Dead philosopher society

Remember the Dead Poets Society? It was a movie starring Robin Williams as a maverick teacher who causes ructions at an ultra-conservative American prep school when he uses his unauthodox methods to engage and inspire his students. It was a heart warming movie, and if you could get past Williams' emetic impersonations, it had a strong message for educators everywhere: dare to take a few risks. The fact that one of William's young charges commits suicide in the film is a bit of a dampener, but there is some interesting underlying philosophy in the screen play. Hmmm... philosophy...

Are you interested in philosophy and have a Twitter account? If the answer to those questions is 'yes', it so happens that Twitter has its own Dead Philosophers Society. Yes, there are famous philosophers on Twitter - alive and tweeting. The accounts are all fake, obviously, but if you want a daily dose of philosophy to make you think, ponder life or something to quote to irritate your friends, colleagues or family, your favourite sage is probably out there somewhere, just waiting for you to follow them. Many of the accounts simply tweet unadulterated quotes from published works or well trodden aphorisms from their late authors, but one or two may engage in dialogue with their followers. Here are a few of Twitter's philosopher accounts I have stumbled across (and occasionally retweeted) in the past few days. Explore for yourself ... and follow whom you will:

Mikhail Bakhtin
Roland Barthes
Pierre Bourdieu (in French)
Gilles Deleuze
Jacques Derrida
Paulo Freire
Ivan Illich
Jacques Lacan
Friedrich Nietzsche
Claude Levi-Strauss
Susan Sontag
Ludwig Wittgenstein

If you know of any other dead philosophers who are still alive and tweeting, and want to recommend them, please add their links in the comments box below.

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Dead philosopher society by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Manifesto

If you have a few moments to spare over the next few weeks, you could check out the Manifesto for Media Education site, where educators and media specialists from around the world are being invited to post their thoughts and ideas on best practice, learning philosophy and the future of education, all around the context of media. Here are Pete Fraser and John Wardle, the minds behind the Manifesto project:

"This project is an attempt to develop a shared understanding, some shared reasons, for media education. We hope it will stimulate discussion within course teams and with students. We imagine it will lead to conversations about how we teach and what specific things we teach, but those are secondary questions. We believe we may uncover many reasons but it seems better to have articulated many as opposed to none and as Postman says ‘A definition is the starting point of a dispute, not the settlement’.

"On this website you will find a variety of writers’ summations of their reasoning for media education. These will be context specific and at times may feel at odds with one another. However we hope that by the end of the process we will have a better, more sustaining understanding of the purpose of what we do and that we will be able to draw on this understanding to keep us on track in the classroom and in defending and advocating our subject in the future."

With contributors such as Stephen Heppell, Henry Jenkins, David Buckingham and Natalie Fenton, it's a thought provoking set of readings which should get you reaching for your laptop to respond.

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