 of this term’s reading responses on sustainability here.)

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Posted in SHP Summer 2010, Student work, What is Sustainability? | 3 Comments »

More sources critical of sustainability

July 5, 2010 by jvhillegas-elting

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

Some reasons why many people seem only to think “environment” when they hear “sustainability”

July 2, 2010 by jvhillegas-elting

This post is in response to the same student comments and questions spurred by the assignment outlined in On Sustainability, Summer 2010 (pt. 1 of 2). I found myself writing more and more in reply to this particular issue, so I opted to make a stand-alone post.

I’ve seen a pattern, both in these courses I teach and in our broader culture, that suggests to me that a great many (most?) people seem first to think of environmental issues when they hear the word “sustainability.” Members of the Brundtland Commission perceived this pattern as early as 1982, when they began their work on Our Common Future, so my relatively limited sample size seems more than anecdotal.[1]

One student’s reading response this quarter flipped on the light bulb for me. This student found that her/his definition of sustainability focused on environmental concerns, and, when comparing this definition to the Brundtland Commission’s definition, suggested that this was “mainly because that’s what everyone hears in the media or news.”

Aha!

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Posted in Economics, Environment, Equity, Media, SHP Summer 2010, What is Sustainability? | 3 Comments »

On Sustainability, Summer 2010 (pt. 1 of 2)

July 2, 2010 by jvhillegas-elting

Our first assignment for the Summer 2010 quarter had us reading and responding to the same articles as the students in the Spring 2010 term; you can find the assignment details and journal entry citations in the post “On Sustainability, Spring 2010.” As I did in Spring 2010, I have extracted a selection of student comments and questions, below.

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Posted in SHP Summer 2010, Student work, What is Sustainability? | 3 Comments »

Toward an Understanding of the Historical & Philosophical Antecedants of Sustainability

June 1, 2010 by jvhillegas-elting

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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Posted in History of Sustainability, Quantifying Sustainability, Uncovering & Evaluating Sources, What is Sustainability? | Tagged | 4 Comments »

Critiquing Sustainability

May 27, 2010 by jvhillegas-elting

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

Discussion of oral history methods & philosophy

April 27, 2010 by jvhillegas-elting

Last week, students responded to two articles outlining the history, philosophy, and methods of oral history interviewing (core of assignment reproduced below). These readings prepared students for the class discussion we had on Thursday April 22. (Additional information on oral history methods & techniques can be found here.)

There were many thought-provoking elements in these student responses . . .

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Posted in Oral History, SHP Spring 2010, Student work | 3 Comments »

On Sustainability, Spring 2010 (pt. 2 of 2)

April 8, 2010 by jvhillegas-elting

This post continues the conversation from the post On Sustainability, Spring 2010. Again, I’ve gleaned themes and questions from student responses to the assignment (reproduced below) and from class discussion on April 6:

Understanding Gibson’s Purpose & Approach

Many students found Gibson’s 2006 article difficult. As Gibson writes, his article “outlines the basics of a practical generic approach to sustainability assessment (italics mine).” Thus, he analyzes a range of sustainability programs put in place since publication of the Brundtland Commission report (1987); remember that the Brundtland report did not come with specific assessment criteria, but was an intellectual framework outlining the idea of “sustainable development.” Continue Reading »

Posted in SHP Spring 2010, Student work, What is Sustainability? | 7 Comments »

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