I posted the first Quiz, look for it under the Assignments tab in Canvas.
You can take the at-home part anytime between now and 2 hours before our meeting tomorrow. Once you begin the Quiz, you have one hour to complete it. You can backtrack to earlier questions, but once you press “Submit” at the end, that’s it. After you Submit the quiz, you’ll be shown a page that gives the correct answers (at the bottom it shows which answers you chose and when they were wrong), and talks through explanations of why some of the wrong answers were wrong. Aim to understand all this, and formulate questions to help you get clearer about the parts you don’t understand. What we’ll be testing in-class on Wednesday will depend on that understanding.
After you dismiss the Results page, if you later want to come back and read it again, just go to the Assignments tab and click on the same Quiz again. The system will know that you’ve already submitted the quiz, and so it will give you the option to re-read the Results.
If you missed yesterday’s class, here are two handouts:
- What is Philosophy? — I reorganized these notes a bit from the handout used in class
As I say in the course guide, devices are generally not allowed during our classroom meetings.
There are three exceptions to this policy:
- Approved accommodations. Some students have authorization from UCO Accommodations to use particular devices or assistive technologies in class. Such uses are of course permitted. Please don’t assume that another student’s use of a device is unauthorized, or ask them to explain why they are permitted to use it.
Handwritten notes on a tablet. I will also permit tablets to be used as a substitute for a paper notebook when they are being used for handwritten note-taking with a stylus. This exception only applies to using a tablet in that way; it is not permission for general tablet use during class.
I recognize that this draws a line that isn’t perfectly principled. I am not claiming that handwriting is educationally superior to typing, or that a tablet used with a stylus cannot itself be distracting or used for other purposes. In principle, a student using a laptop conscientiously for typed notes might create no more distraction than a student writing notes on a tablet.
The device policy is a practical classroom rule, rather than a judgment that every prohibited use of a device is itself distracting. In my experience, unrestricted laptop and tablet use too easily turns into browsing, messaging, homework, games, and other activities, and trying to distinguish responsible from irresponsible uses during class makes device use itself a recurring classroom issue. Using a tablet flat on the desk as digital paper for handwritten notes seems close enough to using a paper notebook, and makes the permitted activity relatively easy to distinguish from other device use, that I’m willing to make this narrow exception.
If you use this exception, please keep the tablet in handwritten note-taking mode during class. Typing, browsing, messaging, or using other apps remain disallowed.
- In-class portions of quizzes. At the start of term, we’re going to do these entirely on paper. But later we might give you an option to complete these using a lockdown browser integrated with Canvas, on any laptop or tablet. We’ll explore this later.