OLDaily

Feature Article
Consciousness
Stephen Downes, Half an Hour, 2017/11/14

Consciousness seems to be mysterious to most people. How does subjective experience arise? What is the relation between the perception of redness, say, or the thought that "Paris is the capital of France," and the purely physical mechanisms that philosopher Daniel Dennett believes - and I believe - constitute human processes of thought? In this article I use David Bentley Hart's article criticizing Dennett as a frame through which to offer my own thoughts on consciousness. Note that at 14,500 words this is one of my longer articles. Also note that I'm still making edits and updates, not so much to polish it, but to fill gaps and round it out where needed.

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Revisiting 70:20:10
Clark Quinn, Learnlets, 2017/11/14

I think that Twitter is a terrible place to hold a conversation, but if you can get past how annoying these tweets would be to a non-participant you get what is actually a pretty good stream of comments in Will Thalheimer's debunk session. What are my takeways from it? Well, first of all, the numbers don't matter - what the phrase expressdes is the idea that there is a split between formal, social and espetiental forms of learning (except the numbers do matter; if it's 90% formal we're not having this debate). Also, that the numbers report activities as reported by learners, as opposed to impact on outcomes. And what would a measurement of outcomes even look like - Thalheimer seems at one point to suggest that since there's no way to evaluate the outcomes of informal learning, it doesn't exist. Finally, we find near the end of the chat a pretty good diagram using much better termionology, using education-exposure-experience instead of formal-social-informal.

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Why philosophy is so important in science education
Subrena E Smith, Aeon, 2017/11/14

"Why," asks Subrena Smith, "do college students so often treat philosophy as wholly distinct from and subordinate to science?" She suggests four reasons: a lack of historical awareness, the desire for concrete results, the idea that science is purely objective, and the philosophers' violation of the preceeding three expectations. "Why do they think this way?" she asks. "It’s  not because this is the way that science is practised but rather, because this is how science is normally taught." So she argues that they could be - and should be - taught differently. "Our scientist colleagues should continue to teach the fundamentals of science, but they can help by making clear to their students that science brims with important conceptual, interpretative, methodological and ethical issues."

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Working memory
Matthias Melcher, x28s new Blog, 2017/11/14

I while back I addressed the topic of working memory in a post pushing back against the idea that it is simply a buffer for storage in long-term memory. Matthias Melcher finds some antecedents to the idea in "Baddeley’s model (which) contains, among others, the 'phonological loop' (audio over time) and the 'visuo-spatial sketchpad'." Now there's a lot to the model I don't subscribe to, especially the idea (shared by many others) of an 'executive function'. It (and Baddeley's model as a whole) resembles a web platform more than it resembles a mind. But the idea that short-term memory plays "a great role in processing both temporal and spatial perceptions" makes sense to me.

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What’s New in Firefox Quantum, the Firefox You’ve Been Waiting For
Chris Hoffman, How-To Geek, 2017/11/14

I had switched over from Firefox to Chrome not becuase I wanted to browse the Google way but because Firefox the browser was having bad (and worsening) performance problems (the worst was that the entire browser would freeze while downloading something). With its new version, released today, Firefox turns over a new leaf. It's a brand-new multi-threaded browser that significantly improves performance. I'll be trying it today but I might not switch over fully until the extensions (which have all been disabled by the switch) catch up. Especially ad-blocker. I don't want to browse without ad-blocker. Here's an account of why it's faster - coded in Rust, smarter CSS, optimized for multi-core processors... Update I've installed and run it. It's fast. I need to fix my forms so they're work properly. But I like what I see.

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Educational Technology and Education Conferences for January to June 2018, Edition #38
Clayton R. Wright, 2017/11/14

The 38th edition of the conference list covers 1,529 confirmed professional development opportunities that primarily focus on the use of technology in educational settings and on teaching, learning, and educational administration. When the 39th version of the list is distributed in May 2018, additional events will be added to June 2018. MS Word Document.

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