分类：Teaching & Courses

Commentary on the 2023 Exam Paper for “Media History and Media Philosophy”

Teaching & Courses2023.07.06
Commentary on the 2023 Exam Paper for “Media History and Media Philosophy”
This is my second round of teaching the course “History of Media and Media Philosophy.” The overall syllabus and bibliography did not change much. Compared with the previous cohort, discussion sections were removed, a final in-class exam was added, and in terms of content, artificial intelligence and Web3 were added. The syllabus is as follows: (Two weeks) Introduction: Discovering Media — Media Philosophy McLuhan, Understanding Media; Heidegger, Being and Time Primitive Media — Language, Stone Tools, Symbolic Objects, Knotted Cords Harari, A Brief History of Humankind; Mien, A Brief History of Prehistoric Humans (Two weeks) Writing — Script and Its Material Supports, Oral vs. Written, Alphabet Innis, Empire and Communications;…
course Web3 McLuhan
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2023年7月6日
Summary of the Course “A General History of Technology” (Fall 2022 Semester)

Teaching & Courses2023.04.17
Summary of the Course “A General History of Technology” (Fall 2022 Semester)
The allergy season hasn’t even passed before the dust season arrives, my whole state has been low, and the course summary isn’t especially urgent anyway, so I kept dragging my feet and finally finished writing the second course from last semester. (If you want to jump straight to the exam analysis, go to the second half.) General History of Technology is the course I have taught the most; last semester was already the sixth round, and I also wrote summaries for the first five rounds. Of course, every year there are more or less some new additions. This time, taking last semester’s experience into account, I compressed the first few…
technology China course blockchain
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2023年4月17日
Summary of the Introduction to Philosophy of Technology Course (Fall Semester 2022–23)

Teaching & Courses2023.04.05
Summary of the Introduction to Philosophy of Technology Course (Fall Semester 2022–23)
Because last semester’s final assignment was not due until the beginning of this semester, and after the term started I was, on the one hand, busy with all sorts of pointless odds and ends, while on the other hand I ran straight into allergy season. Every spring my allergies torment me half to death, and this year was no exception; when my rhinitis flares up I can do absolutely nothing. In short, I dawdled and dawdled until now before finally writing this summary. “Introduction to Philosophy of Technology” is an old course. I taught two rounds of it in the autumn of 2018 and the autumn of 2019 (see the…
philosophy technology course Heidegger
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2023年4月5日
“Selected Readings in Original Works of Philosophy of Technology” Course Summary for 2022

Teaching & Courses2022.07.12
“Selected Readings in Original Works of Philosophy of Technology” Course Summary for 2022
The courses I teach are mainly undergraduate general-education courses, and among graduate courses, this reading course is basically the only one I still have now. This is the second run of this course that I’ve taught. I don’t seem to have written a summary after the first run either, probably because there was no exam component then, so there was nothing to comment on. As for the course content, it was just reading, so there wasn’t much to summarize anyway. But in this run I added an exam component, so it became necessary to write a set of comments. This course itself is taught in a fairly lazy way: I…
philosophy course Heidegger Introduction to Philosophy of Technology
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2022年7月12日
Course Summary for A General History of Technology, Fall 2021 (Questionnaire Summary)

Teaching & Courses2022.01.22
Course Summary for A General History of Technology, Fall 2021 (Questionnaire Summary)
Last time I already wrote the final-exam commentary and presentation of excellent papers. In fact, there was another component: the reading notes. This time the reading notes were reduced from more than 6,000 characters in previous years to around 3,000 characters, but there was nothing particularly new in the basic requirements or in my grading impressions, so I won’t say much more about that. The rough grading standards were: 1. plagiarism, 0 points; 2. anything clearly not meeting the course requirements is a fail (for example, not a reading note at all, too few characters, obviously borrowed from an assignment for another course, and so on); 3. anything very perfunctory,…
history of science course General History of Technology
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2022年1月22日
Commentary on the Autumn 2021 Final Exam for A General History of Technology and Showcase of Outstanding Answer Papers

Teaching & Courses2022.01.18
Commentary on the Autumn 2021 Final Exam for A General History of Technology and Showcase of Outstanding Answer Papers
As usual, every course needs a closing summary. This time, the summary of A General History of Technology will be in two parts: for now I’m posting the commentary on the final exam, and in the next post I’ll summarize the student questionnaire and think through possible plans for improving the course in the future. Note: This was an online open-book exam, two hours long, with books and computers allowed, and with internet access for searching materials. The exam consisted of 7 open-ended essay questions. Each examinee chose any 3 to answer, with 100 points for each question, and the final exam score was the average of the three questions….
philosophy technology course Aristotle
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2022年1月18日
A Course Summary on Media History and Media Philosophy (Spring 2021)

Teaching & Courses2021.07.16
A Course Summary on Media History and Media Philosophy (Spring 2021)
This is a new course, though not all of its content is actually new; some of it has “overflowed” from my two other courses, “A General History of Technology” and “Introduction to the Philosophy of Technology.” Since I keep adding content to both of those courses, I plan to transfer the sections on media technologies in “A General History of Technology” (including writing, printing, the telegraph, and so on) to this course. Of course, in the new course I will give more prominence to the relevant philosophical reflections, with both history and philosophy in view. As usual, I am writing up a course summary. I’ll make this first one a…
philosophy media course history of technology
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2021年7月16日
Course Summary for A General History of Technology (Fall 2020)

Teaching & Courses2021.02.19
Course Summary for A General History of Technology (Fall 2020)
This is the fourth round of the course. This round was a little different from the previous three: the total number of class hours was about the same, but the original 16-week format of 2 class hours per week was changed to an 11-week format of 3 class hours per week. This scheduling was due to a small mistake I made when I first registered the course, but afterward I also decided to go with the flow and see what benefits this arrangement might have. There were indeed some benefits. First, the course ended off-peak, concluding a month earlier than most courses, which relatively speaking may have eased some of…
course history of technology General History of Technology machinery
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2021年2月19日
Course Outline: Philosophy of Science and Reading the Original Texts

Teaching & Courses2020.08.25
Course Outline: Philosophy of Science and Reading the Original Texts
“Selected Readings in Classics of the Philosophy of Science” was the first course I was in charge of after coming to Tsinghua, aimed at incoming graduate students in the Department of History of Science. At the time, the Department of History of Science still had only a few teachers, and someone had to teach philosophy of science, so naturally I was assigned to this course. My own research leans toward the history of technology and the philosophy of technology. I am broadly familiar with orthodox philosophy of science, but it is not my specialty. But in my view, orthodox philosophy of science is definitely something one has to study; there…
philosophy of science course Aristotle Kant
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2020年8月25日
Course Summary for General History of Technology (Spring 2020)

Teaching & Courses2020.08.06
Course Summary for General History of Technology (Spring 2020)
The History of Technology survey course has now run through its third round. The course summaries for the first year and second year were both quite detailed, so students who want an overview of the course can refer to those earlier installments. This year’s summary will be written a bit more briefly. This year, because of the pandemic, the spring semester was taught entirely online. Since it was my first time doing an online format, I didn’t add any new material; instead I just reheated yesterday’s leftovers, selecting relatively mature parts from the previous two years and teaching them again. With the teaching plan adjusted for next semester, I will…
history of science course Scientific Revolution Introduction to Philosophy of Technology
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2020年8月6日