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This collaborative self-study examines how five higher education institutions in British Columbia (BC), Canada, have achieved momentum with openness and are implementing and sustaining their efforts. A goal of this research was to see whether an institutional self-assessment tool—adapted from blended learning and institutional transformation research—can help to assess how an institution has progressed with its open education initiatives. By adopting both an appreciative and a critical approach, the researchers at these five BC institutions compared the similarities and differences between their institutional approaches and the evolution of their initiatives. The paper includes discussion of how a self-assessment tool for institutional open education practices (OEP) can be applied to OEP initiatives at an institutional level and shares promising practices and insights that emerge from this research.

To evaluate, whether the regional variability of tonsil surgery in terms of the 16 Federal States of Germany was mirrored by a comparable variability of bleeding complications in male and female patients. A longitudinal population-based inpatient cohort study was performed including all patients who had undergone tonsil surgery between 2005 and 2018. The database was provided by the Federal Statistical Office of Germany and included all inpatient cases after tonsillectomy (with or without adenoidectomy), tonsillotomy, abscess-tonsillectomy and secondary tonsillectomy. The population was stratified by region (16 Federal States) and gender. Operation rates were calculated in relation to the end-year population number of each region. Bleeding percentages were calculated for each calendar year and region as the number of procedures to achieve hemostasis divided by the total number of operations. The surgical rates varied significantly between the 16 Federal States in male, female and all patients (p = 0.001). Revision surgery to achieve hemostasis was predominantly performed in male patients (5.2–11.4% male vs. 3.7–7.6% female patients). Bleeding percentages did not differ significantly from national values in male and female patients in 5 Federal States, but were significantly higher than the national average in 3 Federal States and significantly lower in 7 Federal States for both genders (p

Many teachers appreciate discussing teaching and learning with others, and participating in a community of others who are also excited about pedagogy. Many philosophy teachers find meetings such as the biannual AAPT workshop extremely valuable for this reason. But in between face-to-face meetings such as those, we can still participate in a community of teachers and learners, and even expand its borders quite widely, by engaging in activities under the general rubric of “open education.” Open education can mean many things, from sharing one’s teaching materials openly with others, to using and revising those created by others, to asking students to create open educational materials, and more. In this article I discuss the benefits and possible drawbacks of such activities, and I argue that the former outweigh the latter.

Global health seeks to address healthcare disparities, and sonography has an important part to play in achieving global health targets. Ultrasound is a beneficial and critical imaging modality because of its affordability and effectiveness in the imaging of noncommunicable and infectious diseases. Ultrasound can be successfully integrated into global health partnerships but must be thoughtfully supported by assessment, training, and human capacity development.

Open educational resources (OER), including open textbooks, are free, adaptable learning resources. The integration of these materials in place of commercial textbooks allows for considerable financial savings for students and creates opportunities for more active and engaged learning. The growing interest in the use of OER at a Western Canadian university led to the chance to survey students for their feedback on using OER instead of traditional commercial textbooks. This paper focuses on the views of students in an introductory sociology course for which an instructor adopted an open textbook and otherwise left the course unchanged from when it was taught with a traditional textbook. In addition, completion rates for the offerings with the open textbook are compared to previous offerings with a commercial textbook.

Three-dimensional sonography is being cited more frequently as a means of further evaluating the patient and better defining the pathological condition. One of the main limitations of fully implementing 3D imaging in the sonography department is the limited experience and limited time to educate working sonographers on how to fully understand and use this technology. Deliberate and planned educational activities designed to meet the educational needs of working sonographers may be a way to increase the clinical use of 3D technology in the clinical sonography department.

FOUCAULT AND THE DEMISE OF THE "AUTHOR-FUNCTION" In "What is an Author," Michel Foucault quotes Samuel Beckett: "What matter who's speaking, someone said, what matter who's speaking?" (Foucault 1977b, 115). Foucault cites this statement in reference to an "indifference" that characterizes contemporary writing, an indifference that reveals "an opening where the writing subject endlessly disappears" (116). Yet this "indifference" is introduced in a decidedly non-indifferent way: though the statement proclaims itself as anonymous-"what matter who's speaking, someone said . . ."-its source is explicitly identified in Foucault's text as Beckett.1 Why does Foucault name his source for the indifference that "someone" has expressed, when this indifference signals the death of the author? Why not attempt to preserve the potential anonymity implied by the purposeful identification of the original author as unknown, lost, or intentionally hidden behind the word "someone"? Perhaps because, despite Foucault's own indications to the contrary, it does (still) matter who is speaking; because if it was simply "someone," few might be willing to listen in the way they would to Beckett, or to Foucault himself.2 There may also be another dimension to Foucault's name-dropping, to his citation of Beckett as an author: in tracing to an anonymous source Beckett's (and his own) statement of the author's demise, Foucault points to a lack at what is supposed to be the origin of the idea. Someone has said it, though "the signs of [the author's] particular individuality" have been cancelled out (Foucault 1977b, 117). The author's particular individuality has been sacrificed in the murderous process of writing itself, his identity is "a victim of his own writing." Foucault's repetition of Beckett's repetition of the anonymity of the above-cited question works to enact the point that at the origin of the cited quote is no author in particular-there is only an empty place-holder, the authorial role with an anonymous "someone" playing it.3 Yet this place-holder, the space where the author is expected and looked for, is still significant. If there is no proper name to fill this space, it is labeled merely as "someone"-signaling, in Foucault's terms, the continued existence of the "author-function." The author-function remains alive and well, though Foucault seems to hope for its demise along with the author, for the disappearance of the place-holder still indicated by the insistence that "someone has said, what matter who's speaking?" We may be witnessing the death of the author as a specific individual into the movements of the text, but the author-function remains to the degree that we speak of the author at all, even as only an anonymous "someone." That Foucault looks towards a day when even that last vestige of the author-function disappears is expressed in the last line of "What is an Author?", where "someone" is now silent, replaced by "little more than the murmur of indifference: `What matter who's speaking?"' (Foucault 1977b, 138). This time, there is a murmur without an author, without even the expectation of one that would result in an insistence that "someone" had uttered it. But working to bring about the demise of the author-function is not an easy task, and it is not clear how it might best be brought about. Foucault seems at times to suggest a strategy of anonymity on the part of the author, a succumbing to one's own death as an author at the hands of the text. To accept and further the effacement of his or her identity, the author might refuse to be named as an author at all. Though such gestures seem to be indicated at times throughout Foucault's writings, in this essay I argue that they may not produce the desired change in the institutions and individuals calling for an author for texts. Further, how might we reconcile Foucault's occasional calls for authorial anonymity with his tendency to reiterate in interviews what his concerns are and what he is trying to say-thereby indicating "who he is" as an author? …

In various interviews Michel Foucault refuses to take on the political role of what he calls a ‘prophet’, someone who tells others, ‘here is what you must do — and also: this is good and this is not’.2 According to Foucault, intellectuals can contribute to political change by employing critique to undermine what appears in the present to be stable, certain or necessary: ‘The work of an intellectual … is, through the analyses he does in his own field, to re-examine evidence and assumptions, to shake up habitual ways of working and thinking, to dissipate conventional familiarities, to re-evaluate rules and institutions.’3 Foucault develops a historical form of critique that he calls ‘genealogy’ to engage himself and his audience in a deep transformation of their relationship to their own present, in order to open up new paths for thinking and acting differently. His genealogical narratives show present conditions to be the result of contingent relations and practices of power, revealing some of them to be dangerous but also open to resistance. Still, he insists, whether and how to resist power relations in the present must be decided by those who will be participating in such a battle themselves.4

Acknowledgements Notes on Contributors Introduction Critique, Dissent, Disciplinarity J.Butler Spinoza or the Other Critique A.Tosel Rousseau, Kant, and Philosophical Auto-Criticism: The Practical Ends of Critical Thinking P.Quadrio Beyond the Limits of Reason: Kant, Critique, and Enlightenment C.McQuillan Hegel's Conception of Immanent Critique: its Sources, Extent, and Limit K. de Boer Karl Marx: Critique as Emancipatory Practice R.Celikates Nietzsche's Genealogy as Performative Critique J.I.Porter Psychoanalytic Critique and Beyond E.Rottenberg The Interruption of Myth: Walter Benjamin's Concept of Critique T.Lijster Adorno's Critique of Late Capitalism: Negative, Explanatory, and Practical F.Freyenhagen Habermas' Social Theory: The Critical Power of Communicative Rationality M.Cooke Prophecy and Parre?sia : Foucauldian Critique and the Political Role of Intellectuals C.Hendricks Derrida: Echoes of the Forthcoming O.Custer Negative versus Affirmative Critique: On Pierre Bourdieu and Jacques Ranciere R.Sonderegger Index

Paper presented at the Association for Informal Logic and Critical Thinking meeting in conjunction with the Central Division of the American Philosophical Association, Chicago, April 2004.

In several lectures, interviews and essays from the early 1980s, Michel Foucault startlingly argues that he is engaged in a kind of critical work that is similar to that of Immanuel Kant. Given Foucault's criticisms of Kantian and Enlightenment emphases on universal truths and values, his declaration that his work is Kantian seems paradoxical. I agree with some commentators who argue that this is a way for Foucault to publicly acknowledge to his critics that he is not, as some of them charge, attempting a total critique of Enlightenment beliefs and values, but is instead attempting to transform them from within. I argue further that Foucault's self-professed Kantianism can also productively be read as a means of encouraging change in his intellectual audience, a call to courage to take up the thread of Enlightenment thought that Foucault finds in Kant's essay, `What is Enlightenment?': that of directing one's philosophical efforts towards questioning and transforming one's own present in its historical specificity, for the sake of promoting the values of freedom and autonomy therein. Though much of Kant's philosophical work is focused on that which lies outside of history, Foucault locates in some of it a concern for what is happening here and now that, I argue, he encourages his audience to take up for themselves through tracing his own intellectual lineage to Kant. In so doing, he encourages contemporary philosophers to consider the value and effects of their work on the present social and political contexts in which they live.