Passive vs. active reading and personalization
October 26, 2015 6 Comments
As you can probably tell, dear reader, recently I have been spending too much time reading and not enough time writing. The blog has been silent. What better way to break this silence than to write a defense of reading? Well, sort of. It would not be much of an eye-opener for you — nor a challenge for me — to simply argue for reading. Given how you are consuming this content, you probably already think that the written word is a worthwhile medium. Given how I am presenting myself, I probably think the same. But are our actions really an endorsement of reading or just the form of communication we begrudgingly resort to because of a lack of better alternatives?
Ostensibly this post will be a qualified defense against an attack on reading by Roger Schank at Education Outrage. Although it is probably best to read it as just a series of reflections on my own experience.[1]
I will focus on the medium-independent aspects of learning that I think give weight to Schank’s argument: the distinction between passive and active learning, and the level of personalization. This will be followed next week by a tangent discussion on the importance of emotional aspects of the text, and close with some reflections on the role of literary value, historic context, and fiction in philosophical arguments. This last point is prompted more by my recent readings of Plato than by Schank. In other words, much like last year, I will rely on Socrates to help get me out of a writing slump.
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Emotional contagion and rational argument in philosophical texts
November 5, 2015 by Artem Kaznatcheev 1 Comment
Last week I returned to blogging with some reflections on reading and the written word more generally. Originally, I was aiming to write a response to Roger Schank’s stance that “reading is no way to learn”, but I wandered off on too many tangents for an a single post or for a coherent argument. The tangent that I left for this post is the role of emotion and personality in philosophical texts.
In my last entry, I focused on the medium independent aspects of Schank’s argument, and identified two dimensions along which a piece of media and our engagement with it can vary: (1) passive consumption versus active participation, and (2) the level of personalization. The first continuum has a clearly better end on the side of more active engagement. If we are comparing mediums then we should prefer ones that foster more active engagement from the participants. The second dimension is more ambiguous: sometimes a more general piece of media is better than a bespoke piece. What is better becomes particularly ambiguous when being forced to adapt a general approach to your special circumstances encourages more active engagement.
In this post, I will shift focus from comparing mediums to a particular aspect of text and arguments: emotional engagement. Of course, this also shows up in other mediums, but my goal this time is not to argue across mediums.
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Filed under Commentary, Personal Tagged with compassion, ethics and morality, learning, rationality