A Jeanne Site
California State University, Dominguez Hills
University of Wisconsin, Parkside
Latest update: November 23, 1998
Faculty on the Site.
Jeanne Curran, Ph.D., Esq.
Professor of Sociology
California State University, Domiinguez Hills
Phone: 310-243-3831
No fax
E-mail: jcurran@csudh.edu
California State University, Dominguez Hills
The research question presented by the Dear Habermas project was how faculty could teach both the core concepts of disciplines to the whole range of our students and still supervise those with the academic enthusiasm to explore the entire gamut of knowledge presently available to all our disciplines. We have begun to accomplish this through the extensive use of technology, but not fancy technology, any technology our students can gain access to. As the campus acquired enough technology to make e-mail and the Internet accessible to every student we moved to use that technology to increase the level of discourse between students and faculty, to increase the level of discourse amongst students, to expand the universe and interactivity of available readings, to introduce the fundamental necessity to critically assess every authority, to integrate the use of online sources with traditional sources, and to explore the potential this offered to community outreach. In just one year, we have come a long way, thanks to local campus support. In this proposal we request help in overcoming the barrier of teaching to small groups of students within an office environment. This has proven the most effective way of teaching our students to use the software for which we have very limited licenses, which we cannot put in the student labs, and which require intensive teaching sessions with non-computer science students. We must overcome the inaccurate assumptions that our students cannot use this technology. This project has been done in conjunction with the University of Wisconsin, Parkside, so that we have already moved to external campuses. And the project has very effectively taught students to analyze and synthesize their understandings, to the point of sharing their work at the university with the children in their families and in the local communities.
The project is focussed around a Website, Dear Habermas, http://www.csudh.edu/dearhabermas.
The site grew from courses within Sociology. The title and topic were chosen to reflect our attempt to teach and develop the skills of public discourse which Jurgen Habermas, the Frankfort philosopher and sociologist, sees as essential to the interdependence of modern democracies.
Dear Habermas Goals:
This site offers a forum for the presentation of texts not usually given voice in the academy, texts created by teachers and students in the process of discourse. A discussion of the importance of intertextuality and the reclaiming of texts not generally found in the public sphere of the academy can be found in Available Papers on the Site as " Playing with Habermas".
The site grew from the work produced within classes in Sociology of Law and Sociological Theory at California State University, Dominguez Hills with Jeanne Curran and at the University of Wisconsin, Parkside with Susan Takata. Both Dr. Curran and Dr. Takata were chairing their respective departments when Dear Habermas came into being. The work of developing Dear Habermas has been shared over the last two years at both sociology and criminal justice conferences. We wish to thank our many colleagues for their support and encouragement.
Because Dear Habermas happened on a campus notoriously under-budgeted and with minimal technological support for faculty development of distance learning, Volume 1 came first in hardcopy. We translated that hardcopy to the Web tentatively, with the generous help of a graduate student, Richard Moncure (who has since earned his M.A.), and the help of Dr. Larry Press from the School of Management. The present material constitutes Volume 3, and we are presently preparing Volume 2 from the Spring Semester of 1998, for archival access. Volume 2 will remain available on the present site until it is completely archived.
Volume 2, the first to use this Web site was up loaded on January 3, 1998 on Compuserve's Ourworld where faculty on the site had access over the Winter Break. In early January 1998, the site switched its URL to the CSUDH server. As of June 1998, the Department of Sociology at CSUDH has officially set up its server, at which Dear Habermas has a mirror site. http://soclink.csudh.edu/wisc/dearhabermas
Most recently, in June 1998, we began a corollary site to Dear Habermas to include the children who are friends and relatives of those who share the Dear Habermas Site. The KIDS' Page is meant to offer questions, discussions, and activities to share with our children the issues of most concern to us in presenting and negotiating validity claims. The KIDS' Page, like all of Dear Habermas beckons openly to all who would learn, and is closed to no one, for the KIDS' Page, too, is about discourse, legitimacy, and justice.
One of our major goals is to incorporate whatever level of technology is available into our curriculum, pair it with library sources, and teach our students to consult as many sources as their "lives" will let them. We recognize the dilemma of jobs, families, commuting. Computers offer us ways around some of those dilemmas. "Surfing" is simply not the answer. The new technology needs to be fully integrated into our curriculum and into our students' expectations of learning materials.
Another major goal is to help the student see the many perspectives of all knowledge. We recently posted a reference to Jeremy Bernstein's book in which he asks the question, "How do I know that Einstein wasn't a crank?" We have learned that we need to present all views of an issue, explicitly, on our site, because even though the majority view is out there, in the media, as "idees dans l'air," our students need the discipline of identifying the arguments of each perspective.
This is the small piece of the project for which we ask your help. Students have rarely been invited to a forum, unless it was specifically identified as a "student forum.." This is OUR forum, theirs, their faculty's, their communities'. We consider that an important factor in training for public discourse.
We have already begun to select students for the student editorial board for the site. That, and the mastery of the requisite software, needs to be done in the office provided for that purpose by our department. We need simple additions to our equipment that our department budget cannot afford at this time.
The Dear Habermas Site will reflect the work we propose here, since that is the primary focus of our project. That site is open, as a tool, to all universities, and is presently in use at the University of Wisconsin, Parkside.
As soon as funding is available, the supplementary screen and memory can be ordered, and the waiting software uploaded. Results from our student editorial board and from our evaluation of the effectiveness of the project with our classes will be available by May, 1999.
Prof. Susan R. Takata
Department of Sociology
Interim Director
Criminal Justice Program
University of Wisconsin, Parkside
E-Mail: takata@csudh.edu
Phone: 414-595-2116
This project best fits category 2, Discipline-Based Projects, although we believe that it mixes in components of the other categories.
Personnel:
Equipment and Supplies
Vendor 1: Dell (http://commerce.us.dell.com/dellstore/)
Estimated Cost: $3852. This figure may be considerably lower if we do not need the cpu itself. That depends on the compatibility of monitors with our present equipment. It may be most economical and most technically reasonable to simply replace the present machine, which is only leased, and then to use the leased machine for teaching beginning students.
Total Requested: $5852