The Great Ideas Homepage

Welcome!

What is Great Ideas?

Great Ideas is an interdisciplinary course offered through the College of Arts and Sciences here at Bowling Green State University that is a survey of several fundamental ideas which have shaped modern culture in general and Western culture in particular.

It is important to note that the ideas discussed in this class are not the only "Great Ideas" out there, or even that these "Great Ideas" are necessarily "good." As such, the goal of this course is for the participants to explore these ideas by being curious and open-minded on the one hand, and questioning and skeptical on the other. We will use our reason and imagination to try to gain an introductory understanding of the historical context that framed these ideas, and we will try to further our knowledge about how these ideas are relevant for us today.

Feel free to contact me about any of the course materials or Internet Resources you see mentioned here. If you are using Lynx, Netscape, or another Web browser that supports e-mail, you can send e-mail to me by clicking here.

Available Course Materials

• Course Description and Guidelines for Steve Krause's Section.
• Course Schedule of Events Part One.
• Course Schedule of Events Part Two.
• Course Schedule of Events Part Three.
• Course Schedule of Events Part Four.
• Course Schedule of Events Part Five.

Available Student Essays

The students in this course have put together a lot of interesting writing projects, some of which are available by clicking here.

Available Net Resources

This space will be changing a lot during this semester, so if this is your first visit, be sure to stop back. The resources listed here are loosely categorized according to the "Great Ideas" discussed in the course.

By the way, most of the resources listed here were located simply by doing a key word search with one of the many search engines available on the Web. Click here to be taken to Netscape's collection of Search Engines

Classical Greek Humanism

• Plato's Writings.
• Perseus Homepage. This is a commercial (ie, not free) database on Ancient Greece. Click here and you can see some of the demo information.
• Whatever I want to call it.
• Classical and Mediterranean Archaeology Home Page.Some interesting historical, archaeological, and artistic information.
• The Plato Crater, which actually has nothing to do with the philosopher, but it is kind of a neat picture.

Religion

There are A LOT of net resources on religions of all types. Here are just a few places to get started.

• The WWW Library of Religion, which contains lots and lots of information on Hinduism, Judaism, Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, and Bahai. This page also contains links to other religion-oriented pages and discussion groups.
• EiNet Galaxy Religion Page, which is similar to the WWW Library page. EiNet also has a Religion (Arts and Humanities) Page, which includes a lot of links to academic resources and discussions on religion.
• The WWW Library "Secular Issues" Page. This is sort of a diverse collection of readings and newsgroups that are about modern humanism, atheism, skepticism, and the like. Be sure to check out the link to the "Freethought Page" when you visit here.
• "Guide to Early Church Documents."
• Worlds of Late Antiquity.This is information about a course taught at the University of Pennsylvania. Some of the topics include Augustine and the Christian Bible.

Democracy

This first list includes some information about the writers we read about in class that might be particularily interesting and useful.

• Ask Thomas Jefferson. This is a hypertextually styled collection of Jefferson's thoughts and writings on a variety of topics. Very neat!
• "Historical Documents Gopher," which includes a variety of important documents about democracy through the ages.
• Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech.
• The Martin Luther King Jr. Bibliography, a searchable index of information.
• Two short stories written by six year olds appear here, The KidPub WWW Publishing Homepage. Check out some of the other work of these young writers!

I've also included a number of what might be better called "political WWW resources" in this section.

• The BGSU Coalition Against the Contract on America. Here's a grass-roots campus organization working with national student organizations that are protesting the changes in the student loan program suggested by the new Republican majority. No matter what your personal politics, if you have a student loan or on work-study or have a grant, you should check this stuff out.
• The Yahoo Government Page. If you want to find out more information about government in general on the Web, this is a great place to start.
• The Yahoo Politics Page.Just like the above entry, this is a great place to start for information about politics in genral on the web.
• The Mother Jones "Monitoring Anti-Democratic Movements" Page.
• The Progressive Pages, which is a liberal/progressive clearinghouse of WWW material.
• The Newt Gingrich Activities Page, a collection of various quotes and such from the current Speaker of the House.
• Progress and Freedom Foundation Homepage, a politically conservative collection of government information and projects.
• House of Representatives WWW Page, which has lots of connections to other places as well.
• The Senate Gopher, which is current info about the Senate.
• "Preserving Democracy in Cyberspace: The Need for a New Literacy," an interesting and informative article about issues of freedom and the Internet.

Scientific Revolution

The resources that I've been able to find to date are really about "science" in general, but some of them do provide some interesting information.

• The Whole Internet Catalog's Science and Technology Page
• The Yahoo Science Section
• Nathan Ash's Scientific Revolution Page includes an essay on the importance of the scientific revolution and some great science links.

Marxism

• The Marxism Homepage, the best place to start on the 'net for info on Marx, Communism, and other political/government issues.

Feminism

• The BGSU Women's Studies Homepage, a fabulous place to look for feminst and gender issues on the 'net. Of particular interest is the very handy list of feminst issue links.

Postmodernism

• Postmodern Culture is a scholarly journal about all sorts of different aspects of postmodernism. While some of this is fairly dense, all of it is quite interesting.
• Alternative X, which "is a continuing barrage of Avant-Pop fiction, Internet columns, interviews, manifestos, post-PoMo essays and lots more!" Some fun and interesting things.
• C-Theory, which is a collection of books reviews and other writings on culture and theory.
• Cardiff's Moviedatabase on Natural Born Killers, which is the film we saw with this unit. This link includes all sorts of information about the film and links to a really great database, too.
• A List of Hypertexts to explore from Eastgate Press, which is a company that publishes a variety of hypertext tools and such.

General Internet Resources

• Links to General Reference Materials and Lists of Lists. This is a great place to start for doing some basic Internet research and exploration.
• Steve Krause's Homepage. Steve's personal homepage offers a variety of links and resources, some useful, some not, some just silly fun.