OLDaily

The latest news outlet to dive into the newsletter pool
Tom Jones, Poynter, 2021/11/03

I don't need to convince OLDaily readers of the utility of the newsletter format, though I am concerned that the newfound popularity of the format might have long-lasting harmful effects on email. At any rate, this article focuses on the popularity of email newsletters, wrapping the discussion around the news that the Atlantic is launching nine subscriber newsletters. Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg writs In an editor’s note that “Newsletters are conversational, unrehearsed, contingent, revelatory, humble, and entertaining, and journalism can always use more of these qualities." Open access wouldn't hurt either, but that moment may have passed.

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How do People Think the Mind and the Brain Interact?
Jussi Valtonen, The New Experimental Philosophy Blog, 2021/11/03

'Dualism' is the view that the mind and body are separate, dual, entities. A few years back, not long after I wrote my Consciousness paper, I tried a class presentation that started from a non-dualist perspective. The pushback was intense, and I was convinced not to try that approach again. In the surveys reported in this article by Jussi Valtonen people mostly agreed with a dualist perspective. However, "although people undoubtedly do reveal dualistic tendencies in surveys, they also endorse the view that the mind is not separable from the brain." The proposal here is that people develop "hybrid intuitive theories combining aspects of both." I'm not sure I agree. I think people simply aren't consistent with their beliefs, and will pick and chose one belief system or another depending on context. It's something researchers do all the time (though they misleadingly call this a 'lens') and I don't see why the rest of us can't.

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Some Pods Will Outlast the Pandemic
Michael B. Horn, Education Next, 2021/11/03

This article describes the current state of 'pods', small groups of students formed from relatively affluent families assembled in order "to preserve some in-person support, community, and normalcy in an otherwise abnormal year." While the headline suggests that pods are a going concern, the body of the article suggests otherwise. "Many families... pulled out of their pods last year because they found them unsustainable for any number of reasons." The exception exists where there is institutional support, but instead of serving the affluent, "some of the most robust pod experiments have taken place in school districts disproportionately serving low-income and minority students."

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Pearson+ claims 2 million registered users since launch in July
Emily Bamforth, EdScoop, 2021/11/03

According to this article, "Textbook company Pearson reported its textbook subscription service, Pearson+, has drawn 2 million registered users since its July launch, according to an investor presentation last Friday." This includes about 100K customers paying $US 10 (to access one textbook) or $US 15 (for unlimited access). Competitors include "textbook rental company Chegg and subscription service Cengage," notes the article. Pearson has also acquired Faethm, a workforce analytics application, "to start to provide the learning materials that suit Katherine’s particular learning needs."

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Giving students an eDGE: Focusing on ePortfolios for graduate employability
Lana J. Mitchell, Chris Campbell, Roshan Rigby, Lauren T. Williams, The Journal of Teaching and Learning for Graduate Employability, 2021/11/03

It has been a few years since people were paying a lot of attention to e-portfolios, but my enthusiasm for them has never waned. This paper (16 page PDF) reports on the ePortfolios for Dietetics Graduate Employability (eDGE) project at Griffith University in Australia and aims "to investigate the views of dietetics students on the usefulness of PebblePad as a learning platform and ePortfolio tool." Now this analysis is framed in terms of 'employability', that is, "a set of achievements - skills, understandings  and  personal attributes - that makes graduates more likely to gain employment and be successful in their chosen occupations." The 98 students responding found it useful, but question its utility as an employability tool. "Not sure an employer would look at your PebblePad portfolio," said one. And it's a good point, which is why I think the future benefit of e-portfolios will be tired to automated or AI-based portfolio analysis tools.

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Natural Deduction Systems in Logic
Francis Jeffry Pelletier, Allen Hazen, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2021/11/03

Jeff Pelletier was on my PhD committee, so I'm naturally curious to see what he wrote here. As it turns out, I spent quite a bit of time on natural deduction and was fairly good at it (it made a lot more sense than semantics, which I always thought of as a bit of a sleight of hand). Natural deduction is basically a rules-based linear form of reasoning, which makes for easy conversion into prose, and is characterized by 'sub-proofs', which allow you to consider (and draw conclusions from) hypotheticals. This article follows the development of natural deduction through predicate and modal logics, and ends, as I suppose it must, with Michael Dummett, one of the more engaging but densely complex philosophers I've read. Here's Dummett in a nutshell: "intuitionism as applied to logic urges meaning to be given by rules of how to use the connectives. Classical logic, on the other hand, assumes that there is a pre-given notion of reference and designation."

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