Michael Alley (now at Penn State) helped developed the Assertion-Evidence Approach. The basic idea here is to make sure each slide makes a concrete claim (i.e., one claim), and to support that claim with evidence. I love how this approach eliminates what Tufte calls, if I remember correctly, the "bureaucracy of bullets":
My former teachers Traci Nathans-Kelly and Christine G. Nicometo similarly steer the reader away from bullets in their more recent book Slide Rules: Design, Build, and Archive Presentations in the Engineering and Technical Fields.
(2) I found it hugely helpful when Kristin clarified that we can think of the spectrum from hard to soft determinisms independently of each other. So someone who thinks history / behavior / the future exhibits a high degree of openness to different possible futures (i.e., agency for participants in the system) could be a soft technological determinist and a soft cultural determinist.
McLuhan, if I'm getting this right, would be hard on technological and soft on cultural. Diddo early Heilbroner, at least with respect to the industrial age. My reading of Bruce is a middling position on technological and cultural, because he believes they mutually enmeshed. (This seems to me to be the strongest position.)
As a thought exercise, we can add other orthogonal axes for other aspects of reality according to which various thinkers might think reality is determined (or not). One can imagine biological determinists, for example. And I think we get this in plenty of discussions of genetics and their effects (hard biological determinism = strongly pro-nature in "nature versus nurture"?).
I really started to "get this" when I realized, prompted by Sinan's comment on my last post, that I already know a hard determinist in a discipline I'm much better trained in: theology. Here's my picture. ;)
McLuhan, if I'm getting this right, would be hard on technological and soft on cultural. Diddo early Heilbroner, at least with respect to the industrial age. My reading of Bruce is a middling position on technological and cultural, because he believes they mutually enmeshed. (This seems to me to be the strongest position.)
As a thought exercise, we can add other orthogonal axes for other aspects of reality according to which various thinkers might think reality is determined (or not). One can imagine biological determinists, for example. And I think we get this in plenty of discussions of genetics and their effects (hard biological determinism = strongly pro-nature in "nature versus nurture"?).
I really started to "get this" when I realized, prompted by Sinan's comment on my last post, that I already know a hard determinist in a discipline I'm much better trained in: theology. Here's my picture. ;)
No comments:
Post a Comment