Some links

Julie Hall in educational development kindly supplied me with the following interesting links about blogging:

http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue44/trafford/
http://thecommunityengine.com/home/archives/2005/03/a_learning_blog.html

I also found the following article about teaching and liberal freedom by Mark Ravenhill interesting:

http://arts.guardian.co.uk/theatre/drama/story/0,,2006078,00.html

On a course like this one, it seems to me that the article is relevant in two ways: 1) it is useful in making us think about the university as a home of free speech and liberal culture and what this means, and 2) in an indirect way it also helps us think about debates which took place in al-Andalus since they too struggled in battles over liberalism. Elsewhere (in an article I wrote on Andalusi cosmopolitanism) I have claimed that the key division in al-Andalus was not between religions (Muslims, Jews, Christians) or race (Arabs, Berbers, Europeans, others), but between liberal cosmopolitans (who liked freedom of expression and cultural borrowing) and conservative parochialists (who felt the state should control freedoms of expression and who valorised cultural cohesion and group identities). For a long time, cosmopolitans held sway in al-Andalus, which, to my mind, is why we find such a vibrant and interesting culture there, but the proachialists won out in the end. Is it too simplistic to say that parochialists always tend to win out because their appeal is to the gut and the heart, whilst the cosmopolitan's appeal is to the mind?