OLDaily

So... Who Is Your Audience?
Philip Kitcher, 2018/08/07

Note: 20 page MS-Word document. I've long considered Philip Kitcher's The Nature of Mathematical Knowledge to be required reading for those in the field, and more recently he has done work in the domain of science and society. So this question directly concerns him. And me. There are really two parts to his answer. One is practical: "The need to present scientific issues clearly to people who are not scientists seems to me the most crucial task of all (and perhaps it is especially important to reach journalists and policymakers)," he writes. The other is methodological. "The real achievements of the western philosophical tradition lie in the magnificent syntheses provided by thinkers who reflected widely on the achievements of the past and the conditions of life as they encountered it.  Philosophy at its greatest is synthetic.   It doesn’t work beside the various areas of inquiry and culture and practice.  Instead, it works between and among them." And - yeah. That's me.

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Instructure Enters those Awkward Teenage Years
Michael Feldstein, e-Literate, 2018/08/07

This is a really patronizing article from Michael Feldstein about the emergence of Instructure into the mainstream. "Being perceived as the market leader is a fraught position for them," he writes, "Both because of that change and because they are now a publicly traded company, Instructure is in the process of becoming...something else. We're not sure what it is yet, exactly, although there are some signs of what may be to come. Whatever it is, it will have to be more of an adult company. Instructure can't get away with crashing the other guy's party and passing out snarky T-shirts anymore. It has to grow up."

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Announcing: Discover Data
Mike Bryant, Discovery Education, 2018/08/07

This article introduces teachers to Discovery's new resources about learning with data. It's pretty basic at this level, and the materials are basically low-tech - some PDF guides along with pre- and post-activity surveys. But I'm including it here because I think the idea of connecting data (or, at least, the process of going out and gathering data for yourself) and education is an important one. The Discover Data resources are here. Two of the three activities are based on consumer culture (specifically, differential pricing and celebrity endoorsements).

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My online course quality rubric has a first name. It’s O-S-C-Q-R!
Lindsey Rae Downs, Alexandra Pickett, WCET Frontiers, 2018/08/07

This article summarizes and provides a number of resources supporting the Open SUNY Course Quality Review (OSCQR) Rubric and Process. The prupose of the rubric is "to assist online instructional designers and online faculty to improve the quality and accessibility of their online courses" and as well to provide "a system-wide approach to collect data that informs faculty development and supports large scale online course design review and refresh efforts in a systematical and consistent way."

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A capability approach to children's well‐being, agency and participatory rights in education
Caroline Sarojini Hart, Nicolás Brando, European Journal of Education, 2018/08/07

This article offers a useful summary of some of Amartya Sen's thinking as it relates to education and then uses this in combination with more traditional educational theory to chart a path leading not only to achievement but also to individual freedom. It is in this latter point Sen's voice weighs in: "As a response to approaches to human development that focus exclusively on resources, utility, desire satisfaction and aggregated markers of advantage, Amartya Sen has consistently argued that freedom and a person's own values play a key role in assessing quality of life." Good article, well argued.

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Extended Cognition and Extended Consciousness
David J. Chalmers, 2018/08/07

A few years ago I distinguished between two flavours of connectivism - the 'Siemens answer' and the 'Downes answer'. In particular, the 'Siemens answer' is based on the concept of multimodal extension whereby networks reach out and integrate with each other. This, say, a human neural network might be extended into a computer network. This paper is a description and elaboration of that idea from a philosophical perspective. In particular, it distinguishes between an extended mind and extended consciousness. It is (possibly) true that we could extend our mind by adding computer circuits, but this extension to the brain is not an extension to the mind if we consider the mind to be limited by consciousness - that is, to perception and action. Great discussion. Image: Basar and Duzgun.

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