OLDaily

Why the Civic Info Bill Is Such a Huge Deal
Mike Rispoli, Free Press, 2018/07/03

Five universities in New Jersey are participating in a state non-profit initiative " to strengthen local news coverage and boost civic engagement in communities across the state." It's good to see higher education institutions working for the social good; this is how they survive in the technological era. "Ideas included municipal-website templates designed for easy navigation, media-literacy programs for students and adults, mini-grants for reporting projects, young-journalist fellowship programs serving overlooked communities, and local data apps to provide mobile access to key government data." Such an initiative would have been life-changing had I access to it back when I was running Moncton Free Press.

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Big business ideas for the future role of universities in Australia are skewed and should be called out
Julie Rowlands, Jill Blackmore, 2018/07/03

This is discussion of the Australian EY report: Can Universities Today Lead Learning for Tomorrow (previously mentioned here). "Overall, the report characterises universities as having purely commercial purposes," write Julie Rowlands and Jill Blackmore. "Markets alone should not be allowed to determine what knowledge universities produce...  Knowledge generated by Australian universities also serves wider purposes, as stated in the National Science and Innovation Agenda, which describes research as having social, environmental and other benefits as well as economic ones."

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Aboutness in imagination
Francesco Berto, Philosophical Studies, 2018/07/03

One of the reasons I favour a non-representational semantics is that I don't think we can really make the idea of 'aboutness' work consistently. And 'aboutness' is core to the idea of representation: we define (in language, say) the way one thing represents, or is 'about', the other. What this paper addresses in one of the problem areas for aboutness: the imagination. How can out imagination be 'about' something if it's just something we're making up? The value of this paper is the set of four conditions for successful 'aboutness in imagination' it sets up (in section 2). The bulk of the paper after this is the derivation of formal semantics that meet these criteria, which will be of little value to most readers (unless you like formal notation). Image: Helena Kučerová .

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The market is dead: long live the market
Adam Wright, Wonkhe, 2018/07/03

Adam Wright says it all in the first paragraph: "There is no evidence that greater competition between higher education providers will improve the quality of provision. This is the conclusion of the Public Accounts Committee’s (PAC) recent (21 page PDF well worth reading in its own right - SD) report into the higher education market. But, rather than question whether the government is right to keep pursuing a strongly market-based policy agenda in higher education, the committee appears to ignore the possibility that the market simply doesn’t work in HE."

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