You Can't Teach Books On The Internet | Episode 1
Вставка
- Опубліковано 4 лип 2024
- I spend most of my time on UA-cam talking about Books on the Telephone. I'm starting to wonder if it's possible to teach books on the Internet. Can we talk about books? Yes. Can we teach things? Yes. Can we share ideas? Definitely. But some types of education might not be transferrable to online spaces. Just something I've been thinking about.
#UA-cam #UA-camr #Books #Booktube #Philosophy #classicliterature
Chapters
0:00 Something I Have To Say
1:50 Teaching Books Online
4:46 My Background
7:50 Academic UA-cam
9:38 My 5 Goals
15:45 State of the Channel
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Shakespeare between Machiavelli and Hobbes: Dead Body Politics
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Magic in Early Modern England: Literature, Politics and Supernatural Power
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![[ Seasick Steve Live @ Pinkpop 2017 ] 6. You can't teach an old dog new tricks](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/LE3db0UdbDs/mqdefault.jpg)
Dear Prof, I love your channel and have read quite a few of your recommendations. You definitely have aided my comprehension and enjoyment of several works, Never Let Me Go by Kazoo Ishiguro for example. I think that you explain ideas so well and and I never feel patronised as some academics (presumably unwittingly) do when they discuss great books. I consider it amazing that you provide this content as I would never be able to afford to go to college to do a literature course. Thank you so much!
Typo: Kazuo
Thank YOU so much! This is a very generous comment. I'm so happy to hear that you've found value in the videos. It means a lot to me to know that they have provided you with pathways into these texts and these "great conversations."
I really enjoy these videos! I miss GRID, the wonderful discussions, and using my brain to think about complex and sometimes difficult concepts.
These videos make me feel nostalgic for university and the literature videos in particular encourage me to read new texts or old ones with new eyes.
So happy to hear that Suzanne! I'm glad the channel gives you a chance to revisit some of this stuff!
📚If you like this video, you'll enjoy this discussion of mortality. 💀😄ua-cam.com/video/87cH_8_wnT0/v-deo.html
Thank you professor. Your creativity manifests in exceptionally effective communication of difficult concepts, concepts written iwith sn emphasis on revealing the idea, but not an emphasis on clearly communicating with an audience (I'm looking at you Wittgenstein).
I've been using chatgpt for a month. It's a personal assistant, getting me answers for the questions my own mind produces.
And the ability to generate, interpret and then develop a follow-up question is the skill developed in a critical thinking program.
Brainstorm!
Angles for Literary Criticism / Analysis:
- big philosophical ideas explored through literature (one book at the time)
- crossing genre boundaries (one book at the time)
- what do you need to know before you read this book (one book at the time) to make your experience better :-)
I like that last one… 🤔
Hi Professor. I was a tenured finance faculty member for about 12 years before i went to the private sector, so i think i understand the perspective of a professor and maybe the pressures of academia.
The reason i'm here and looking through some of your videos has nothing to do with academia. I'm here because i need help living my life. I get into a rut and i need new ideas to help me live a better life. So philosophy topics are much more interesting to me than studying literature, unless the point of the literature video is life advice.
It's great to be devoted to your stduents and to students in general. But there may be other viewers like me who are older and will never take another classroom test in their life. We are looking for help to fix our thinking. And your knowlege could be helpful to us. Perhaps that doesn't impress your dean, but it does impress me.
Best of luck.
Jason Karceski
Hi Jason,
Thanks for this comment. I'm definitely aware that there are lots of life-long learners in the audience! There may be more people watching for the love of study than actual students. It's kind of hard for me to tell. I'm happy to hear you've found value in the videos. Thanks for watching! As Socrates said, "The unexamined life is not worth living!"
I'm an "uneducated" 57 year old and I very much appreciate your videos. I found your channel last year as I was looking for ways to deepen my understanding of The Odyssey and been a fan of your work on UA-cam ever since, thank you Professor!
Thanks for this, Jason! That’s great to hear. I’m glad you’re enjoying the videos. And I hope you enjoyed the Odyssey! I think about that book all the time.
I would love to hear your more on your thoughts on Shakespeare as a political thinker!
I would say that a big part of the trouble is what I'd call "The Dinner Table Principle." People want to leave an educational UA-cam video with something that they can have a conversation with their loved ones about over dinner. It's easier to have a fun conversation about the banality of evil even when only one person is familiar with the source of that concept. Meanwhile, it's hard to talk about a specific metaphor in Moby Dick if one person hasn't read the book (or even if they had and just didn't give that line special notice).
Yeah. This is a good summation and exactly the kind of thing I'm grappling with. When you think about the amount of summary and contextualization necessary to give a metaphor its meaning, it becomes clear why some books are harder to teach than others.
I'm trying to. I have the same thesis: lectures don't translate, the Shakespeare summarized in three minutes isnt interesting for people who have read it already. I'm trying to do the same work you are. Let me know if you're ever interested in a joint project
But I have seen many channels that are literally reading pdfs of books in their videos. What about if you just make notes from a book and teach those to your audience?
Yes to defending the humanities!! I think your love of the content and methods of the humanities comes across well in your videos, that’s why I gravitate towards them for my philosophy students, even as you say there is a plethora of philosophy content out there.Your grasp of and passion for the original text of the theorists is evident, and is something I appreciate - not the telephone of what the concept came to mean (although of course that is important as well) but also the original articulation of it. This approach to texts seems to me essential for both philosophy & literature (I’d call it hermeneutics but my hermeneutics is too rusty to trust it’s right haha).
As an aside - a personal favorite combo of mine is history and philosophy, so if you ever wanted to make a video on Thucydides I’d be thrilled! I was also very happy to see the social contract video on the eve of my class moving into a political philosophy unit! My students and I really love your videos, we watched your whole series on Arendt & Foucault.
Thanks for this! Engaging with the primary texts is so important to me! I'm so happy to hear that you and your students have enjoyed the videos. Humanities squad! 😄
I may talk a little bit about Thucydides in an upcoming video. A colleague and I took a group of students to Greece as part of a travel study course last month, and we studied Thucydides before making the trip.
With philosophy you can stay focused on the modes of explanation and description. With literature you cannot avoid the necessity of interpretation, and I think people don't trust others to come up with interpretations of things. In some cases it may even seem arrogant to say something like XYZ means ABC. Like you're telling somebody else what to think. That's not as much the issue if you're describing or explaining. They are more humble tasks
This is a really clear summation of the problem. Thanks! I think this gets close to the core of it.
i feel like youtube to me is like i learn about things i might like and then once i find some video about a topic i learn alot the do some google searchs and pretty much follow the cult of do. but yeah you need to actually sit down with a book
it's why I hate modern education. literally I think from 5 teach them how to just learn anything from the internet. no point going to study and be a worker or employee. go learn and learn til you find something you love so much you can't imagine not doing it for the rest of your life. it's just most don't know how to properly find information and determine weather or not that information in genuine or not. but we really just need to teach them to think to create things because when you create things your not focused on learning the material you are focused on the goal or wanting to make it and the learning comes with it. literally I've been like this since I was 10 but I never could tap into this true potential because everyone would suppress me and tell me that I should study hard. I always asked myself. for what? why am I studying? only now I'm starting to realize what making things is. it's art. it's everything. music. UA-cam videos. stories. science. everything we do is a form of art. making stuff is art. a project. sorry this got deep I'm so motivated I really wanna write a book
So are you going to stop teaching books on the internet 🥲
I'm not going anywhere. ❤️ Just thinking out loud about what works and what doesn't on UA-cam.