It has been years since I have been active on this blog, for a variety of reasons. Initially, I wanted to keep it as a diary to accompany me throughout my graduate studies. But then the reality of grad school and being an immigrant in a foreign country on a different continent hit me with full force. The challenges I ended up facing I could not have anticipated. It certainly didn’t help that the blog’s contact form has been abused in order to stalk me…

But after giving it much thought, I decided to revive and re-purpose this blog!

For context, this spring term I made my first experiences properly teaching at the university level. I held a couple of tutorials before, but those were mainly about further expanding on the content that the main lecture covered. There wasn’t much agency or me preparing and lecturing on new material involved. This time, however, I was co-teaching a class on Nature & Environment, freshman level. And oh dear, did I find my calling in teaching!
This semester I also took a seminar on digital humanities and digital scholarship. In conversation with students from other disciplines, I realized that while there was a lot of theoretical work on the digital in philosophy, „the digital itself“ is surprisingly absent when it comes down to the praxis in the seminar room.
Sure, there are the two big online encyclopedias, SEP and IEP, that almost every philosophy student stumbles across sooner or later. There are philpapers, academia and other, more shadowy websites to consult when trying to acquire books and articles. You maybe use a fancy PDF editor for your readings and maybe, if the topic of the class allows for it, you watch a video or movie. But other than that, there don’t seem to be many ways in which the digital plays a role in the philosophy classroom. At least in my experience!

Now, against this background, I want to dedicate this blog to reflections on my experiences with teaching, and especially with regards to incorporating the digital, broadly construed, into my pedagogy and philosophical praxis. What new possibilities does the digital have to offer for philosophy? What ideas and approaches can be easily realized? What limitations and hurdles will I encounter? What concepts and practices should we re-think? What work regarding digital pedagogy has already been done? And what are my experiences with all of this? These are some of the questions I want to address through reflections, musings, and informal conversations with my intellectual peers.

It’s great to be back and I’m excited for a fresh, new start.
Stay tuned!

NPC