Teaching Philosophy

Philosophy began as a result of humans trying to understand. We generate theories, talk about them, and write about them. Then we create tests to research and explore our theories. What good is all this theory and research? Hopefully, and in many cases, we learn. We inform ourselves and share it with others. We take the learned knowledge and apply it to our lives and develop applications of this understanding. But why? To improve our lives, to make things better in a more significant world; to work toward a more harmonious existence. This striving for harmony is done through the education of the people, a basic and primary building block of all civilizations.

Through educational institutions and their emerging information technology and media studies departments, we are experiencing a growth in education to promote younger generations to retain the skills required to contribute to the mediated landscape (ecology) of blogs, photo blogs, podcasts, vlogs and other emerging forms of personal all-media production, interaction, and delivery. Specifically, the integration of wireless, mobile hardware such as cell phone capture and publishing, Palm, Blackberry devices, video cams, still cams, laptops, Wiki's, and XML formatting RSS 2.0 broadcast are changing the very methods in which individuals can and do receive their information about the world around them. These numerous digital devices and services are now changing the ways in which individuals express themselves and participate in their communities. Through these changes, we see the impact of personal media on the fields of journalism, publication, mass media broadcasting, and alternative media, just to name a few, but really, these changes are dynamic everywhere, in all sectors and in all fields of study. We are witnessing first hand a new mode of citizenship and participatory politics. The very foundation of the ways in which we understand ourselves and the world around us is in a state of flux. There will never be a time when we are without new and emerging ways in which to tell a story.

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"I've worried some about why write books when presidents and senators and generals do not read them, and the university experience taught me a very good reason: you catch people before they become generals and senators and presidents, and you poison their minds with humanity. Encourage them to make a better world."

-Kurt Vonnegut