OLDaily

Teach Yourself Logic: A Study Guide (and other Book Notes)
Peter Smith, Logic Matters, 2018/12/26

Despite the summary in O'Reilly - "a wonderfully chatty book that functions as an introduction to logic for mathematicians and philosophers" - this text  (95 page PDF) doesn't actually teach you logic, it teaches you how to teach yourself logic. For casual readers, it's a pretty good summary of what the field of logic entails - from first order logic (which is what most logic textx cover) to more advanced topics such as model theory and mathematical logic, and then outlines the elements of proof theory, computability and completeness. Now, could someone actually teach themselves logic this way? I think it's possible, but it would be very difficult, especially in the absence of immediate practical application for a lot of what's being covered.

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Helping Students and Teachers Embrace Engineering
Reid Whitaker, Getting Smart, 2018/12/26

When I took a year of Computing Science in 1980 it was still considered engineering and so I got a year's worth of engineering education (and one computing science course). It was actually pretty interesting, and I appreciated the exposure to mechanical, electrical, and other forms on engineering, as well as the chemistry and physics that underlie them. The 'engineering' mentioned in this article is something very different. Yes, engineering presupposes an approach based on precision and design. But 'brainstorming' isn't inherent to engineering, nor are 'redesign' and 'critique'. This article is yet another one of those articles applying fancy words to teachers in an effort to help them feel good about the things they're already doing.

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If universities sacrifice philosophy on the altar of profit, what’s next?
Julian Baggini, The Guardian, 2018/12/26

The issue here isn't whether philosophy is valuable or even the slippery slope implied in the title, it's this: "The crude pursuit of what is 'practical', 'efficient' or 'useful' is threatening everything of value that isn’t evidently profitable." To be clear, by "profitable" we usually mean "profitable to some business owner" because skills that merely profit the student, but not industry, are still deemed to be of limited value. My position is that education should benefit first and only the student in question, and that priorizing the interests of 'stakeholders' is essentially an illicit appropriation of the student's time and resources.

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The Epistemology of Consent
Alexander A. Guerrero, Applied Epistemology, 2018/12/26

Educators deal with issues of consent on a daily basis, but it's rare in general to pause and think about the epistemology of consent, that is, how we know that consent has been obtained. Generally, I think, people would say they "just know". But this is a very bad standard. "Social psychologists have discovered that we are significantly worse at mindreading than we think we are ... We consistently and substantially overrate our ability to accurately judge others’ mental states and interpret social interactions." So we need evidence - but of what sort, and under what circumstances? This paper takes a detailed and analytical approach to the question and even if that style of writing doesn't appear to you, the questions it raises should. 

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The Yoda of Silicon Valley
Siobhan Roberts, New York Times, 2018/12/26

This article describes the history behind the multi-volume Bible of computer programming, The Art of Computer Programming, by Donald E. Knuth. The first volume was release and, now 80, Knuth is still working on the series. No detail is spared. “Knuth made it clear that the system could actually be understood all the way down to the machine code level.”

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Online Higher Education in India Comes Full Circle
Brian Warren, Michael B. Horn, EdSurge, 2018/12/26

The authors are critical of India's recent regulations for online learning. " By replicating a system that India’s citizens and employers already say doesn’t produce workforce-ready graduates, it’s not clear why this wave of online learning will work better than the last," they write. They suggest an alternative. By maintaining a quality framework, they write, "The government of India ought to incentivize institutions to compete on delivering what’s best for students." But this is magical thinking. There's no reason to believe competition would produce a better result. The reason why it would be "the first in the world to pioneer such a progressive approach" is that other countries recognize that it would be a failure (also, I love the appropriation of the word 'progressive' to apply to a regressive multi-tier approach to public education).

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