OhioLINK History of Philosophy Website
The OhioLINK History of Philosophy Instructional Web Site will be the subject of a presentation at the Thirteenth Annual Computing and Philosophy Conference, which is being held on August 13 and 14, 1998, in conjunction with the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy, which is taking place on August 10-16, 1998, in Boston, Massachusetts.
Look for us on Friday, August 14, 1998, at the noon CAP session. The CAP conference is co-sponsored by the American Philosophical Association Committee on Philosophy and Computers and the Department of Philosophy at Carnegie Mellon University. What follows is an abstract of the presentation.
Brian J. Rosmaita
Department of Philosophy
Kent State University
brosmait@kent.edu
This talk has two components. (1) A demonstration of a new philosophy World Wide Web facility associated with OhioLINK, the Ohio Library and Information Network (a cooperative venture of university libraries in Ohio and the Ohio Board of Regents). (2) A discussion of strategies which were employed to get the entire Philosophy Department at Kent State to participate in the project (even those not normally interested in integrating new technologies into their teaching), and how this influenced website design.
The OhioLINK History of Philosophy Instructional Web Site (IWS) is an innovative World Wide Web facility designed to motivate and assist students in doing philosophical research as part of writing-intensive courses in the history of philosophy.2 Not simply a repository for course materials, the website is an interactive research tool which serves as a philosophy front-end to the powerful OhioLINK library catalog search facilities and on-line databases of print resources.
Designed and maintained by the Department of Philosophy at Kent State University under a grant from OhioLINK,3 the History of Philosophy IWS began operation on August 15, 1997. The site's organization mirrors the history of philosophy course sequence at Kent State, with separate courses for Ancient Philosophy, Medieval Philosophy, Continental Rationalism, British Empiricism, German Idealism, Nineteenth-Century Philosophy, Twentieth-Century Philosophy, and American Philosophy. For each course, the website contains two components: a repository of writing exercises and an automated research assistant.
The writing exercises are of various lengths and content: some ask a student to grapple directly with a particular point in a text, while others ask a student to conduct basic research using the OhioLINK facilities (e.g., to find out how many dissertations have been written on Spinoza in the past 10 years and on what topics). The primary feature of the research assistant is an Easy SearchTool which acts as a philosophy front-end to the general OhioLINK search engine. It allows students to conduct an easy menu-driven search over figures, concepts, and issues from the historical period covered by the particular course chosen. While the SearchTool is useful for students seeking paper topics, its primary purpose is to show in a friendly way how to use search delimiters to restrict the results of OhioLINK searches to the historical period in question. The research assistant also provides links to World Wide Web resources containing tips for conducting research in philosophy.
While basic organizational design of the OhioLINK History of Philosophy IWS took its cue from the philosophy program at Kent State, it was designed to be useful to other philosophy programs in Ohio and elsewhere.4 While students at non-OhioLINK institutions cannot use the website to request books, its search facilities are accessible to them, and they can make use of any of the seven research assistants covering a historical period of interest. Additionally, professors can use the writing exercises either directly or as models, and can contribute their own exercises or even entire classes to the website. The Philosophy IWS is an ongoing project, and new materials supplied by Kent State professors and others are being mounted each semester.
This gives you an idea of what the OhioLINK History of Philosophy Instructional Web Site is all about and what would be covered by a "live" guided tour of the site. I'll briefly indicate the direction the other component of the talk will take.
This project was particularly well-suited to ensure faculty participation since the duty of teaching writing-intensive courses is shared by the entire department (these courses tend to be a lot more work than "normal" undergraduate courses). This provided an archive of writing exercises for use in the website, and since faculty expected to teach those courses again in the future, they were motivated to contribute to the project. Contribution was made easy: professors simply submitted their exercises on hard copy or disk (as text files) and the conversion to a web document was done for them. Thus the cost of contribution to each professor was extremely low. Further, careful site design made it an easy (and not too time-consuming) task to convert the exercises for mounting on the site. As a result, the website is considered the common property of the entire department, and each faculty member has a vested interest in it. It is not just a project that each person could contribute to--it is a project that each person has already contributed to, and in such a way that it is very likely that most of our faculty will eventually make use of the website in their classes.
While the situation of each philosophy department is of course different, there are some general features of our experience at Kent State which will carry over to other departments, and I will point these out in my talk. I further suggest that this kind of project is ripe for replication elsewhere, and explain why it is particularly well-suited for attracting external grant money, which is otherwise unfortunately all too rare for philosophy departments.
Note 3.
The website was developed under the 1997 OhioLINK Small Grant Program.
Brian J. Rosmaita was the principal investigator on the project with Gayle
L. Ormiston and Jeffrey Wattles as co-principal investigators.
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