Re-evaluating various things lately, this was a job for Philosophy Path (哲学の道) along the eastern mountains of #Kyoto. Writers have asserted that Japan doesn't do #philosophy, mais non. To be sure, Mahayana #Buddhist#ontology eludes our grasp.
Thus, I was #walking along the #path and not #philosophizing per se, but just absorbed in the scenes like these captioned #photos, and that was quite refreshing.
I'd say that bodhicitta (菩提心), consciousness-only, and such metaphysical concepts are indeed Mahāyāna #Buddhist#philosophy, but not #ontology. I alluded to our not being able to grasp it intellectually.
Frankly, I dislike the #Japanese emphasis on 'emptiness' or non-being (無), since we'll have all eternity minus our lifetime for that. I've always been in the kill-the-Zen-master camp. I rebel against their regimentation and the haughty disrepect all gurus have for what naturally wells up in the independent person, who might be #liberated to an extent -- without their knowledge (in both senses), who sees for oneself.
Having said that, if I had to define Mahāyāna ontology, it is in the Heart Sūtra (心経, Prajñāpāramitāhṛdaya Sūtra) that #Buddhists here are always chanting, essentially that being and non-being are the same.
@bryanalexandee I've had an abiding interest in disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity since a Stanford professor could not answer how his field (CALL - Computer-Assisted Language Learning) was a discipline. Disciplinarity is also a weak point of Indian academia, as you notice, e.g., with journals combining disparate fields. Therefore, I started a culmination of my work by explaining the difference between a field and a discipline, then I defined terms related to online education. If you haven't already read it, check it out some time: "Online Education as a Discipline" at https://doi.org/10.20935/AL434 or https://www.researchgate.net/publication/353073973
An individual can have a dream or vision that is not just personal but expresses a deep need of the zeitgeist. It has been my fortune to conceive of such visions and, if only of modest influence, to create new realities.
In a 1998 article for the Journal of Online Education at New York University, I wrote that educators concerned with online education in the broadest sense, like so many nomadic masterless samurai, needed a real organization. My 1998 TCC online conference keynote address from Japan proposed the World Association for Online Education, to turn online education into a new professional discipline.
In mid-2023, I was asked to organize an Indo-Japanese research group towards a bi-national grant for 2024-2026. With members' input, I created a proposal, which we submitted to both governments, on Indo-Japanese Collaboration to Humanize Online Educational Experiences.
2/2 A bit further to my post introducing the Indo-Japanese research grant proposal, I have a question to linguists, Indians, or other British English users. Because it was submitted to the Indian government, I used British English spellings, and with academic vocabulary there were many cases of spellings like -ise instead of -ize. Yet younger Indian scholars would use -ize, and I didn't know if they were trolling me as an American or what.
With a team of top educational technologists and social scientists from Tokyo and New Delhi, the main challenge was herding those cats to get all the difficult steps done on time. Yet I wonder if the proposal was more persuasive with British English, or can I dispense with that distinction from now on?
@mguhlin In Bilingualism classes in Japan, I can require students to show what they have learned from this class, which is based on reliable research, and to discuss their own experiences in summary, reflection, and response papers. In such ways I can discern how much of students' writing is their own thinking and analyzing. Findings from the discipline of bilingualism are dwarfed by the amount of common misconceptions about bilingualism, which would presumably be reflected in AI databases, from blogs and such sources in Japanese, where students find mostly stereotypical, anecdotal, or prejudiced information for papers, despite my warnings to use reliable sources. I am wondering how applicable this approach could be for other subject matter areas.
Among the limitations are that the English is too much and too difficult for L2 learners in most academic sources, such as journals. When students use automatic translation, they have probably thought about the content in Japanese, but they can paste the auto-translated English into papers without fulfilling the language-driven mandate to balance the content-driven approach. I do not believe in content-based EFL as a pretext to mask a language-driven agenda, since the students are enriched by the transferable knowledge they gain in L1 as well as in L2.
Writing reflects thinking, so I discourage writing and speaking that relies on machine translation or AI. The result might be obvious, but we cannot accuse and police students.
Secondary school students in the U.S. and elsewhere might benefit from a similar approach, because the assignment is to summarize a reading, connect it to their own experience, and then express what they think about the ideas in the article. With these three skills called for, and content tailored to the class, it is quite evident how much the students have relied upon their own thinking and effort.
@Loukas asked: "Is there some kind of open platform where teachers share lesson plans and resources?" Greetings from Japan, and hope this helps:
At Humanities Commons you can set up a free Profile and site that is principally a blog or a Website - like I have at https://japanned.hcommons.org - and they have a repository called CORE to upload all sorts of publications and deliverables, in categories including "Course material or learning objects" (each assigned a DOI and connected to Google Scholar), an example of which you can see under "Work Shared in CORE" at https://hcommons.org/members/stevemccartyinjapan