Please excuse my digital dust as I update my website. It’s been pretty stagnant for a few years, so I decided it was due for a major overhaul. I want to make room for some new links to web sites that I think are invaluable to anyone with an interest in developing courses on critical thinking. I will be working on that in the weeks to come. Critical thinking has become one of the major initiatives, along with writing proficiency and community engagement, at the University of Houston-Downtown, where I teach and do my research.
One other initiative I am pursuing involves online education. Most of the classes I teach are now online, and I have found WordPress to be a superb content-delivery environment; far more useful than, say, BB Learn by itself. A WordPress site can easily become a virtual classroom. It’s where I now store my course notes, videos, class discussions, and even textbooks. I currently use WordPress for my courses in critical thinking and foundations of Western Culture. In the latter, we even store our textbooks on WordPress. We follow the “classics” approach and read works from the Western canon in their entirety. Thanks to Project Gutenberg, we have them available free of change in both .epub (Nook) and .mobi (Kindle) format. We even have audiobooks, free of charge, courtesy of Librivox. Open source and public-domain software and content show great potential in lowering the costs of textbooks, which continue to soar to a degree that threatens access to higher education for lower-income and moderate income students.
If anyone else is interested in pursuing WordPress classrooms, or is already down that path, I’d love to hear from you.
– LK
