Faculty

Educational Projects
Selected Online Material
Presentation Abstracts
Abbreviated CV

Robert Cavalier received his BA from New York University and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Duquesne University. In 1987 he joined the staff at Carnegie Mellon's Center for Design of Educational Computing (CDEC), where he became Executive Director in 1991.

While at CDEC, he was also co-principal in the 1989 EDUCOM award winner for Best Humanities Software (published in 1996 by Routledge as A Right to Die? The Dax Cowart Case). He also co-authored the CD-ROM The Issue of Abortion in America (Rountledge, 1998)

Dr. Cavalier was Director of CMU's Center for the Advancement of Applied Ethics and Political Philosophy from 2005-2007. He currently directs the Center's Digital Media Lab which houses Project PICOLA (Public Informed Citizen Online Assembly), and is also co-Director of Southwestern Pennsylvania Program for Deliberative Democracy.

Co-Editor of Ethics in the History of Western Philosophy (St. Martin's/Macmillan, England, 1990), Editor of The Impact of the Internet on Our Moral Lives (SUNY, 2003) and other works in ethics as well as articles in educational computing, Dr. Cavalier is internationally recognized for his work in education and interactive multimedia. He was President of the "International Association for Computing and Philosophy" (2001 - 2004) and Chair of the APA Committee on Philosophy and Computers (2000-2003). Dr. Cavalier has given numerous addresses and keynote speeches here and abroad.

In 1996 Cavalier was designated "Syllabus Scholar" by Syllabus Magazine in recognition of his life long work with educational technologies. In 1999 he received an award for "Innovation Excellence in Teaching, Learning and Technology" at the 10th International Conference on College Teaching and Learning. In 2002 he was recipient of the H&SS Elliott Dunlap Smith Teaching Award and in 2006 he was awarded a Fulbright Senior Specialist Grant in Education.

Today Dr. Cavalier’s interests focus on the field of deliberative democracy. He is a PI in projects involving deliberative polling and other forms of democratic dialogue at the local, regional and national level. He has two books under contract: an anthology entitled Deliberative Democracy: Theory and Practice, SUNY Press (2009) and Democracy for Beginners (Steerforth Press, 2008)

Educational and Research Projects and Research

I have explored and pioneered the use of educational computing in philosophy for almost 20 years. My teaching techniques include the use of interactive multimedia, presentation software, computer-mediated communications, and web-based materials.

I have co-authored multimedia tools (A Right to Die? The Dax Cowart Case and The Issue of Abortion in America) as part of my research and development work at the Center for the Advancement of Applied Ethics. These interactive environments are instances of our long-term work with Project THEORIA. The acronym "THEORIA" stands for : Testing Hypotheses in Ethics/ Esthetics: Observation, Reason, Imagination, and Affect. The term is intended to play off of the origins of both ‘theory’ and ‘theater’ in the ancient Greek verb theorein: to see, to view, to behold.

Throughout much of the 1990s, my research and teaching initiatives continued to grow out of Project THEORIA and the intersection of New Media and Case studies in Applied Ethics. By the year 2000 my interests evolved to take into account to role of conversation and perspective in analyzing hard cases. Books like Jonathan Moreno¹s Deciding Together and Brendan Minogue's Bioethics: A Committee Approach discuss the social psychology and pedagogical aspects of what Habermas calls Dialogical Reason. I have used these ideas in my courses through student role-play in ersatz ethics committees and, in my Political Philosophy course, student participation in "constitutional conventions." These pedagogical experiments have recently been expanded to include theoretical and empirical interest in the movement of "Deliberative Democracy." And it is within this conversational turn that I have worked on both online and face-to-face applications of deliberative democracy, most specifically through what James Fishkin has called "deliberative polls."

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Selected Online Material

Examples of the programs in deliberative democracy that I direct as well as individual deliberative polling events can be found at:

Southwestern Pennsylvania Program for Deliberative Democracy: District Three Initiative

Campus Conversations: Student Bill of Rights

An article from Inside Higher Ed describes the contributions that we are making to bring the principles of deliberative democracy to the College Campus.

My Introduction to Ethics course contains extensive online material that is available for other instructors to use (extracts or appropriation with permission only).

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Presentation Abstracts

Instantiating Deliberative Democracy

Liberal democracies of the kind we see forming around the world are only the beginning of what Benjamin Barber has called strong democracies. Thin, liberal democracies provide the constitutional essentials of universal suffrage, freedom of press and assembly, etc. but this in no way guarantees that the citizens of these societies will see themselves as any more than isolated individuals who periodically vote (if they choose to do so). Recent work in "Citizenship Theory" has made clear that "the health and stability of a modern democracy depends, not only on the justice of its basic institutions, but also on the qualities and attitudes of its citizens" (Kymlicka). These qualities and attitudes are often highlighted by proponents of Deliberative Democracy and emphasize the role of the citizen in becoming a truly informed and engaged individual, a person willing to listen to all sides and willing to let the force of the better argument (in all its richness) become a guide to opinion formation. In this talk I will discuss my work as Co-Director of the Southwestern Pennsylvania Program in Deliberative Democracy and Director of Campus Conversations. Both of these programs utilize the protocols of deliberative polling: the former at the local and regional level, the latter at the college and university level.

Learning, Media, and the Case of Dax Cowart: A Comparison of Text, Film, and Interactive Multimedia

This presentation discusses the results of a three-year investigation into the comparative advantages of using interactive multimedia in the presentation of a case study in Ethics. The study involved undergraduate students in philosophy courses at Carnegie Mellon and the use of the case of Dax Cowart, a burn patient who wished to be allowed to die. In representing the case, we strove for functional equivalence in the content of the media chosen: a literary narrative plus expert commentary (text), a one-hour documentary (film), and the Guided Inquiry/Archive sections of an interactive multimedia program (A Right to Die? The Dax Cowart Case). We also strove for functional equivalence in the use of the material: an evening assignment and a follow-up essay exam. The results of our research demonstrate a statistical difference in learning outcomes based on the medium used. Students in the interactive CD group outperformed students in the text and film groups with regard to (a) understanding the complex perspectives and positions of the principals in the case and (b) analyzing the case with respect to its morally relevant details.

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Abbreviated CV

Education
Duquesne University - Ph.D. (Philosophy) 1978, M.A. (Philosophy) 1973 (Honors)
New York University - B.A. (Philosophy) 1971 (Dean's List)

Grants and Awards
2008: Grant from Gill Foundation and Gift from Alumnus Frank Brunkhourst to host a Statewide deliberative poll on the Issue of Marriage in America.
2007: Birmingham Foundation (in support of a Pittsburgh neighborhood "community conversation"); Gill Foundation (in support of a campus deliberative poll on same-sex marriage); Teagle Grant/Phi Beta Kappa (in support of a Handbook for Campus Deliberative Polls)
2006: Fulbright Senior Specialist Grant in Education
2005: CMU Berkman grant to support development of Mobile PICOLA; Benedum Foundation grant to host a regional deliberative poll on Healthcare.
2004: HSS grant to support development of PICOLA; Grant from PBS to host regional deliberative poll on America¹s Role in the World.
2002: PI in NSF Grant "Developing and Testing A High Telepresence Virtual Agora For Broad Citizen Participation: A Multi-Trait, Multi-Method Investigation" (2.1 million); H&SS Elliott Dunlap Smith Award for Excellence in Teaching.

Employment

• 1994-Present: Carnegie Mellon University
  Teaching Professor, Department of Philosophy
  
• 1991-1993: Center for Design of Educational Computing
  Executive Director
  
• 1987-1991: Center for Design of Educational Computing
  Project Scientist
  
• 1987-1989: Interuniversity Consortium for Educational Computing
  Assistant Director
  
• 1981-1986: Towson State University
  Assistant Professor of Philosophy
  

Research Interests

• Philosophical Foundations of Applied Ethics
• Pedagogical Foundations of Case-based Interactive Multimedia for Moral Reasoning
• Issues in Deliberative Democracy

Selected Publications

Books

• Deliberative Democracy: Theory and Practice. SUNY Press (2009)
• Democracy for Beginners. Steerforth Press (2008)
• Editor. The Impact of the Internet on Our Moral Lives. SUNY Press (2005)
• Editor (with Gouinlock & Sterba). Ethics in the History of Western Philosophy. St. Martin's/Macmillan, England (1990)
  
• With Christopher Dreisbach. Study Guide for Barker's Elements of Logic (4th Edition/5th Edition) McGraw-Hill (1985/89)
  
• Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: A Transcendental Critique of Ethics. University Press of America (1980)
  

Software

• With Covey, Thompson and Style, CD-ROM: The Issue of Abortion in America -- Routledge, 1997.
  
• With Andersen and Covey, CD-ROM: A Right to Die? The Dax Cowart Case (includes User's and Teacher's Guide) -- Routledge, 1996.
  
• Co-Principal (with Covey, Bend & Leizman). Art or Forgery? The Strange Case of Han van Meegeren (EDUCOM/NCRIPTAL Award: Best Humanities Software, 1990) Intellimation.
  
• Co-Principal (with Covey, Bend & Roberts). A Right to Die? The Case of Dax Cowart (EDUCOM/NCRIPTAL Award: Best Humanities Software, 1989) Falcon Software.
  
• With Christopher Dreisbach. Study Disks to Accompany Copi's Introduction to Logic (8th Edition) Macmillan (1990).
  

Articles, Notices, Reviews, Contributions (from 1995)

• "Campus Conversations: Modeling a Diverse Democracy through Deliberative Polling" Diversity & Democracy (American Association of Colleges and Universities) January 2008
• With Mike Bridges: "Polling for an Educated Citizenry" The Chronicle of Higher Education, January, 2007
• "E-Democracy and the Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere" in Proceedings of the Asia-Pacific Computing and Philosophy Conference, ed. Hongladarom (Cambridge Scholars Press) 2007
• With Miso Kim and Sam Zaiss: "Deliberative Democracy, Online Discussion, and Carnegie Mellon's Project PICOLA (Public Informed Citizen Online Assembly)" in Online Deliberation: Design, Research, and Practice Ed. by Davis and Noveck (CSLI Publications/University of Chicago Press), 2007
• "The Poetics of Simulation: An Analysis of Programs in Ethics and Conflict Resolution" in Cohen, et. al Virtual Decisions: Digital Simulations for Teaching Reasoning in the Social Sciences and Humanities (Lawrence Erlbaum, 2005)
• "Applied Ethics in a Digital Age" in Resnick and Scott, Eds. The Innovative University (Carnegie Mellon Press, 2004)
• "Learning, Media, and the Case of Dax Cowart: A Comparison of Text, Film, and Interactive Multimedia" with Keith Weber in "Interactive Learning Environments" (2002)
  
• "Interactive Multimedia and Case Studies in Applied Ethics" in Medienbildung im Umbruch - Lehren und Lernen im Kontext der Neuen Medien, hg. Volker Deubel u. Klaus H. Kiefer (Aisthesis Verlag, Bielefeld, 2002)
  
• "Applied Ethics in a Digital Age" in Resnick and Scott, Eds. The Innovative University (Carnegie Mellon Press, 2002)
  
• "Cases, Narratives, and Interactive Multimedia" (Syllabus Magazine, May 2000)
  
• Review of Sandor Radnot's "The Fake: Forgery and Its Place in Art"in "CAA Review" (2000)
  
• "Multimedia in Philosophy Teaching and Research" The Digital Phoenix: How Computers are Changing Philosophy (Blackwell, 1997).
  
• "Evaluating Evaluation in Light of Discipline-Specific Computational Turns" Journal of Computing in Higher Education (Vol 8, No. 1 Fall 1996)
  
• "Computers" (entry) Philosophy of Education: An Encyclopedia (Garland Publishing, 1996)
  
• Feminism and Pornography: A Dialogical Perspective. Computer-Mediated Communication (January, 1996)
  

Selected Conferences (from 2000)

• 2007: RAND: Institutionalizing Deliberative Democracy (February)
• 2006-2007: Humanities Lecture Series: Deliberative Democracy: Theory and Practice.
• 2006: Fulbright Lectures: University of Madras; Stella Maris College; India Technical Institute of Chennai (all in Chennai, India, February); Keynote: CMU Phi Beta Kappa Initiation Ceremony (May)
• 2005: “E- Democracy and the Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere,” Asia-Pacific CAP Conference (Bangkok, Thailand January); Invited Panelist for Plenary Session: Online Deliberation from Groups to Cities to Nations (Online Deliberation 2005 Stanford, May)
• 2004: Workshop: “Designing Virtual Communities” (Syllabus 2004) Keynote Address: Instantiating Deliberative Democracy: Project PICOLA (European Computing and Philosophy Conference, Pavia, Italy); Invited Participant: Libraries Research Association (University of Virginia)
• 2003: "From Cases to Conversations: A History of Interactive Media from CMU's Center for the Advancement of Applied Ethics" (CAP Conference at the University of Glasgow, UK).
• 2002: Keynote: The Digital Campus (Cal State at Fresno); "Casuistry, Rhetoric and Interactive Multimedia" (Critical Reasoning Conference, VCU); "Learning, Media, and the Case of Dax Cowart: A Comparison of Text, Film, and Interactive Multimedia" (Syllabus Conference)
• 2001: Keynote: Redesigning the Classroom: Teaching and Technology in Higher Education (Transylvania University June) A Brief History of CAP (Computing and Philosophy Conference, CMU, August)
  
• 2000: Invited Participant: Spenser Roundtable on Assessing Instructional Simulations of Social Decisions (Tufts) Keynote: "Learning Models for the Millennium" ADEPT 2000 (Edinboro University of PA) "The Role of Multimedia in Applied Ethics" (CMU/Dartmouth Videoconference) Invited Speaker: "Interactive Multimedia and Case Studies in Applied Ethics" (Schrift und Bild in Bewegung, Munich)
  

Professional Offices

• 2001-2004: President, International Association for Computing and Philosophy
• 2000-2003: Chair, the APA Committee on Philosophy and Computers
• 1999-2001: Director, Syllabus Institute
• 1994-1997: APA Committee on the Use of Computers in Philosophy
• 1988-2001: Executive Director, Computing and Philosophy Conferences
• 1990-1992: ADCIS International Relations Committee
• 1989-1992: APA Committee on the Use of Computers in Philosophy
• 1987-1992: Co-director, Interactive Learning Forum

Courses

• Knowledge and Values
• Introduction to Ethics
• Continental Philosophy
• Ancient Philosophy
• Introduction to Political Philosophy; Metaphysics
• Issues in Multimedia Authoring

Service
During the 1990s, I provided numerous talks and workshops relating to the classroom use of educational computing. Recently, I have directed the Campus Conversations project, holding deliberative polls in issues such as the Student Bill of Rights, Campus Public Art Policy, and the Issue of Marriage in America.

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