I was invited to write a critical review of Jennifer Lackey’s book Learning from Words. I just submitted a draft to Philosophical Books for review, but I still welcome comments/feedback. In short, despite the fact that I disagree with Lackey on a number of issues, I think this book is excellent.
Warning: It’s a long one. This is a full-blown critical review, and my limit was 8,000 words.
Google-is-awesome-aside: This is also the first paper I wrote from start to finish entirely inside of Google Documents. It was great. Google may well have their hooks in yet another area of my life.
Hi Andrew,
This is in response to your “aside”… Over the summer I tried using Google Docs in my Intro classes. I’ve developed fairly extensive study guides for the texts we read, and in these classes I “shared” them with my students using GD. I then assigned small groups the task of working together to complete the relevant portions of the study guides prior to each class. This promised to be a big improvement over having people emailing chunks of text around so that one unfortunate person could attempt to compile everything into a single document right before class. The major drawback, based on feedback from my students, seemed to be that Docs becomes agonizingly slow at certain times–presumably high-traffic periods, or when more than one person was editing a given document. I wouldn’t have been surprised if this were an occasional occurrence, but it happened so much that I don’t think I’ll repeat the experiment this fall. Any thoughts on how to deal with this? Thanks for any help….