The New York Sophist

I got a new GoPro so what better way to break it in than to walk and talk through something on my mind about teaching.

I think what explains the lack of student motivation best is that they have only one measure to evaluate things in this world: entertainment. Is it entertaining? If not, they won’t do it.

How do we engage a generation of people whose only reason to engage anything is that they think it is entertaining?

On Friday I’ll post the second vlog on this topic. Subscribe to my YouTube channel to get the first look!

My life has radically changed since I was last blogging. I moved to the suburbs, got a dog, a partner, a car, and I’m up before the sun.

My partner gets up early for work so I get up pretty early too. I think it’s nice to have some time in the morning together.

As far as the dog goes, she just loves to play. Lots of trouble housebreaking her but she’s learning. She’s just a dog, albeit a smart one.

This video is from earlier in the summer when she was a few months younger but she still loves to do this.

This environment has been very productive for me and my writing, as well as getting a better camera, and a voice notes app on the phone. I also swapped out to an iPhone against my better judgement and it seems to be going fine.

Big changes are big no doubt, but it was just the right kind of reset for me.

I was invited on the Essence of Wonder podcast last weekend to participate in a very interesting and stimulating discussion about whether we should engage with the works of authors and creators who have expressed problematic viewpoints.

I really enjoyed the thoughtful conversation. It raised a lot of new ways to think about the issue for me. My position is most often that language has it’s own position apart from the author, and it’s the interpretive frame of the audience that either permits the material to be consumed or not. This is a result of how traumatizing it is to learn the author or creator’s viewpoint on social or political issues.

There should be links to the video of the episode behind the link up there. I detonated most of my social media, so I’m not sure. I couldn’t get the YouTube link to work but here’s a Facebook link!

Still struggling through the question of whether or not YouTube is a good place to host lecture videos for American students who often have to pay thousands of dollars anyway to take a course. I am sure I would resent having to watch advertisements before or during a video that provided important discussion of concepts for a course I had to take.

Vimeo is a much better option but Vimeo is expensive – at least the way I’d like to use it. I have the plan that I’m willing to pay for, which limits your uploads to about 5GB a week. I always run out of space right before I get the last video up for the week so that’s not really a problem. It’s just a really, really annoying thing that regularly happens.

Here are the new videos:

A discussion of Boudry, Paglieri, and Pigliucci, “The Fake, the Flimsy, and the Fallacious: Demarcating Arguments in Real Life” Argumentation 29, 4 (November 2015)

A discussion of Kenneth Burke, “The Virtues and Limitations of Debunking” from The Southern Review, v. 3, issue 4 (Spring 1938).

There are a few other ones on my YouTube channel. I’ll be posting more every week as I find and/or make ones that I think are more relevant to the general audience here.

Blue State Coffee Pour from Professor Steve Llano, Ph.D. on Vimeo.

For the greater part of a year I put a short video like this one up every morning on my social media – mostly on Snapchat, since that’s what my students used at the time.

They loved it and we’d talk about the different stickers and things I would put on there and how I would put a motivational phrase on there every day. This video is pretty basic compared to what I used to make in Snapchat.

But times change, and students no longer look at or even use Snapchat anymore. All of them are on Instagram, and that program just never really caught on for me.

Years ago I tried to eliminate Facebook from my life. At the time, it was really the only social media out there so the students used it all the time. I had to return to the platform because students would not respond quickly to other forms of communication – Facebook was the best way to get things to happen when trying to organize people to do stuff related to debate.

Now that reason has evaporated and I think my life will improve greatly just publishing my thoughts here and having conversations. Already since announcing that I’m going to be departing those platforms I’ve had some pretty wonderful conversations with people that were much more in depth and interesting than anything I’ve been posting or reading there in the past year.

In the end I think that I’ll have to keep those platforms open simply because one never knows who or what might come along or happen. For instance, I got in touch with someone who wanted to give away some old debate books through Facebook. Once they get here (more challenging than expected) I’ll be posting their story here as well. I tried in the past to keep them open and unused, but wasn’t successful. I’m jealous of my many friends who have their accounts still open, but their last update or post was from 2012 or even earlier. Occasionally someone who doesn’t pay that much attention might wish them happy birthday or something on their wall, leaving this strange annual pattern of bursts of unliked posts occurring in clusters around the same day every year.

I want to practice writing where I have to develop interesting reasons at length, and Facebook and Instagram do not encourage this. I like to write, and I like the practice of conjuring up a universal audience to address with some claims. I find writing here – even if very few people ever read it – a lot more fun and interesting than posting something on my social media accounts.

I do wonder if pedagogically I’ll need my accounts again. From time to time I have chatted with various students using Instagram recently, but even that has died down. I think that with Discord and the LMS we use (currently Canvas) and some other things like email and Google Voice, online teaching won’t require social media. This is really my only concern.