In spring 2009, I will be teaching a seminar for our students pursuing a Master's degree in philosophy on "Mill's On Liberty," and I hope to include some of my Slovak students electronically in some of our discussions.
Here's John Stuart Mill, whose 1859 book On Liberty, has been enormously influential in shaping our thinking on free speech in the U.S. In Bratislava, I taught a course I called "Free Speech in Contemporary Democracies," in which we studied On Liberty and examined several contemporary free speech controversies, including Nazi speech, hate speech, pornography, and the Internet. For the seminar next year, I hope to include several of my Slovak students electronically in some of the discussion of those contemporary issues. At a minimum, we can communicate by e-mail, but I'm also looking at ways to enroll my Slovak students as guests in "Beachboard" (our CSULB web-based classroom) so we can try real-time chatrooms and other discussions.
I will be contacting Slovak students and faculty colleagues this fall about participating in the class. I'd be happy to hear from people before then as well.
