Published on September 9, 2009

Christopher Long, associate professor of philosophy, has created a podcast series, blog, and video to open up dialogue on Socratic politics among colleagues and students inside and outside Penn State. This semester, he plans to use these tools to encourage debate, inspire discourse, and create a marketplace for ideas, just as Socrates did many years ago.

Long completed the first phase of this work during his term as an Information Technology Services (ITS) Teaching and Learning with Technology Faculty Fellow with the intention of building a scholarly community with an atmosphere of openness. The podcast series can be accessed at Long’s blog entitled "Socratic Politics in Digital Dialogue" at http://www.personal.psu.edu/cpl2/blogs/digitaldialogue/blog/. In each episode, Long, along with one or more guests, including ITS staff, graduate students, and participants from Penn State and other universities, addresses specific elements required in creating "excellent" dialogue, and then relates these topics to the Socratic practice of politics.

According to Long’s blog, "Socrates haunted the public places in Athens looking for young people with whom he could converse. During these discussions, Socrates was intent on turning the attention of those he encountered toward the question of the good and the just." The blog and podcasts provide a way to create a similar kind of public forum digitally. Some of the themes of the podcasts are openness, sincerity, identity, and attentive listening. Long explained that he chose to use digital media to open up his research and academic work to a broader audience. "By deciding to do a podcast," he states, "it liberated me to be more fluid with some of my ideas, and to have a dynamic discussion where ideas were free-floating and not rigid."

Although investigating the excellences to strive for in dialogue is important to Long, he is not trying to produce a fixed, comprehensive list of those excellences. However, he stresses that one very important requirement is "a certain kind of openness to new ideas, a willingness to listen attentively, and to imagine our way into the perspective of the other person." He adds that the excellences of dialogue are not merely the subject matter of his podcast series, but that he is also trying to model the qualities of excellent dialogue in the process of discussing them with his guests. He is now drawing on the podcast series for course content and his colleagues at other universities have also expressed interest in referencing the series in their courses.

This fall, Long will ask students in his undergraduate ancient philosophy course to create entries and share their own podcasts on his blog, according to specific rubrics. Since he is also teaching a graduate-level ancient philosophy course, he is considering ways to integrate the graduate students into this discussion, to give it a more substantive intellectual dimension. Long additionally plans to use a specialized commenting tool during the discussions called Intense Debate. The tool allows readers to give comments a "thumbs up" or "thumbs down." Periodically, Long can look at a person’s Intense Debate profile and see all the comments that individual has made in one place, which can help him with student assessment.

Lastly, with assistance from the Teaching and Learning with Technology staff, Long is creating a video that will take a passage from Plato's Republic and animate it in a compelling way in order to draw a more popular audience into a discussion of the question of what justice is. According to Long, the passage is one in which Socrates states, “Although we’ve been looking for justice all along as something beyond us, maybe it in fact appears between us, as we attempt to say and hear what justice is.”

"We'll use this theme to link to historical figures who have stood for justice...people like Harriet Tubman, Susan B. Anthony, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Martin Luther King," he explains. "This will help us explore what a visual medium like video adds or subtracts from thinking about and articulating philosophical ideas."

For more information, please contact Mary Janzen (mja11@psu.edu).

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