Author Archives: swoodill

Berlin, the largest city of the German empire, the capital of the kingdom of Prussia. 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica, Volume 3 The images above are presented in a Jetpack Tiled Gallery block, set to the Circles style.

Yosemite National Park in California spans roughly 750,000 acres. It has been a UNSECO World Heritage Site since 1984. The images above are displayed in a Jetpack Tiled Gallery block. The gallery block is contained within a Group block. The Group block is set to full width and has a dark background.

A chain of 26 atolls – lagoons encircled by coral reefs – in the Arabian Sea of the Indian Ocean. The Maldives is a tropical country, and its capital city is Malé. This is a “Media & Text” block. It’s an easy way to create an attractive layout around an image. This is a “MediaContinue reading “The Maldives”

The Covid19 pandemic has initiated a seismic shift in higher education that is part of a radical re-shaping of systems across the globe. While many within and around academia seem to be under the impression that this is a temporary change and a return to ‘normal’ will shortly ensue, there are good reasons to expectContinue reading “An Earthquake in Education: Surviving and Thriving”

Trying to explain complexity theory is, well, complicated. It’s complicated because it is both a way of representing a world out there while at the same time constructing a world out there. What I mean is that there are complex systems in the world such as economies, the human body, and ant colonies, and theseContinue reading “Complexity is in the Eye of the Beholder”

In June of this year, I began teaching a six-week program at the Central Florida Reception Center as part of the Florida Prison Education Project. The course was entitled “Love and Faith, Family, and Friendships.” The plan was to cover the topic of love from multiple perspectives, which was typical of an interdisciplinary approach. IContinue reading “Talking About Love. In Prison.”

I don’t usually talk about my own beliefs, and a big reason for this is that I try very hard to remain open-minded. This means that my beliefs are consistently subject to review and revision. This being said, we are living in a polarized era where one is quickly branded as either for-or-against an ideaContinue reading “On Finding Common Ground in a Polarized World”

I have three points to make in this post (or perhaps over three posts): Education that focuses on information transfer or information curation misses the mark by a mile because we live in an era in which we are inundated with information at every turn. As educators, we now need to focus on cultivating theContinue reading “Education, Complexity, and Interdisciplinary Studies-Part 1”

Chapter 3: The art of the kluge: On the haphazard construction of the mind This chapter expands on the notion of the mind and rational thought as an exaptation. “The ability of our brains to sustain rational thought is an example of what evolutionary theorists refer to as exaptation—where something that evolved in order toContinue reading “Reason and Intuition”