OLDaily

The Computational Theory of Mind
Michael Rescorla, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2020/03/02

This article, which has just been revised, is an important article for anyone working in the field of education and development. Too often people write about learning without thinking through whether their understanding of the mind. We see this most often when people start using computer terms - the short term 'memory buffer', visual 'encoding', etc. - to talk about the mind. This article sets out a lot of that thinking, but importantly, the revision assigns a lot of these old views (for example, the representational theory of mind) to the 'classical' category. That is, no longer current. Now there's still a lot of the legacy of these old theories lingering - for example, externalism about mental content, and information processing - but the more current 'new' approaches are looking at things like embodiment. If you wanbt to read more, there's a semantic scholar list of resources.

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Rudolf Carnap
Hannes Leitgeb, André Carus, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2020/03/02

It's hard to imagine the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy not having an article on Rudolf Carnap until now, but this is a new article, so there it is. Carnap is my favourite of the logical positivists. The Logical Syntax of Language totally appealed to me, as a person who likes all of their sentences to make sense. His treatment of probability, a nice contrast to the usual frequency interpretation (which is not wrong, just different) also appealed to me. To me, Carnap lays the groundwork for important developments in later years, such as information theory. The Semantic Web is in many ways Carnap's vision realized in code. And of course it is Carnap to whom Quine is (mostly) responding when he criticizes the dogmas of empiricism.

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How Do Elementary Teachers Study and Learn from a Multimedia Model of Reading Development? An Exploratory Eye-Tracking Study
Pamela Beach, John Kirby, Pamela McDonald, Jen McConnel, Canadian Journal of Education, 2020/03/02

In our LPSS project we had a section called 'Automated Competency Detection and Recognition'. The idea was to use analytics to study expert performance and identify using actual evidence (as opposed to anecdfote) to determine what actually characterized an expert's expertise. This would then feed into the content recommenders, etc. Unfortunately, there was nobody in LPSS interested in doing this, and it languished. But here we have some work that demonstrates really well what that sort of feature could look like, and this makes it important. This study (37 page PDF) of expert and novice teachers found significant differences in what "what they notice and how they organize, represent, and interpret information.” The authors suggest designers "can use information generated from studies that employ eye-tracking methodology to facilitate more efficient inspection." But more importantly, I think, the novice teachers can learn from seeing exactly what it is that the experts do.

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Unesco – Futures of Education initiative
Canadian Journal of Education, 2020/03/02

This is a note on the Canadian Journal of Education website inviting people to contribute to UNESCO's Future of Education initiative, and in particular:

• Top 3 Challenges and Purposes of Education – Survey. A 3-minute online survey to offer views on the top three development challenges ahead in the future and top three ways education can address them.
• Your Vision of Education in 2050 – Submission of artwork. This platform invites people to share their original creative, artistic visions of what education might look like in 2050.
• Your View on the Futures of Education – Written contributions. This platform invites people to present their thoughts on what they see as the one major issue for the futures of education (max 1000 words).

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Online learning responsible for 10% of the UK economy – it is claimed
Tony Bates, Online learning and distance education resources, 2020/03/02

Tony Bates reviews a Demos study called The Learning Curve: How the UK is Harnessing the Potential of Online Learning (44 page PDF). It's a pretty positive report, and it argues that "learning can now happen anytime, any place and is no longer confined to the classroom." Which is true, but Tony Bates cautions, "this study is so bad I hardly know where to start... Its methodology is unbelievably flawed, and its conclusions trite." In particular, he is concerned with "the pseudo-quantitative claim that informal online learning contributes 10% to the British economy that is unsustainable. The methodology they used to support this claim is completely bogus." I have to agree with Bates. The study is pretty light. And yet, as he says, "there is surely a really good story to tell about the value of informal online learning."

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