OhioLINK History of Philosophy Website
The Kent State University Department of Philosophy, as a grant recipient from the OhioLINK Small Grant Program, is constructing a history of philosophy instructional website. This website will enhance use of OhioLINK facilities in a way that other disciplines can easily adapt. We plan to implement an interactive research tutorial, a forum for research tips, and a philosophy front-end to facilitate OhioLINK searches. (See section 3 of this document for a description of these components of the site.) In addition, the site will make available syllabi, handouts, and exercises to stimulate research and teaching at all levels, drawing on our innovative, writing-intensive, history of philosophy course sequence. We are committed to soliciting evaluations of this project from philosophers at other OhioLINK institutions, and plan to build in facilities so that philosophers at other institutions can make contributions to this website.
The Kent State University Department of Philosophy, in collaboration with philosophers from other OhioLINK universities, is constructing a web site to support research and writing in the history of philosophy. This is an area which nearly every student of philosophy must encounter, whether reading a Plato dialogue in an introductory course or exploring the roots of an issue in cognitive science. In an age when our intellectual community is fragmented into subspecialties and multiple approaches, the history of philosophy provides an anchor for community, a shared territory in which ever-new perspectives are articulated and to which many faculty and students return to find stimulus for moving forward.
Indeed, one might well prefer to speak of "histories of philosophy" rather than "the history of philosophy"; and a pluralistic web site, one that represents the work of many historians of philosophy at many institutions should be of particular benefit today. This website is designed in such a way that it can serve as a prototype for OhioLINK websites for other philosophy departments and other academic disciplines.
Philosophy faculty at Kent State have created a large and evolving set of syllabi, handouts, and exercises used in our history of philosophy courses since 1992, when the University writing-intensive course graduation requirement went into effect. But until now, this set of resources existed only on paper. As part of this project, we are placing this collection, plus newly developed materials, on line so that faculty and students at all OhioLINK Universities can access these materials directly. While many of these class assignments already integrate the use of OhioLINK and WWW resources, until now we did not have a general site available for in-class use or extra-class access by students or faculty. This website will address this need, as well as allow us to incorporate OhioLINK facilities directly into the world wide web versions of our course materials.
The development of the website will occur in two phases.
During the one-year maintenance period following the development of the website, it is expected that the materials from several writing intensive courses in the history of philosophy will be added to the site.
The Department of Philosophy at Kent State University has an uncommonly thorough eight-course, upper division history of philosophy curriculum: Ancient Greek Philosophy, Medieval Philosophy, Continental Rationalism, British Empiricism, German Critical Philosophy, Nineteenth-Century Philosophy, Twentieth-Century Philosophy, and American Philosophy.
As part of the general "writing across the curriculum" and more specific "writing in a discipline" components of undergraduate education at Kent, each of our history of philosophy courses is taught as a writing-intensive course in unique ways that can bring many benefits to students, teachers, and researchers. Our writing-intensive history of philosophy courses focus on both independent study and active and collaborative learning in the classroom, as students are instructed on how to accomplish specific tasks with explicitly stated goals and outcomes.
In each history of philosophy course, students are required to complete at least three "macro" writing projects. For each macro project, students are required to complete at least two "micro" projects that are designed to instruct in the writing process regarding a specific topic or theme that provides preliminary instruction leading up to the completion of a macro project. The micro projects are viewed as instructional devices for preparing students to write the larger macro project. In addition, bibliographic micro-exercises directly involve students in using OhioLINK.
Macro projects are developed as major writing assignments that allow students to work in some depth and detail on specific questions with a goal of developing a student's own reading and understanding of the material in question. At least one of the three macro projects includes an opportunity for guided revision, where the instructor provides written comments to students and meets individually with students to guide the process of revising or re-visioning the structure, content, and point of a macro.
Macro projects can take any of the following forms (but are not limited to these forms):
Micro projects consist of an open-ended disjunction of the following kinds:
In order to have the website up and running by August 15, 1997, course materials already developed by Kent State Philosophy faculty will serve as starting points for the site. At the same time, however, we will solicit the contributions of colleagues at other OhioLINK universities. The aim is to display syllabi, handouts, and writing assignments from philosophers all over the state of Ohio (and perhaps institutions outside Ohio) and to encourage interactive response to the materials from those persons who visit the site.
The research guide aspect of the website has three components.
We will put into HTML form the many research guides that Kent librarians and philosophy professors have developed for their classes. This will be of use primarily for students.
Tips submitted by OhioLINK users will be available in a forum that the Kent State University Department of Philosophy will moderate. It will differ from a list in that it may contain hyperlinks to specific resources and will be organized in such a way that it will be easy to navigate through the tips.
Our site is devoted to using OhioLINK facilities for researching and writing in philosophy. For the prototype web site, we would like to design and implement a philosophy front-end to the OhioLINK search engine. At the prototype stage, the front-end is designed as follows.
Our writing intensive courses are structured by historical period, and within each period are specific figures and issues on which research in the history of philosophy has traditionally concentrated. Each historical period would be hyperlinked to a selected list of figures of that period (selection in part based on whether the figure is indexed in OhioLINK). Each historical period would also be hyperlinked to a selected list of issues of that period. In general, issues are keywords which are not names (e.g., topics such as "substance", "critique", etc.). Each issue would be associated with a list of OhioLINK subject terms which could be used in an OhioLINK search.
Our idea is to implement these pages using forms and CGI scripts so that a user could use menus of figures and issues to construct an input to the OhioLINK search engine; i.e., the final output of our front-end would be in the same format as a "normal" OhioLINK search submission.
We are incorporating speech-friendly design principles into this website in order to promote internet accessibility. Many blind and visually impaired persons depend on computer screen readers and speech synthesizers in order to navigate the internet. A site is speech-friendly when it's organized so that these devices can track its content accurately. Follow this link to learn more.
This Instructional Web Site is being developed by the Department of Philosophy at Kent State University, on an OhioLINK Small Grant given to the department as a whole. Principal investigator on the project is Brian Rosmaita, who designed the site architecture and the web page formats. Co-principal investigators are Gayle Ormiston and Jeffrey Wattles, who contributed to the design and format of the entire site. Graduate assistant James Bednar converted faculty contributions to HTML and designed and implemented the Easy SearchTool.
July 14, 1999. All exercises for Ancient Greek Philosophy, Continental Rationalism, and German Critical Philosophy have been updated to be in Level Triple-A Conformance with the W3C-WAI Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.
July 13, 1999. All course homepages, class homepages, and class syllabi have been modified to be in Level Triple-A Conformance with the W3C-WAI Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. We've been assisted in this task by Bobby, version 3.1.1, a web-based tool that analyzes web pages for their accessibility to people with disabilities.
July 5, 1999. We've begun the process of modifying all pages on this website to be in Level Triple-A Conformance with the W3C-WAI Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. This includes updating most pages to HTML 4.0, which contains more accessibility hooks than level 3.2. At the same time, we're striving to keep all pages readable by older browsers.
July 2, 1999. All web pages have been modified to reflect our switch from the KGV to the more official W3C validator. (We use a validator to make sure that our web pages are written in interoperable HTML.)
July 1, 1999. The website has been updated, with new classes posted in Ancient Greek Philosophy, Nineteenth-Century Philosophy, and Twentieth-Century Philosophy.
August 14, 1998.
If you missed us in Boston at the World Congress of Philosophy, you can
still take the tour of this website given during the presentation there.
Follow this link to take the tour.
March 16, 1998. This website will be the subject of a presentation at the thirteenth annual Computing and Philosophy Conference, being held on August 13-14, 1998, in conjunction with the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy in Boston. See the talk abstract for details.
March 1, 1998. The website has been updated, with new classes posted in Ancient Greek Philosophy, British Empiricism, and American Philosophy.
November 20, 1997. Links to some automated validators have been added to the Speech-Friendly Website Design page.
October 15, 1997. The website has a new alias URL to associate it more clearly with the OhioLINK Instructional Web Site project. This new URL is
http://iws.ohiolink.edu/philosophy/
You don't need to change your bookmarks to the new URL--the old one is still valid. This new URL is just easier to remember when you tell people about this website.
September 18, 1997. The interface for contributions to the website has been improved and expanded. See Instructions to Contributors for details.
August 16, 1997. The website has a new URL, viz.
http://karn.ohiolink.edu/philosophy/
Please change any bookmarks to reflect the new URL. (Don't forget the trailing slash--it makes a difference!)
August 15, 1997. The website is up and running, and mostly debugged. Please send bug reports to philo@kent.edu. The website will continue to be developed and improved throughout the 1997-98 academic year, so your comments will be appreciated.
July 21, 1997. Phase II of the project is well underway. A prototype of the philosophy front-end for the Nineteenth-Century Philosophy course is up and running. (Follow this link to test out the prototype.) Examine the Research Assistance document to get an overview of how research tools are being integrated into the website.
July 1, 1997. Phase I of the project has been completed: the syllabi and exercises from all recently taught writing-intensive history of philosophy courses are now online, and all web pages have validated for correct HTML 3.2 syntax.
May 22, 1997. The exercise pages have been redesigned to be produced dynamically by CGI scripting. See any of the exercises listed on the Fall 1996 Continental Rationalism Homepage to see how this works. A description of how these dynamic pages are designed can be found in the Website Design Protocols document.
April 21, 1997. We are in the process of designing the format for the web pages. Sample pages for one course are available for perusal and comment. Follow this link to enter the site.
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KSU Department of Philosophy
This page was last modified Wed 14 Jul 1999 at 23:22:11 EDT.