University courses
Kim A Taylor
martial arts at:
http://nautarch.tamu.edu/anth/Green/Fa01/489/489_syllabus_Fa01.htm
Hmm, if ever there was a good reason to pay next month's hosting charge
for EJMAS :-). Since I've read all the articles up there I wonder if I
could get automatic credit for this course.
So no interest in a "budo university of the internet" then? The silence
has been deafening.
Kim.
==========================================
Kim Taylor
mailto:kata...@uoguelph.ca
519-824-4120 ext. 3700
Dept. Animal Science
U. of Guelph, Guelph Ontario
Canada N1G 2W1
FAX 519-836-9873
Join iaido-l: http://listserv.uoguelph.ca/archives/iaido-l.html
http://www.uoguelph.ca/~kataylor/
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NEXT EVENTS:
Toshi Goshi Keiko, Toronto Yoshinkai Dec 28
500 waza practice iaido and jodo, Jan 6 noon-5pm UG
==========================================
Neil
and some manner in which these classes will offer something I cannot get by myself or cannot learn on the dojo floor.
I recently defended my thesis in grad school (for mass comm) and it has been my experience that most of my "courses" were little
more than instructors telling me which books to read and then spitting back to them what I'd read. No offence is meant to anyone
here, but I'm perfectly capable of going to the bookstore and deciding what books I think are appropriate for my budo education.
This is further complicated by the fact that these are distance correspondence courses and not any direct interaction with
instructors, which seems like it would limit what one could learn as mentioned above.
None of this is to say I dislike your idea, Kim, but personally speaking, I don't need college credit anymore, and I doubt many of
my list-ka peers do either. How can this University idea offer me something more that I'm looking for?
Respectfully,
Neil Melancon
Kim A Taylor
> Ok, I'll bite. I for one am interested, but I'd need to see a list of
> instructors and subsequent bios, a clearly defined syllabus, and some
> manner in which these classes will offer something I cannot get by
> myself or cannot learn on the dojo floor.
>
I know what you mean. If you've got a good instructor who knows his
history and has a grasp on the art, and if you've got a university/college
education that has taught you how to read critically and research
efficiently, I doubt you'd get much out of any post-secondary course that
you couldn't find yourself, in any field really. That's why I never went
back and got a post-grad degree in philosophy (that and the fact I don't
wanna learn German) or some other social science even though I could do
it gratis.
The question comes down mainly to efficiency, I'm busy enough that I will
actually consider paying people to work on my house, something I'm capable
of doing but just don't have the time to do. I concentrate on things I
can't find other people to do for me.
So the argument is that you are paying someone else to do the donkeywork
for you, to arrange it and sort through it, to filter out the crap from
the cream and then present it to you ready to digest. That's worth money
if you don't have the time to do it yourself.
> I recently defended my thesis in grad school (for mass comm) and it has
> been my experience that most of my "courses" were little more than
> instructors telling me which books to read and then spitting back to
> them what I'd read. No offence is meant to anyone here, but I'm
> perfectly capable of going to the bookstore and deciding what books I
> think are appropriate for my budo education.
Yes, as I mentioned above, all you need is a critical eye, but there
really aren't all that many books out there on the mass market that are
research quality. To get those you need a market, to get a market you need
instructors and students and to get those... My desire for seeing a good
post secondary budo stream out there is to see the books getting produced
to serve the market.
Until then you're going to have to rely on primary source material,
papers, lectures, presentations and whatnot done by, hopefully, the
instructors and their contacts. That's where the real donkeywork comes in,
something that it's worth paying money to have done as far as I'm
concerned.
>
> This is further complicated by the fact that these are distance
> correspondence courses and not any direct interaction with instructors,
> which seems like it would limit what one could learn as mentioned above.
>
Hard to do the physical art itself over a distance but there's lots of
distance ed courses in history, philosophy and whatever else you can think
of that can be taught to bums on lecture seats. Email makes for pretty
good student-instructor interaction too, likely more than you get in an
undergrad course (hell I don't think I exchanged a sentence with 20% of my
undergrad profs). Athabasca University is all distance ed, even the
science courses, students come in for a couple of weeks to do the labs all
in one shot.
> None of this is to say I dislike your idea, Kim, but personally
> speaking, I don't need college credit anymore, and I doubt many of my
> list-ka peers do either. How can this University idea offer me
> something more that I'm looking for?
>
Dunno, likely nothing at all if you're happy with your current level of
knowledge, but I'm convinced that there are people out there that know
more than I do, and I'd love an excuse to audit their courses ;-). Even if
they don't know more than I do, there's people who are smarter than me out
there who could make me look at something from a different angle if they
get half a chance.
I've been paying for budo knowledge for 22 years now, first as a student
paying mat fees, then as a publisher of The Iaido Newsletter, JJSA and now
EJMAS, not to mention putting together the seminars and schools and
whatever else I've done over the years. Those all took time, effort, sweat
and money to do but I got knowledge back from each and every minute and
penny put in. Well worth it from a selfish point of view, no higher
motive than greed needed to justify it. Even now I'm still learning
something new each time I edit an article for EJMAS.
Kim.