In this paper, I work out a five-stringed criticism of John Hattie’s theory of Visible Learning. First, I argue that the theory is a theory of evaluation that denies education as such. Second, I show that there are problems with the dependent variable, learning, i.e. the effect of a given intervention. Thirdly, I show that Hattie's theory belongs to the radical constructivist paradigm. Thus, the problems of constructivism, i.e. problems of normativity and the outside world, walks directly (...) into Hattie’s concept of teaching, resulting in a double breakdown of the essence of teaching. Fourth, I argue that Hattie’s concept of feedback has a centralizing trend which ultimately has the potential to transform the country’s educational activities into a big hierarchical and data-driven organism. Finally, I show that Hattie’s reference to Karl Popper’s theory of “three worlds” is based on a highly problematic reading, where Popper’s objective world is reduced to a subset of a radical subjectivity. (shrink)

Air pollution is one of the largest environmental health risks globally but is often imperceptible to people. Air quality smartphone applications provide real-time localized air quality information and have the potential to help people learn about the health effects of air pollution and enable them to take action to protect their health. Hundreds of air quality apps are now available; however, there is scant information on how effective these mobile apps are at educating stakeholders about air pollution and promoting behavioral (...) change to protect their health. In this paper, we test how intrinsic and extrinsic motivations can enhance users’ engagement with air quality information through an app, and favor changes in protective behavior. We developed an air quality app, AirForU, with a built-in research study that was downloaded by 2740 users. We found that engagement was higher for users with intrinsic motivations, such as those who are health conscious, either because they are suffering from heart disease or other conditions aggravated by air pollution, or because they exercise frequently and want to maintain a healthy lifestyle. Extrinsic motivations such as notifications were also effective. App users stated that they frequently shared air quality information with others, learned about the Air Quality Index, and took measures to protect their health while using AirForU app. (shrink)

Go beyond reading about early learning theories and see what they look like in action in modern programs and teacher practices. With classroom vignettes and colorful photographs, this book makes the works of Jean Piaget, Erik Erikson, Lev Vygotsky, Abraham Maslow, John Dewey, Howard Gardner, and Louise Derman-Sparks visible, accessible, and easier to understand. Each theory is defined-through engaging stories and rich visuals-in relation to cognitive, social-emotional, and physical developmental domains. Use this book to build a stronger comprehension (...) of the foundations of early learning theories and become more reflective and intentional in your work with young children. (shrink)

Technology-based assessment offers unique possibilities for collecting data about students’ cognitive development and using this data to provide students and teachers with feedback to improve learning. The aim of this study was to show how the psychological dimension of learning can be assessed in everyday educational practice through technology-based assessment in reading, mathematics and science. We analyzed three related aspects of the assessments: cognitive development, gender differences and vertical scaling. The sample for the study was drawn from primary (...) school students in Grades 1–8 (aged 7 to 14) in Hungary. There were 1500 to 2000 students in each grade cohort. Online tests were constructed from 1638 items from the reading, mathematics and science domains in the eDia system. The results confirmed empirically that the disciplinary, application and psychological dimensions of learning can be empirically distinguished. Students’ cognitive development was the most steady (and effective) in mathematics where the greatest development happened in the first years of schooling. Path models suggested that the psychological dimension of learning can be predicted at a moderate level based on students’ level of school knowledge consisting of the disciplinary and application dimensions of learning as latent constructs. The predictive power was almost the same in both of the dimensions. Generally, girls developed faster in the psychological dimension of reading, mathematics and science learning; however, the size of gender differences varied by age and domain. This study (1) provides evidence that the psychological dimension of learning can be made visible even in an educational context and (2) highlights the importance of the explicit development of the psychological dimension of learning during school lessons, and (3) shows that there are gender differences in the developmental level of the psychological dimension of learning in favour of girls, but it varies by grade and domain. (shrink)

We present a game mechanic called pseudo-visibility for games inhabited by non-player characters (NPCs) driven by reinforcement learning (RL). NPCs are incentivized to pretend they cannot see pseudo-visible players: the training environment simulates an NPC to determine how the NPC would act if the pseudo-visible player were invisible, and penalizes the NPC for acting differently. NPCs are thereby trained to selectively ignore pseudo-visible players, except when they judge that the reaction penalty is an acceptable tradeoff (e.g., (...) a guard might accept the penalty in order to protect a treasure because losing the treasure would hurt even more). We describe an RL agent transformation which allows RL agents that would not otherwise do so to perform some limited self-reflection to learn the training environments in question. (shrink)

This article reconsiders the early hominid ‘‘lithic niche’’ by examining the social implications of stone artifact making. I reject the idea that making tools for use is an adequate explanation of the elaborate artifact forms of the Lower Palaeolithic, or a sufficient cause for long-term trends in hominid technology. I then advance an alternative mechanism founded on the claim that competency in making stone artifacts requires extended learning, and that excellence in artifact making is attained only by highly skilled (...) individuals who have been taught and practiced for extensive periods. Consequently both competency and expertise in knapping comes at a high learning cost for both the individual learner and the social group to which they belong. Those high intrinsic costs of learning created contexts in which groups selected cost-reducing forms of social learning and teaching, and in which specialization could develop. Artifacts and their manufacturing processes probably acquired functions as social signals—as honest signals of valuable capacities. The magnification of these signals, through competition between knappers and through inspiring later craftspeople, may account for a substantial amount of the accumulated elaboration visible in the archaeological record. Consequently lithic artifacts operated as material symbols from an early time in hominid evolution. (shrink)

Children develop in a real, messy world in which learning unfolds through time and space shared with others. Understanding how children develop in this complex environment will require a solid, theoretically-grounded understanding of how the child and environment interact—both within and beyond the laboratory. We as researchers understand the scientific value in testing children in carefully-controlled environments, but for our findings to have any impact on children’s lives we must strive to understand how the processes we study in the (...) lab operate in the real, busy environments in which children interact with peers and adults. Categories, like children, do not exist in isolation. Consequently, category learning cannot be easily separated from the learning context—nor should it be. According to a systems perspective of cognition and development, categorization emerges as the product of multiple factors combining in time (Thelen & Smith, 1994). Here we illustrate this multicausality by considering the who, what, how, where and when of categorization. In this paper, we include many different types of behaviors under the umbrella term “categorization.” To be as inclusive as possible, we consider any case in which a participant responds to how stimuli may be grouped as evidence of category learning. This includes studies of word learning (generalizing a label from one instance to another), looking preferences (to stimuli from different familiar groups), and play (exclusively touching instances from the same category). The variety of tasks that relate to category learning exemplify the importance of this fundamental process to a broad range of behaviors outside the lab.You may notice in these examples that we have not included children’s ages because, according to a systems view, research should not be about age per se. Our goal is not to create a catalog of milestones; our goal is to understand the cognitive mechanisms driving change. Therefore, we focus on the developmental level of the child. Obviously, age must be taken into account in experimental design because age is generally (but not perfectly) correlated with developmental level (e.g., appropriate motor responses differ for a 2-year-old versus 2-month-old). Our point, however, is that we will learn more about category learning if we stop asking questions such as “how do prototype representations compare between 6 and 8 months of age?” and focus instead on the underlying learning mechanisms, e.g., “what causes prototype representations to change?”Who is Involved in Learning. In the real world children learn through play and independent exploration (Hirsh-Pasek, Golinkoff, Berk, & Singer, 2009). However, in the lab children are seldom alone. This is important because children adjust their learning depending on who is providing information (e.g., the same or different experimenter, Goldenberg & Sandhofer, 2013; human or robot, O'Connell, Poulin-Dubois, Demke, & Guay, 2009; mom or dad, Pancsofar & Vernon-Feagans, 2006). Children are also opportunistic and will look for any signal of what the right answer is. For example, children will track who is present when they hear a new word (e.g., Akhtar, Carpenter, & Tomasello, 1996), whether the speaker has provided reliable information before (e.g., Jaswal & Neely, 2006) and whether a question is repeated (e.g., Samuel & Bryant, 1984). Thus, who is involved in learning matters both for learning in general and for category learning specifically. Moreover, who the child is also matters. For example, children with larger vocabularies more flexibly categorize the same stimuli on multiple dimensions (Ellis & Oakes, 2006; Horst et al., 2009); right-handed participants are more likely to associate “good” with right and “bad” with left (Casasanto & Henetz, 2012); and female participants learn phonologically-familiar novel words better than males (Kaushanskaya, Gross, & Buac, 2013; Kaushanskaya, Marian, & Yoo, 2011).What is Being Categorized. All categories are not created equal: categories vary in complexity and within-category similarity (Sloutsky, 2010). Where children draw boundaries between categories is influenced by category (object) properties, including distinctive features (Hammer & Diesendruck, 2005), number of common features (Horst & Twomey, 2013; Samuelson & Horst, 2007), visual cues to animacy (Jones, Smith, & Landau, 1991), the presence of category labels (Plunkett, Hu, & Cohen, 2008; Sloutsky & Fisher, 2004) and the presence of other objects (e.g., identical or non-identical exemplars Kovack-Lesh & Oakes, 2007; Oakes & Ribar, 2005). In naturalistic environments, categories are often ad hoc and flexible (Barsalou, 1983). For example, the category ‘toys to pick up before bed’ may be discussed every day, but each day it may include different items. Furthermore, the process of categorizing objects is not independent of the objects themselves: different objects may be more or less flexibly assigned to different categories depending on the context (Mareschal & Tan, 2007) and information available (Horst et al., 2009). Thus, in order to understand the process of categorization, researchers must ensure that the results they find in the lab are not too closely tied to the specific stimuli. Where Categories are Experienced and Tested. We know that environment matters because there are significant effects of household chaos (Petrill, Pike, Price, & Plomin, 2004), excessive classroom decorations (Fisher, Godwin, & Seltman, 2014) and environmental noise (for a review see, Klatte, Bergström, & Lachmann, 2013) on children’s cognition. Where a child lives impacts what social categories they learn and the category choices they make. For example, Black Xhosa children in South Africa prefer own-race faces if they live in a primarily Black township, but prefer higher-status race faces if they live in a racially diverse city (Shutts, Kinzler, Katz, Tredoux, & Spelke, 2011). Furthermore, where children live interacts with who they are: only infants from the statistically dominant race show “own-race” face preferences; infants from the minority race show no race preference (Bar-Haim, Ziv, Lamy, & Hodes, 2006). In the lab, location matters both in terms of where the child is and where the stimuli are. For example, children are more likely to learn names for nonsolid substances if introduced to the gooey items in a familiar highchair context (Perry, Samuelson, & Burdinie, 2014). Children also benefit when learning and testing contexts are the same (Vlach & Sandhofer, 2011) and when stimuli locations are the stable across naming instances (Samuelson, Smith, Perry, & Spencer, 2011). How and When Category Learning is Probed. Different tasks support different types of category learning. For example, yes/no questions lead to a stronger shape bias than forced-choice questions (Samuelson, Schutte, & Horst, 2009), various types of feedback differentially affect learning categories with highly salient features versus less salient features (Hammer, Sloutsky, & Grill-Spector, 2012) and highly variable category members facilitate category name generalization (Perry, Samuelson, Malloy, & Schiffer, 2010) whereas less variable category members facilitate category name retention (Twomey, Ranson, & Horst, 2014).Categorization does not reflect static knowledge; rather, category learning unfolds over time and is a product of nested timescales. Children (and adults) are constantly learning: experimenters’ distinction between learning versus test trials is arbitrary with respect to the processes that operate within the task (McMurray, Horst, & Samuelson, 2012). That is, learning continues even on test trials—in fact, participants may not realize the shift from learning to test trials. Consequently, different behaviors are observed depending on when during the categorization process category learning is assessed (Horst, Oakes & Madole, 2005). Category learning is a product of nested timescales including (a) the current moment (e.g., how similar the stimuli are on the current trial, Horst & Twomey, 2013), (b) the “just previous” past (e.g., what happens during the intertrial interval, Kovack-Lesh & Oakes, 2007; whether stimuli on the first test trial are novel or familiar, Schöner & Thelen, 2006; and trial order effects Vlach, Sandhofer, & Kornell, 2008; Wilkinson, Ross, & Diamond, 2003) and (c) developmental history (e.g., vocabulary level, Ellis & Oakes, 2006; Horst et al., 2009; Perry & Samuelson, 2011). Because children’s behavior is never solely the product of a single timescale it is impossible to create an experiment that taps only into category learning in the moment or only knowledge children brought to the lab. Each timescales is part of the time-behavior interaction. For example, Kovack-Lesh and colleagues (2008) demonstrated that 4-month-old children’s ability to form a category of cats that excludes dogs is not due only to comparison (i.e., looking back-and-forth, in the moment) or having a pet at home (developmental history), but is due to the interaction of both factors.Unexpected influences. If researchers view categorization as static knowledge, then neither the when or how should matter. Many researchers hold this view, which purports experiments are designed to test what a child knows upon arrival at the lab: trial order and trial types are largely trivial. However, as the examples we provided collectively illustrate, the impact of seemingly “nuisance” factors are not just noise in the data; they are “unexpected influences” that change behavior in predictable ways and can provide insights into the underlying processes of learning and generalization. Small variations in what children experience during category learning can have dramatic impact on how they form categories (e.g., sequential versus simultaneous presentation, Lawson, 2014; Oakes & Ribar, 2005) and differences in testing contexts can lead to indications of what has been learned (Cohen & Marks, 2002). Thus it is vital to acknowledge the impact of such unexpected influences if we want to understand how categorization unfolds over time. Subtle experimental design decisions, such as the number of test trials to include, may not seem theoretically significant, but they can have profound effects on children’s behavior. As dozens of studies illustrate, “boring” factors like counterbalancing and stimuli choice during both learning and testing can have a profound effect on findings, including trial order (Wilkinson et al., 2003), how many targets (Axelsson & Horst, 2013) or competitors (Horst, Scott, & Pollard, 2010) are presented, or the color of the stimuli (Samuelson & Horst, 2007; Samuelson, Perry, & Warrington, 2007). For example, how broadly participants generalize a category label depends on where the exemplars are presented and if the exemplars are visible simultaneously (Spencer, Perone, Smith, & Samuelson, 2011). In particular whether more or less diverse examples occur in the first block of trials influences later generalization (see Spencer et al., 2011 supplementary materials). A result like this sheds light onto the generalization process: deciding how broadly a category should be applied depends on the timing of experience with exemplars (see Oakes & Spalding, 1997; Samuelson & Horst, 2007, for similar findings). Unexpected influences may not be of immediate theoretical interest to a given experimenter, but they are still often informative—even at times vital—to the underlying processes at work (e.g., the influence of novelty on children’s selection is informative for understanding how prior memory influences current learning). Experimental designs should manipulate these types of factors as independent variables whenever possible. We recognize this can be impractical with populations that are costly to recruit, in which case such factors may be controlled for statistically, for example with item-level analyses. Outlook. Category learning unfolds across both space and time, and small differences at one moment (e.g., shared features among the stimuli; whether exemplars are identical) can create a ripple of effects on real behavior. Behavior emerges from the combination of many factors, including those not explicitly manipulated or controlled by the experimenter. To understand what causes developmental changes in behavior, we must also acknowledge and understand the processes through which these factors (sometimes unexpectedly) influence behavior in our tasks, including at short timescales. However, just as it is important to acknowledge these unexpected influences, we must not fail to see the forest for the trees. If a behavior such as category learning can only be captured in an ideal environment under carefully-controlled conditions, how much can we generalize to the contexts in which learning typically occurs? Theoretical accounts that neglect the rich influence of context in real time are too narrow to be applied outside the lab (Simmering & Perone, 2013). What we as researchers are ultimately trying to understand is how learning occurs in a real, cluttered world across time and a variety of contexts. Consequently, a solid, theoretically-grounded understanding of cognitive development will require understanding how the child (or adult) and environment interact. Only then will our theories be both comprehensive enough and sufficiently specific to reliably predict behavior and potentially intervene to prevent adverse outcomes. (shrink)

This article situates contemporary computer vision within a longer genealogy of enumeration, classification and control, tracing its colonial and capitalist inheritance. From early pattern-recognition experiments in the 1960s to today’s large-scale machine learning pipelines, computer vision has evolved into an infrastructure embedded in predictive and profit-driven regimes that aim to automate perception. Drawing on insights from critical data studies and science and technology studies, the analysis foregrounds how machinic vision operationalizes visibility as a political technology, determining who is rendered (...) legible and illegible. Against this backdrop, the article turns to artistic research as a site for counter-practices that intervene in the operative strata of computer vision, reconfiguring its technical procedures from within. Case studies presented demonstrate how artistic interventions expose the convolution of technical infrastructures and, in one case, instigate remediation by tech actors. By staging encounters where machinic perception is made tangible and contestable, these instances open space for alternative modes of seeing in new tech-saturated corporate regimes. (shrink)

Sustainability and risk management in microfinance institutions (MFIs) have become increasingly important since the global financial crisis, with a continual emphasis on how risks are identified, quantified, reported, and controlled. Machine learning is increasing in business contexts, with numerous solutions already in place and a lot more being investigated. The application of machine learning has also been suggested as a project that could aid in the modernisation of risk management functions of MFIs on a large scale. The present (...) study employs a comprehensive bibliometric analysis to better understand machine learning applications for MFIs in the Indian context. Data collection from the Scopus database has been modified from 2012 to 2023 (until December 22, 2023). A dataset of 32 papers was collected from the Scopus database using a modified search. The R language and bibliometrix are used in this paper to perform bibliometric analysis and science mapping. According to the study's findings, there has been a substantial increase in publications from 2017 onwards. We specifically found an overall growing tendency since 2017, with minor changes in recent years; nonetheless, it has continued to rise in general. Overall, an increase in the average number of citations has been visible from 2018 to now. “Finance” and “machine learning” have occurred the maximum number of times (11 times). The University of Malaya has shown increased affiliations’ production over time from 2015 onwards. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Learning Music:Embodied Experience in the Life-WorldEva Alerby and Cecilia FermIn the present age, which is often signified as post-modern or knowledge-intensive, the calls for learning echo loud. Discussions of learning, as well as teaching, permeate almost all levels and arenas of our society, and have a sure place in every-day conversation as well as scientific debate. The concept of learning can be understood and explained (...) in many different ways. Our intention in this article is to make visible and discuss how learning music can be understood and explained from a life-world approach.By life-world approach we mean that learning is constituted by the experiences that we are having in the world. From that perspective it can be seen as a process which leads to some kind of change, whose utmost purpose is—consciously or unconsciously—to create meaning and make managing the world possible. In addition, we stress that learning does not arise nor is formed in a vacuum, but instead is found in complex contexts. In turn this creates the necessity of making learning situated and contextualized.1How one understands how music is learned is consequently influenced not only by what fundamental assumptions one holds about learning but also by prevailing views of music. Furthermore, how musical ability is regarded and whether musicality is accepted as an emotional or cognitive phenomenon is also [End Page 177] important. Other assumptions that need to be considered are whether or not it is possible to divide musicality into smaller parts and if that is the case, what is the relationship between these parts. One further question that has to be illuminated is the question about biological and social influences on musicality.2 According to Sture Brändström,3 musicality is sometimes divided into two categories—absolute contra relativistic musicality. The first category implies that musicality is regarded as a native ability, already existing within the human being, an ability that some people have and others lack. The second category reflects an approach that assumes that musicality is something everybody can acquire, it can be learned and appropriated. We will return later to this issue.These questions reveal a dualistic approach, specifically: whether musicality is an emotional or a cognitive phenomenon, or absolute or relative, which in turn leads to the question of whether or not learning music is constituted within or outside the human being. To expose problems related to this dualistic approach in music education, we will examine musical learning using life-world phenomenology as a theoretical framework, a brief description of which follows.Phenomenology: A Way of ThinkingAt the turn into the twentieth century, the German philosopher, Edmund Husserl (1859-1938), named his philosophical approach phenomenology, and with that the development of modern phenomenology began. Phenomenology is both a method and a way of thought.4 He distinguished the fundamental principle of phenomenology as—'back to the things themselves.' According to Husserl it is through experiences that we gain access to things themselves. The concept of experience was essential to his formulation, and it became a key signature for the whole of phenomenology. His starting-point was how the world is experienced in a subjective way, and the aim was to find a way to describe the meaning of these subjective experiences. In other words, phenomenology has been summarized as a description of how the world is experienced by the person in the world.Various thinkers have interpreted phenomenology in different ways. Jan Bengtsson5 emphasized that phenomenological method should be named in the plural as methods. The phenomenology of the life-world, which was developed as an alternative to the so-called epoché, the special method of transcendental phenomenology, is a philosophy of the life-world without transcendental reduction. It is the life-world that constitutes the basis of our lives. It is the everyday world of our experiences, which we take for granted and where we live our lives. In other words it is the life-world that constitutes people's being-in-the-world.6 Through our existence we experience the concrete world in all its complexity, which is both historically and contextually dependent. Consequently... (shrink)

The processes whereby our brains continue to learn about a changing world in a stable fashion throughout life are proposed to lead to conscious experiences. These processes include the learning of top-down expectations, the matching of these expectations against bottom-up data, the focusing of attention upon the expected clusters of information, and the development of resonant states between bottom-up and top-down processes as they reach an attentive consensus between what is expected and what is there in the outside world. (...) It is suggested that all conscious states in the brain are resonant states and that these resonant states trigger learning of sensory and cognitive representations. The models which summarize these concepts are therefore called Adaptive Resonance Theory, or ART, models. Psychophysical and neurobiological data in support of ART are presented from early vision, visual object recognition, auditory streaming, variable-rate speech perception, somatosensory perception, and cognitive-emotional interactions, among others. It is noted that ART mechanisms seem to be operative at all levels of the visual system, and it is proposed how these mechanisms are realized by known laminar circuits of visual cortex. It is predicted that the same circuit realization of ART mechanisms will be found in the laminar circuits of all sensory and cognitive neocortex. Concepts and data are summarized concerning how some visual percepts may be visibly, or modally, perceived, whereas amodal percepts may be consciously recognized even though they are perceptually invisible. It is also suggested that sensory and cognitive processing in the What processing stream of the brain obey top-down matching and learning laws that are often complementary to those used for spatial and motor processing in the brain's Where processing stream. This enables our sensory and cognitive representations to maintain their stability as we learn more about the world, while allowing spatial and motor representations to forget learned maps and gains that are no longer appropriate as our bodies develop and grow from infanthood to adulthood. Procedural memories are proposed to be unconscious because the inhibitory matching process that supports these spatial and motor processes cannot lead to resonance. (shrink)

Teacher attrition remains a persistent concern, with decisions about whether to remain in teaching often taking shape during the pre-service phase. While recent quantitative research has identified enjoyment as a key predictor of preservice teacher persistence, little is known about how enjoyment is experienced and sustained in everyday teaching practice. Addressing this gap, this narrative inquiry explores how enjoyment functions as an emotional resource shaping a pre-service teacher’s desire to persist in teaching during a project-based learning (PBL) practicum. Focusing (...) on the narrative experiences of a pre-service English teacher, Yang, the study draws on semi-structured interviews, emotion diaries, and classroom observations collected over seven weeks. The findings show that enjoyment initially emerged from students’ engagement and visible learning, but became fragile when Yang encountered instructional uncertainty and emotional strain. Through reflective meaning-making, enjoyment was reinterpreted as something that could coexist with difficulty, enabling it to be sustained. The study reconceptualises persistence as a narrative, future-oriented professional orientation shaped through emotional experience. (shrink)

Recently, infrared human action recognition has attracted increasing attention for it has many advantages over visible light, that is, being robust to illumination change and shadows. However, the infrared action data is limited until now, which degrades the performance of infrared action recognition. Motivated by the idea of transfer learning, an infrared human action recognition framework using auxiliary data from visible light is proposed to solve the problem of limited infrared action data. In the proposed framework, we (...) first construct a novel Cross-Dataset Feature Alignment and Generalization framework to map the infrared data and visible light data into a common feature space, where Kernel Manifold Alignment and a dual aligned-to-generalized encoders model are employed to represent the feature. Then, a support vector machine is trained, using both the infrared data and visible light data, and can classify the features derived from infrared data. The proposed method is evaluated on InfAR, which is a publicly available infrared human action dataset. To build up auxiliary data, we set up a novel visible light action dataset XD145. Experimental results show that the proposed method can achieve state-of-the-art performance compared with several transfer learning and domain adaptation methods. (shrink)

This article takes a conceptual approach to an issue of pedagogical relevance—the presence of teaching and learning moments within educational environments. We suggest sources of philosophical confusions that design patterns for the classification and creation of typologies of classroom events. We identify three foundational assumptions with the way in which classroom events are analyzed: Describing a classroom event ; Devising a procedure for co-classifying events ; Repurposing decontextualized events to fit a preferred analytic model. Hitherto these assumptions have obscured (...) the phenomenal integrity of the learning environment; since the topic sought is based on critical incidents according to analysts’ interests, but not on the actual identifying details of the setting as made available by the participants. While teaching and learning moments are generic issues, in methodological terms these matters have to be explored in their details. In our article, we align ourselves with particular research approaches, namely ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, that facilitate close analysis of ‘perspicuous settings’, such as classroom interactions, through which phenomena such as teaching and learning moments are made visible as collaborative accomplishments. (shrink)

Wild chimpanzees commonly use sticks to fish for termites, ants or honey. This ability seems to be socially transmitted to juveniles by their mothers across generations. In a natural environment, the limited visibility of this behavior with regards to the extent of stick's insertion and about the success or failure in fishing hinders the study of the underlying learning processes. This study explores the discovery and learning of tool use for fishing honey in an artificial hive by a (...) group of four captive chimpanzees. The discovery of tool use was accidental and coactive. The speed with which the group of experimentally naive chimpanzees discovered and learned tool use suggests that wild chimpanzees of different populations independently discovered the fishing behavior. The alpha male and his ally learned before the subordinates. Here, trial-and-error learning was, as in monkeys, the main process allowing the acquisition of the tool-use technique. However, the observation of conspecifics allowed the orientation of the experimentation by the selection of clues. As suggested by Tomasello et al. (1987), it is the understanding of the function of the tool, i.e. the cause-effect relations between the action of the demonstrator, the type of tool and the task to accomplish which confer to chimpanzees an advantage over monkeys. (shrink)

Mariangela Ardinghelli is remembered as the Italian translator of two texts by the Newtonian physiologist Stephen Hales, Haemastaticks and Vegetable Staticks. This essay shows that her role in the Republic of Letters was by no means limited to such work. At a time of increasing interest in the natural history of the areas around Naples, she became a reliable cultural mediator for French travelers and naturalists. She also acted as an informal foreign correspondent for the Paris Academy of Sciences, connecting (...) scientific communities in Naples and France. Unlike other learned women of the time, Ardinghelli was neither an aristocrat nor a member of the ascendant middle class. The essay discusses the strategies she devised to build her authority and her choice of anonymity at the apex of her popularity, when she translated scientific texts by contemporary celebrities such as the abbé Nollet and the comte de Buffon. It argues that, in spite of Ardinghelli's historical invisibility, for her contemporaries she never became an “invisible assistant”: she constructed layers of selective visibility that allowed her authorship to be identified by specific audiences, while protecting herself from social isolation or derision. (shrink)

Les chercheurs modernes discutent de la fondation des cultes en termes humains, souvent en opposant le public et le privé, la cité et l’individu. Les Grecs eux-mêmes pouvaient également parler de cette manière, mais ils représentaient souvent l’institution du culte comme quelque chose d’initié par un dieu. C’est particulièrement visible dans les récits mythiques des fondations antiques, mais de nombreuses sources littéraires et épigraphiques mettent également l’accent sur l’apport divin. Le modèle typique ne distingue pas radicalement culte public et (...) culte « privé » (bien que cette dernière catégorie inclue différents groupes). Dans les cultes publics, financés par la polis, ainsi que dans d’autres types de cultes, un individu (pas nécessairement un citoyen) servait souvent d’introducteur du culte, de point de contact initial avec la divinité; l’introduction est ensuite sanctionnée par un oracle (une autorité divine reconnue) et, enfin, elle est officiellement incorporée dans les structures religieuses de la polis. Il existe un équilibre délicat entre l’autorité de la cité et celle de l’oracle, chacun respectant l’autre, tandis que la cité tente de réguler et de contenir l’imprévisibilité de la divinité. (shrink)

Application of artificial intelligence is accelerating the digital transformation of enterprises, and digital content optimization is crucial to take the users' attention in social media usage. The purpose of this work is to demonstrate how social media content reaches and impresses more users. Using a sample of 345 articles released by Chinese small and medium-sized enterprises on their official WeChat accounts, we employ the self-determination theory to analyze the effects of content optimization strategies on social media visibility. It is found (...) that articles with enterprise-related information optimized for content related to users' psychological needs achieved higher visibility than that of sheer enterprise-related information, whereas the enterprise-related information embedded with material incentive brings lower visibility. The results confirm the positive effect of psychological needs on the diffusion of enterprise-related information, and provide guidance for SMEs to apply artificial intelligence technology to social media practice. (shrink)

As a committee of the National Academy of Engineering recognized, ethics education should foster the ability of students to analyze complex decision situations and ill-structured problems. Building on the NAE’s insights, we report about an innovative teaching approach that has two main features: first, it places the emphasis on deliberation and on self-directed, problem-based learning in small groups of students; and second, it focuses on understanding ill-structured problems. The first innovation is motivated by an abundance of scholarly research that (...) supports the value of deliberative learning practices. The second results from a critique of the traditional case-study approach in engineering ethics. A key problem with standard cases is that they are usually described in such a fashion that renders the ethical problem as being too obvious and simplistic. The practitioner, by contrast, may face problems that are ill-structured. In the collaborative learning environment described here, groups of students use interactive and web-based argument visualization software called “AGORA-net: Participate – Deliberate!”. The function of the software is to structure communication and problem solving in small groups. Students are confronted with the task of identifying possible stakeholder positions and reconstructing their legitimacy by constructing justifications for these positions in the form of graphically represented argument maps. The argument maps are then presented in class so that these stakeholder positions and their respective justifications become visible and can be brought into a reasoned dialogue. Argument mapping provides an opportunity for students to collaborate in teams and to develop critical thinking and argumentation skills. (shrink)

The widespread adoption of learning management systems (LMS) in higher education is typically framed as a question of functionality. This paper argues that it is more fundamentally an ethical question. Drawing on Gert Biesta’s account of subjectification as the distinguishing purpose of education, we examine how LMS platforms mediate the conditions under which that purpose can be enacted. Subjectification, on Biesta’s account, is an ethical commitment that concerns human freedom and the responsibility of educational institutions toward the students in (...) their care. To understand this, we analyse mediation across the dimensions of temporality, encounter, and visibility, finding that the platforms examined consistently foreclose the conditions subjectification requires to thrive. This architecturally enacted foreclosure of educational purpose raises questions about the ethical responsibilities of institutions that adopt infrastructure configured against their deepest educational commitments, and about what students are owed in the conditions under which their education is conducted. (shrink)

In this article, we introduce the concept of tempered visibility as a lens through which to view Martin Luther King Jr.'s civil rights leadership. First, we review the academic literature on visibility and its implications for leadership. Second, we outline key moral and sociopolitical factors that enabled King to become visible. Third, we provide examples of how King intentionally increased and decreased his exposure while leading key events in the Civil Rights Movement. From King's example, the process by which (...) leaders gain visibility and the positive and negative outcomes of visibility for leaders and their change efforts is learned. This analysis extends the understanding of the strategic management of visibility as a tool that is motivated by personal goals, social pressures, and moral concerns and that is critical for managing impressions and leading social change. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Creating a Learning Space That Is Virtual and ExperientialBette E. Schneiderman (bio)The final product of the Rembrandt Project will be a Web site that is intended primarily for use by middle and high school teachers and their students. It is a celebration of Rembrandt’s work in the contexts of his time, place, and culture and all that may emanate from them. A special feature of the site is (...) the integration of art, aesthetic, and social studies education. Other articles in this issue address the rich content of the project’s work, that is, the artworks themselves, their contextual grounding, and the development of skills that maximize learning. This article looks at the creation of a learning space as a home for the development of the project. It explores issues related to learning spaces and features some of the technologies that can be used within them.The Rembrandt Project will not be a Web site that merely flattens images on a computer screen or conveys facts about Rembrandt and his oeuvre. Rather, it is a portal to a learning place with online features and opportunities for learners to have transformative experiences. Learning may occur online in electronic conversations, in opportunities to view and respond to reproductions in collections that cannot be visited in person, and in the creation and display of learners’ products. Learning is facilitated by access to a range of resources and people. Numerous announcements of activities, events, and products will be posted on the site. Some individuals will work in the space of the works themselves while others might undertake learning activities in museums, galleries, and private homes. In some cases special programs will highlight certain works and relate them to the project. Images of places in the Netherlands will also be presented with accompanying learning opportunities for those who may wish to see the paintings in person or simply ponder their influence from afar. All participants will be encouraged to share creations and reflections on the site. [End Page 38]To provide a sense of what this article is about, three cases are presented, each with two scenarios and a sample online discussion. The purpose of these cases is to draw readers into the experience of a virtual learning space before discussing contemporary learning communities, learning spaces, and technologies. The cases will show how to develop lively democratic conversation that makes communal learning possible. Participants can be of all kinds, from experts to those who simply want to learn. They can be located anywhere and participate at whatever time suits them best.Case A: Two ScenariosScenario 1: Viewing a Masterwork by RembrandtStanding before a work by Rembrandt you are drawn into its space. If you have viewed a Rembrandt in the past, recall your experience. If not, perhaps you might want to travel to a place that has one of his works or access some of his images online.1 Or you might think about a work of art that aroused your interest and prompted you to ponder its import and ask questions. Perhaps you returned to the work many times, experiencing it more deeply and differently upon each visit. What is it, specifically, about the encounter that resulted in a satisfying experience? And what changed the moment you viewed the work in a book reproduction, a slide, or a digitized image on a computer? In pursuing its purposes, the Rembrandt Project explores ways multiple skills can help maximize the experience of a wide range of works both online and off. Case A, Scenario 1, will set the stage for an experience with the work itself.Scenario 2: Viewing a Masterwork OnlineSelect a major work by Rembrandt online.2 What makes experiencing this image worthwhile, despite the fact that certain aspects cannot be captured in this flat digitized space? Upon reflecting on these scenarios, thoughts about experiencing the work may be recorded and discussed with others.3Case B: Two ScenariosScenario 1: An Experience of a LandscapeImagine wandering through an open field, tingled by a gentle breeze, warmed by the sun, refreshed by the aromas of moist grasses, mixed flowers, and the woody smells of trees. A village, visible... (shrink)

Like other parts of the social system, education is becoming an information-driven venture: data technologies pervade all levels of the system. This datafication of education seems to take place alongside a general turn to learning that Gert Biesta has called learnification: a progressively singular focus on the manipulable features of individual learning in education. Given rapidly rising levels of datafication, it seems timely to take up Luhmann and Schorr’s contention that education entails a technology deficit and discuss datafication (...) as reflection issue in the system of education. Against their argument that human learning is not amenable to a technology, I develop the counter-argument that data technologies are replacing human learning outright with data at the level of organisation. Data thus present a concretely digital form of what Raf Vanderstraeten has called education as an ersatz order. In a data-driven form of organising education, human dimensions of learning become secondary to a systemic dimension: making learning visible as data and so susceptible to databased manipulation. The text treats school-wide positive behaviour support interventions as an evidence-based exemplar of this trend towards datafication in the system of education. (shrink)

? This article is reproduced by kind permission of the author and O.E.C.D. (Paris) who are publishing the material in the series Studies in the Learning Sciences (Paris, O.E.C.D., 1975).

This contribution proposes how beholders may internally process unfinished works of art. It does so by considering five of Michelangelo Buonarroti’s interrupted sculptures and pointing out their empathic and imaginative potential. The beholder focused on the surface, I propose, is inclined to mentally simulate the artist’s gesture that drafted the sculptures through the visible graphic signs of the chisels. This inner simulation takes place within the activation of various brain networks, located in the brain’s motor system. Renaissance authors associated (...) the observation of the unfinished to learning and, as this article shows, this assumption seems to find confirmation in recent neuroscientific studies on mirror neurons and imitation learning. In this way, the empathic engagement established between the beholder and the work of art observed – as well as the role played by embodied simulation and imagination in this kind of visual perception – clarifies how the incompleteness can also have that pedagogical function recognised by Giorgio Vasari and Benvenuto Cellini. (shrink)

Interest in Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has proliferated in academic and business circles alike. In the context of CSR, the spotlight has traditionally focused on the role of the private sector particularly in view of its wealth and global reach. Other actors have recently begun to assume more visible roles in the context of CSR, including Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) which have acquired increasing prominence on the socio-economic landscape. This article examines five partnerships between businesses and NGOs in a developing (...) country context that fall in the realm of CSR. The article starts with a literature review, delineating foundational underpinnings that have to be carefully designed and crafted to promote the success of collaborative ventures. An empirical study of five selected partnerships between businesses and NGOs in Lebanon is then presented, allowing to derive interesting insights into types of existing alliances, their relational characteristics as well as salient factors considered most determinant of success or failure in this regard. (shrink)

Some regularities enjoy only an attenuated existence in a body of training data. These are regularities whose statistical visibility depends on some systematic recoding of the data. The space of possible recodings is, however, infinitely large type-2 problems. they are standardly solved! This presents a puzzle. How, given the statistical intractability of these type-2 cases, does nature turn the trick? One answer, which we do not pursue, is to suppose that evolution gifts us with exactly the right set of recoding (...) biases so as to reduce specific type-2 problems to (tractable) type-1 mappings. Such a heavy-duty nativism is no doubt sometimes plausible. But we believe there are other, more general mechanisms also at work. Such mechanisms provide general (not task-specific) strategies for managing problems of type-2 complexity. Several such mechanisms are investigated. At the heart of each is a fundamental ploy representational redescription language and culture – may themselves be viewed as adaptations enabling this representation/computation trade-off to be pursued on an even grander scale. (shrink)

Spectroscopy is a scientific topic at the interface between Chemistry and Physics, which is taught at high school level in relation with its fundamental applications in Analytical Chemistry. In the first part of the paper, the topic of spectroscopy is analyzed having in mind the well-known Johnstone’s triangle of chemistry education, putting in evidence the way spectroscopy is usually taught at the three levels of chemical knowledge: macroscopic/phenomenological, sub-microscopic/molecular and symbolic ones. Among these three levels, following Johnstone’s recommendations the macroscopic (...) one is the most useful for high school students who learn spectroscopy for the first time. Starting from these premises, in the second part of the paper, we propose a didactic sequence which is inspired by the historical evolution of spectroscopic instruments from the first spectroscopes invented by Gustav Kirchhoff and Robert Bunsen in 1860 to the UV–vis spectrophotometers which became common since the 1960s. The idea behind our research is to analyze the conceptual advancements through the history of spectroscopy and to identify the key episodes/experiments and spectroscopic instruments. For each of them, a didactic activity, typically an experiment, is then proposed underlining the relevant aspects from the chemistry education point of view. The present paper is the occasion to reflect on the potentialities of an historical approach combined with a laboratorial one, and to discuss the role of historical instruments and related technological improvements to teach spectroscopy. (shrink)

The image is the raw material of the twenty-first century. Images infiltrate all social and cultural spaces. Its digital-mediated realities drive communication, industry and knowledge. Images saturate life and adolescent learners are familiar with the participatory nature of image production and its social, educational and personal communicative realities. Vision and visibility, seeing and being now dominate how we inter-subjectively recognise ourselves and perform our world. We also find our aesthetic and embodied self increasingly constituted within imaging acts that are relational. (...) Visual culture may have colonised the self and learning, but imagination is without borders. The current pictorial turn opens possibilities to explore truth in flux through visual artistic acts. This article embeds Deleuzian method, which is one of intuitions, going beyond the actual, or our limited forms of representing life, to recognising that life has future imaginative potential forms and is always becoming. The article discusses an arts-based inquiry project for gifted artist visualiser/learners at an Australian regional university who are given broad topics on science phenomena and asked to give them expression. It suggests that pedagogies of the visual with their performative acts can prise open curriculum where an art-science interchange between two disciplines is made difficult by the current siloed nature of curriculum knowledge. Drawing on an analysis of Anika’s and Joel’s artworks and visual diaries it aims to reveal how their learning events dwell and are performed in aesthetic borderlands and how visual pedagogies forge new fluid visual borderlands and new learning. (shrink)

Rapid technological change creates a persistent alignment problem for technical and vocational education and training (TVET): curricula may be formally linked to an occupation while students still experience weak correspondence between classroom learning and contemporary work. This study examines whether perceived curriculum–job alignment is associated with career commitment among students and recent graduates of Chinese higher vocational New Energy Vehicle (NEV) programs, and whether learning experience mediates that association. A cross-sectional survey produced 354 valid responses from students and (...) recent graduates across multiple higher vocational institutions in one Chinese province. Curriculum–job alignment, learning experience, and career commitment were assessed on five-point scales. Learning experience was modeled as a second-order construct comprising teacher support, authentic resources, practice-oriented assessment, capability activation, and goal clarity. Confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling were conducted, with indirect effects estimated through 5,000 bootstrap samples. The final model showed good fit (χ²/df = 2.12, CFI =.962, TLI =.952, RMSEA =.058, SRMR =.038). Curriculum–job alignment was positively associated with learning experience (β =.41, p <.001) and retained a direct association with career commitment (β =.22, p <.001). Learning experience was positively associated with career commitment (β =.46, p <.001), and the indirect effect was significant (β =.19, 95% CI [.14,.25]). The model explained 61% of the variance in career commitment. The findings indicate that alignment becomes educationally consequential when students experience it through credible teaching, current equipment, authentic assessment, active competence development, and visible career pathways. For fast-changing vocational fields, curriculum reform should therefore connect dynamic task mapping with deliberately designed learning experiences and staged workplace exposure. (shrink)

In vision research metacontrast masking is a widely used technique to reduce the visibility of a stimulus. Typically, studies attempt to reveal general principles that apply to a large majority of participants and tend to omit possible individual differences. The neural plasticity of the visual system, however, entails the potential capability for individual differences in the way observers perform perceptual tasks. We report a case of perceptual learning in a metacontrast masking task that leads to the enhancement of two (...) types of adult human observers despite identical learning conditions. In a priming task both types of observers exhibited the same priming effects, which were insensitive to learning. Findings suggest that visual processing of target stimuli in the metacontrast masking task is based on neural levels with sufficient plasticity to enable the development of two types of observers, which do not contribute to processing of target stimuli in the priming task. (shrink)

In recent years, blended learning has grown to occupy an important space in Chinese educational practice. Policymakers have developed many application strategies and platforms and are continuing to develop BL for future use. In order to apply BL in practice, key stakeholders have been using different learning management systems, digital platforms, games, hybrid courses, and various forms of social media to create a framework for BL. This study asserts that many visible opportunities have emerged in Chinese higher (...) education through the applications of BL. The advantages of BL are that it fosters stronger academic achievement, student engagement, and cognitive engagement and understanding as well as flexible and quick communication skills, faster interaction skills, technical skills, and adaptability to ever-changing educational practices. On the other hand, BL has brought about some pedagogical and technical difficulties for both learners and practitioners. This study found that most BL courses are not as effective as they could be because they do not have a strong pedagogical framework. Moreover, BL suffers from the technical incompetence of teachers and students, the inefficiency of LMSs, and the unavailability of required resources, such as certain devices and the Internet. Some higher education institutions have become pioneers in Chinese educational practice and been able to successfully adopt BL frameworks and integrate Moodle as well as other platforms and techniques. However, many other institutions’ attempts to adopt BL approaches have not been as effective. In order to better understand how and in what ways BL is being integrated into the educational system, this study overviews the current situation and discusses the strengths and weaknesses of BL in Chinese higher education. (shrink)

The vast majority of theologians accept true news, sound senses and healthy working mind as sources of knowledge. Due to the fact that the mind is counted among the sources of knowledge, reason-based evidence has been used in many subjects. It is known that Māturīdī was the first theologian who dealt with the mentioned sources of knowledge in his work. At the very beginning of his Kitāb al-Tawhīd, he determined the ways of acquiring knowledge as correct news, sound senses and (...) reason, and elaborated them in detail. Māturīdī mostly prefers the term inference to describe the use of reason. He has proven his views on theological issues with many types of inference as well as true news and sense knowledge. These include matters related to the hereafter, too. The visible over the invisible, which is a type of inference, was used as evidence by Māturīdī to prove almost every subject. Many definitions of the method of the method the visible as an evidence for the invisible have been made. However, it is possible to understand the structure on which it is built as follows: There are areas that human beings cannot comprehend and have will no definite knowledge about. These areas called as al-ghaib “the invisible” may be related to ontological differences or may be due to differences in time and space. The difference between humans and Allah is ontological difference, and Allah is an ontological invisible for humans. While events that have not yet happened are invisible in terms of time, happenings what beyond the mountain for example, are invisible in terms of spatial difference. It is not possible for human beings to fully understand (perceive) the attributes of Allah, who is ontologically invisible. For this reason, many theologians have used the method the visible as an evidence for the invisible especially in making the attributes of Allah understandable and have tried to explain the divine attributes with this method. Belief in the hereafter is also related to the realm of the unvisible. There are a lot of revelations (true knowledge) about the hereafter. However, because of the conditions of the hereafter are different from this world, it is necessary to make the revelations about that place comprehensible. Accordingly, it is interesting how Māturīdī uses the aforementioned method to understand the nature of reward and punishment in the hereafter, which is the area of the unvisible. Māturīdī sometimes understood the verses about reward and punishment in the hereafter with their real meanings, and sometimes attributed different meanings to these verses. In this context, while dealing with the verses about the afterlife, he listed the possibilities regarding what they might mean, and included interpretations based the method the visible as an evidence for the invisible. Thus, Māturīdī tried to make the hereafter, intelligible based on human being’s experiences in this world. According to Māturīdī, the mind also has a function in understanding the hereafter. The mind has the capacity to go beyond the senses and gives us information about that field. Our mind, based on what we can perceive and understand, can go beyond itself and make inferences about the issues that are incapable of understanding. Knowing the pleasures and tortures of the world in order to understand the reward and punishment that will be given to humans in the hereafter happens in a similary way. In addition, he makes inferences based on events, situations, characteristics, etc. (visible) that people know from worldly life in order to better understand the expressions in such verses, which is quite remarkable for our study. In this context, while interpreting many verses, Māturīdī bases on the aspects of the realm of the visible similar to the realm of the hereafter. He explains the similarities of the hereafter to the worldly life, mostly through human nature, the Arabs’ perception of reward and punishment, and people’s perception of color and direction. In addition to these, he takes our knowledge, which has increased to the knowledge of observation, as a basis even though we learn through news, and evaluates the divine narrations for the hereafter on these principles. For the hereafter can be understood through things known, visible, lived and experienced in the life of this world. Māturīdī emphasizes the similarity of the world and the hereafter as well as the different aspects of the hereafter and uses these differences as a basis for his inferences. Our study is aimed at understanding how Māturīdī brings evidence to what people know from worldly life while explaining the nature of reward and punishment in the hereafter. In this context, methods such as interpretation, comparison, concept analysis, and literature review were used, and the study was limited to the books of Kitāb al-Tawhīd and Ta’wīlāt of Māturīdī. (shrink)

Hyperspecialization in machine learning creates blind spots: deep technical skill without contextual awareness. Drawing on a Grounded Theory design, data were gathered through semi-structured interviews with 153 practitioners across 50 countries. This research identifies three operational modes: Known-Unknowns (specialized focus), Unknown-Unknowns (integrated collaboration), and Crisis (forced integration). Effective performance depends on “toggling”, dynamically shifting between modes based on the problem. This cognitive flexibility helps teams transform invisible blind spots into visible knowledge gaps, enabling sustainable collaboration. Resistance or misalignment (...) signals stalled collective learning, not individual failure. The paper provides a learning-centered framework for building adaptive capacity in human-AI teams. (shrink)

Engaging civil society actors as knowledgeable dialogue partners in the development and governance of emerging technologies is a new challenge. The starting point of this paper is the observation that the design and orchestration of current organized interaction events shows limitations, particularly in the articulation of issues and in learning how to address the indeterminacies that go with emerging technologies. This paper uses Dewey’s notion of ‘publics’ and ‘reflective inquiry’ to outline ways of doing better and to develop requirements (...) for a more productive involvement of civil society actors. By studying four novel spaces for interaction in the domain of nanotechnology, this paper examines whether and how elements of Dewey’s thought are visible and under what conditions. One of the main findings is that, in our society, special efforts are needed in order for technology developers and civil society actors to engage in a joint inquiry on emerging nanotechnology. Third persons, like social scientists and philosophers, play a role in this respect in addition to external input such as empirically informed scenarios and somewhat protected spaces. (shrink)

Sketching as a scientific practice goes beyond the simple act of inscribing diagrams onto paper. Scientists produce a wide range of representations through sketching, as it is tightly coupled to model-based reasoning. Chemists in particular make extensive use of sketches to reason about chemical phenomena and to communicate their ideas. However, the chemical sciences have a unique problem in that chemists deal with the unseen world of the atomic-molecular level. Using sketches, chemists strive to develop causal mechanisms that emerge from (...) the structure and behavior of molecular-level entities, to explain observations of the macroscopic visible world. Interpreting these representations and constructing sketches of molecular-level processes is a crucial component of student learning in the modern chemistry classroom. Sketches also serve as an important component of assessment in the chemistry classroom as student sketches give insight into developing mental models, which allows instructors to observe how students are thinking about a process. In this paper we discuss how sketching can be used to promote such model-based reasoning in chemistry and discuss two case studies of curricular projects, CLUE and The Connected Chemistry Curriculum, that have demonstrated a benefit of this approach. We show how sketching activities can be centrally integrated into classroom norms to promote model-based reasoning both with and without component visualizations. Importantly, each of these projects deploys sketching in support of other types of inquiry activities, such as making predictions or depicting models to support a claim; sketching is not an isolated activity but is used as a tool to support model-based reasoning in the discipline. (shrink)

Representative for contemporary attempts to establish a science of consciousness we examine Chalmers' statement and resolution of the 'hard problem of consciousness'. Agreeing with him that in order to account for subjectivity it is necessary to expand the ontology of the natural sciences, we argue that it is not sufficient to just add conscious experience to the list of fundamental features of the world. Instead, we turn to phenomenology as the philosophy of conscious experience and give an outline of Merleau-Ponty's (...) critique of the objectivist ontology underlying science which excludes subjectivity from the world. We reconstruct his proposal for a revised ontology in The Visible and the Invisible aiming at an extended understanding of Being including subjectivity, which takes on the form of a constellation of new ontological terms centered around the concept of the 'flesh of the world'. Trying to spell out the consequences of Merleau-Ponty's ontological considerations for scientific practice and especially the science of consciousness, we notice that his philosophy of subjectivity-in-the-world on its part is unable to connect to the insights of the natural sciences. The phenomenological critique of the 'hard problem' reveals a deeper disparity which, at present, limits its practical implications. (shrink)

In this paper we aim to use the Swedish example of entrepreneurship in education as a springboard to discuss the unexpected alliance between student-centered progressive education and the commercialization of schools. In doing so we wish to highlight the effects of this alliance on the relationship between teaching and learning and, consequently, on the teacher-student relation. In order to do this, we will first examine the conditions for the commercialization of contemporary education, and its impact on the teacher-student relation. (...) Having done so, we will turn to progressive education, examining the curious link between the ideal of student-centeredness and the economization of the role of the student. The paper will conclude with a discussion on some inherent tensions visible in entrepreneurial learning, being at once an effect of the commercialization of schools and a pedagogical project firmly rooted in progressive ideals. (shrink)

All creative processes begin by establishing an end goal, the realization of a vision to be. This intended purpose is the one directing a creator’s (or an author’s) experience of immersion in a thorough process of exploration. This process establishes the author’s ontological positioning and their relationship to the desired end result. Moreover, immersion in exploration creates space for identifying the best methods for uncovering and acquiring the knowledge to help refine this ontological positioning. Beliefs and attitudes in relation to (...) the process of bringing the vision to life begin to more clearly emerge, building the grounds for epistemological inquiry. These personalized learning tools help inform the decisions made in the selection of the instruments and methods deemed appropriate for creative production. Alternatively, they can equally help in the selection of the right tools for scientific analysis and subsequent theory building. Thus, the scope of the intended result becomes more visibly delineated, regardless of its scientific or artistic nature. Finally, the ensuing strengths and limitations of these final products create a direct line of communication between the creator and the intended audience. Critiques and interpretations of the works are then issued by the public, in a dialogue that can continuously assess and reappraise these visions over time. In other words, differences in the work of creators and researchers, artists and academics begin to blur. Their projects, ideas or theories are meant to be sent out into the world in the hopes of either revealing something novel or in the hope of offering solutions to an existing predicament. Sometimes, the intended result is to spark inspiration. Other times, the work is meant to merely soothe, to offer relief of some kind. Hopefully, all proposed goals take place concurrently. (shrink)

With their intensive use of data to classify and price risk, insurers have often been confronted with data-related issues of fairness and discrimination. This paper provides a comparative review of discrimination issues raised by traditional statistics versus machine learning in the context of insurance. We first examine historical contestations of insurance classification, showing that it was organized along three types of bias: pure stereotypes, non-causal correlations, or causal effects that a society chooses to protect against, are thus the main (...) sources of dispute. The lens of this typology then allows us to look anew at the potential biases in insurance pricing implied by big data and machine learning, showing that despite utopic claims, social stereotypes continue to plague data, thus threaten to unconsciously reproduce these discriminations in insurance. To counter these effects, algorithmic fairness attempts to define mathematical indicators of non-bias. We argue that this may prove insufficient, since as it assumes the existence of specific protected groups, which could only be made visible through public debate and contestation. These are less likely if the right to explanation is realized through personalized algorithms, which could reinforce the individualized perception of the social that blocks rather than encourages collective mobilization. (shrink)

In recent years, digital tools, such as WhatsApp, have been increasingly deployed to support group interaction and collaboration in higher education contexts. To understand contemporary, digitally-mediated collaborative dynamics – including the role played by tutors and the situated nature of group development – robust and innovative methodologies are needed. In this paper, we illustrate how integrating qualitative methods with quantitative tools used in qualitative ways makes it possible to trace how tutors adapt their style to support group development, which in (...) turn triggers student development in a circular and responsive process. To make visible this contemporary phenomenon, we combine thematic content analysis – a qualitative tool – with a quantitative method: Social Network Analysis. Drawing on data generated by two WhatsApp learning groups in research exploring the collaborative construction of boundary objects in a master’s level “E-learning Psychology” course, we suggest that our methodological approach has the potential to support interrogation of complex and dynamic digitally-mediated group interactions. Our results show the situational nature of an effective tutorship style through its complex adaptation to learners’ maturity, digital tools, and learning goals. (shrink)

Fat people are often depicted in popular media as imperfect, their whole characters riddled with negative features that can be attributed only to their non-idealized body. These representations imply not only that fatness itself is aesthetically and physically imperfect, but that fatness is caused by and causes more robust character imperfections. Using Hulu series Shrill as a model, I argue that in order to address our collective distaste for fat bodies (and, by extension, our shared anti-fat bias) we must create (...) and engage with humanizing representations that show fat people as imperfect without blaming those flaws on their weight. By creating more complex fat characters, we can learn to love and accept fat people without reinforcing harmful stereotypes about fatness. (shrink)

Remote sensing (RS) has become indispensable for monitoring Earth’s processes and informing environmental and political decisions. Yet, despite a long history of critical scholarship pointing to its epistemological limits and political embeddedness, mainstream RS research and public representation continue to treat the technology as offering neutral and comprehensive insights into the planet. In this perspective paper, we revisit these critiques and argue that the celebratory narrative of RS persists and that the field has largely failed to integrate them into research (...) practice, training, and institutional culture. We center our analysis on what we call the “satellite gaze”: a socio-technical perspective shaped by four interrelated dimensions: its positionality (“gaze from where”), its ownership (“whose gaze”), its production (“which gaze”), and its object (“gaze on what”). Drawing on feminist theory and Hannah Arendt’s reflections on space exploration, we show how RS fosters an illusion of objectivity and mastery that risks reinforcing rather than overcoming structural inequalities. Through case studies from our own work and existing literature, we illustrate how technical choices, image interpretation, institutional preferences, and global-scale ambitions shape what becomes visible, what is obscured, and who benefits. We conclude that the promise of RS should not lie in mirroring the Earth “as it is,” but in cultivating plurality by acknowledging its situated knowledge production, engaging with local expertise, and confronting the political dimensions of observation. Without such reflexivity, RS risks contributing to the very alienation and inequalities if often claims to overcome. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to show the waysin which education can be centered on the bodyas the subject of experience, rather thanas an object or an absent entity. Pedagogicalpractices that emphasize a conscious awarenessof embodiment provide opportunities forstudents to learn in a holistic manner. Sincethe body is the way in which we experience theworld, mediating all processes of learning, allexperience is therefore embodied (Levin, 1985). Recognizing the body as subject of being ratherthan as object acknowledges that beneath (...) theattempts to separate aspects of our being,which often occurs in educational settings,there exists an underlying, unified being thatis not subject to separation (Welton, 1998). (shrink)

In six compelling chapters, this book recounts conversations that discuss what is ethical, why it does not occur more often, and how can we improve ethical conduct in our personal and public lives. The conversations include Knowing Ethical Principles, Learning How to Apply Principles in Practice, Moral Reminders, Accountability for Conduct, Addressing Structural Problems, and Ethical Vigilance. Major ethical perspectives are discussed in conversational format, as are fascinating ethical dilemmas taken from actual cases to evaluate and improve our ability (...) to identify ethical principles and make decisions that reflect concerns beyond self-interest. (shrink)

Thomas Reid claims to have learned of Idomenians, “an order of beings” in “sublunary regions” whose visual system is very much like ours except that they could detect only the direction of rays reaching their eyes, not the distance of origin. The properties of Idomenian vision are here examined in the light of the physiological optics of Reid’s time and of the scientific developments that have since augmented our knowledge of the discipline.

In this paper we continue an ongoing dialogue that has as its goal the critical appraisal of theoretical perspectives on culture and health, in an effort to move forward scholarship on culture and health. We draw upon a programme of scholarship to explicate theoretical tensions and challenges that are manifest in the discourses on culture and health and to explore the possibilities Bourdieu's theoretical perspective offers for reconciling them. That is, we hope to demonstrate the need to move beyond descriptions (...) ‘of’ culture to an understanding of cultures as dynamic, and to show ways cultural practices create contexts that have the potential to foster or impede health.In our early research, largely undertaken in Canada's multicultural context, we sought to make visible the ways in which culture shaped conceptions of health and influenced health practices of immigrant groups. In recent years this focus has expanded to include populations that reflect the cultural and social diversity of our region. From the outset we attempted to move towards a conception of culture as negotiated, unifying, transformative and dynamic. While this position continues to hold appeal we are continually reminded that, despite our leanings towards constructivism, there is salience to the notion of culture as having enduring elements. It is this tension between the view of culture as embodied and enduring and culture as constructed and dynamic that we seek to examine.We explore whether Bourdieu's theoretical perspective offers promise for reconciling these apparently competing views. Using exemplars from our research we share insights that Bourdieu's work has offered to our analyses, thereby enabling us to move towards a view of culture that holds in tension these apparently contradictory positions of culture as both essence (albeit unstable, negotiated) and constructed. (shrink)

In this chapter, Immanuel Kant explains the crucial role played by biblical scholars: true religion must be universal, yet the dogmas that define a historical faith are not naturally universal. He attempts to defend the role of biblical scholars as both necessary and legitimate. Kant then turns to an analysis of why biblical theologians nevertheless tend to have a negative effect on church life and why the traditional linkage between Christianity and Judaism only exacerbates this problem. He relates both the (...) “convoy” metaphor and his redefinition of faith, as grounded in one of two possible principles, to his earlier distinction between true service and pseudoservice. Kant also explores different aspects of how churches tend to be unsuccessful in such efforts and how such failures can be avoided. The chapter concludes with comments on a more affirmative topic, where Kant conveys a principle to assist visible churches in avoiding religious delusion. (shrink)