INTUTE has launched a basic online tutorial on how to search the Internet for Philosophy content. You can check it out here: Internet Philosopher. A bit restricted in its range of examples but worth a look - and you might want to give them some feedback (if you can work out where the feedback form is - I couldn't - I gave up after 5 minutes). This could be worth watching as a teaching resource if it develops and includes a few more examples - at the moment the list of sites to explore is quite restricted (David Chalmers and Barry Smith are the only examples of philoosphers with websites, for example). I suppose they didn't want to duplicate INTUTE's extensive listing of Philosophy Resources - but I think they need a wider range of links to make this training effective (and the shopping basket of links they provide is really irritating for anyone who uses the Internet regularly - what's wrong with hyperlinks? I half expected them to invoice me for what I'd put in the basket).
They also seem to have completely forgotten about audio and audio-visual content. This is a shame as it is one of the growth areas for Philosophy. I'm not saying this just because of my own involvement with Philosophy Bites, Ethics Bites and Philosophy: The Classics. Downloadable Philosophy MP3s have huge potential in our subject, and there are some excellent podcast lectures and discussions at a variety of levels already available that students using the Internet would definitely want to know about (e.g. if you were researching Heidegger, you would want to download Hubert Dreyfus' lecture series from iTunesU see my previous post about this podcast lecture series).
What's odd is that INTUTE does list Philosophy Bites in their main resources page (here's the listing) - but audio content didn't make the cut when it came to designing the Internet Philosopher tutorial.
Dear Nigel,
Many thanks for reviewing our "Internet Philosopher" tutorial and the Philosophy section of Intute on your blog.
You are right to point out that the tutorial only provides a taster of the key websites for online research - the Intute database has a much more comprehensive listing.
The tutorial is part of the Virtual Training Suite , which provides basic training in Internet research skills for most university degree subjects. We do update tutorials to keep up with Web developments, and plan to release a new version of this tutorial within the year. I will pass on your suggestions for including more audio and audio-visual content to the author.
If you have any further comments, you can find the "Feedback" link in the header (top right) of each page of the tutorial:
http://www.vts.intute.ac.uk/he/tutorial/philosophy
We'd welcome any further suggestions from you or your readers.
With best wishes,
Emma Place
Intute
Posted by: Emma Place | May 06, 2008 at 03:36 PM