One two students came to class. They were only there to get some assessment results, so in the end we didn't watch the video. We discusses the essay for about 10 minutes minutes and left.
We watched Black Mirror: Nosedive. Afterwards in our discussion one student drew parallel with the system is use in the show, with the social ratings system in use in China that we saw earlier in the semester.
We watched the first 50 minute Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others). This depicts life in the DDR in the late1980s. I had hoped that we would watch the entire movie over two classes, but it is much longer than I remembered it. And it is m u c h s l o w e r. In the next class we will watch the last 40 minutes or so. We will skip the middle. This time will give us some time for discussion. Some students expressed concern after class that I had not warned them in advance of the content. The last segment of the movie depicts a woman running in front of a truck and dying. I was asked if we could cancel Wednesday's class because students have very little else on that day. But I'm not able to do that. So I hope to see you there.
Deutschland '83 is a very entertaining series available to stream for free on Channel 4 that deals with same period.
We tried to tease out on the board what is meant by "Privacy". We decided that there are public spaces and private spaces, such as home. We also discussed how there are public places where there is an expectation of privacy, notwithstanding that the space is public.
We figured that privacy is mostly about control over what about us is revealed and to whom.
Colin argued that as well as valuing privacy for itself, we must recognise that privacy is required for other things that we might want to do. And that although privacy is a right of individuals, a society a large needs to support privacy if it is to achieve its objectives. This was a harder sell.
We discussed how technology can blur the binary between private and public spaces.
We looked at arguments and discussed the difference between false premises and invalid arguments. We looked at some of the most common fallacies that we encounter is shoddy reasoning. I asked students to work in groups to come up with examples of the different kinds.
