OLDaily

Book Symposium: Explaining Imagination — Précis
Peter Langland-Hassan, The Brains Blog, 2021/02/16

I'm not sure how deeply I'll be able to pore into what promised to be a fascinating exploration, but I'm sure some readers will be interested. Even the first few paragraphs of this précis are enough the roil the blood (quoting Fred Dretske, for example, saying "if you can’t make one, you don’t know how it works"). The context is a study of Peter Langland-Hassan's open access book Explaining Imagination (337 page PDF). There is a rich philosophical literature on mental imagery, mental representation and imagination to draw upon (I was steeped in some of it in the 1980s, including Block, Kosslyn, Pylyshyn, and more). Is imagination the sort of thing we think it is? Could we create an AI with an imagination? Is it reducible to other things (sentences? pictures?). We need a recipe, says Langland-Hassan, but "the cake recipes still all list cake as an ingredient." See also this commentary by Margherita Arcangelia.

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The Noncredit Market Curse: Adventures in a Parallel Postsecondary Universe
Richard Garrett, Encoura, 2021/02/16

I think this topic is interesting though the article could be improved. After complaining that there's no data on non-credit course statistics, he references a report entitled Noncredit Enrollment and Related Activities (61 page PDF), which describes enrollments, staffing levels, and programs. That said, to be fair, the reporting is quite uneven - Cornell, for example, reports offered 4.3 million contact hours in noncredit courses in 2012-13, but zero non-credit instructor hours. My complaint about the article is that it appears interested only in non-credit offerings from U.S. colleges and universities. But the vast bulk (I would say) of non-credit instruction is likely happening outside the college and university sector (and statistics on this are most likely not being reported on at all).

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Whatever Happened To 1:1 Laptops?
Larry Cuban, Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice, 2021/02/16

I recall referencing things like the Maine one-to-one laptop program quite a bit when it was first launched. What has happened to initiatives like that? They seem less necessary now that it seems like almost everyone has their own computing device - but we've also learned during the pandemic that this is nowhere near the case. The problem was, he writes, that surveys could not establish that students using laptops led to higher academic achievement. So much depended on how the teachers used them. "Separating the teacher from the technology, then, is illogical and, in a word, goofy." So what happened to the initiatives? They're still out there, but nobody pays attention. "An earlier generation of boosters for 1:1 had plowed the ground thoroughly for a later generation to see laptops and tablets as common as paper and pencil." Except, that is, when they don't have them.

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Will Shift to Online Classes Speed Progress Toward Student-Centered Learning?
Thomas Arnett, The 74, 2021/02/16

According to Thomas Arnett, who quotes a survey he led, the answer is yes. "Online learning," he writes, "has become the new normal in many schools. Among teachers surveyed, 83 percent reported that they were teaching either remotely (30 percent), or in a hybrid arrangement (53 percent)." he also reports that "nearly half (42 percent) indicated that their version of remote learning resembled a conventional school day’s worth of synchronous instruction (i.e., teaching live from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. over Zoom, Google Meet or Microsoft Teams)," which sounds pretty awful. And as a result, "much of pandemic-era education is falling short of its potential." It doesn't help that a lot of teachers spend even more time preparing their own material. He concludes, pessimistically, that "it’s going to take more than a massive shift to remote, online instruction for student-centered practices to become widespread."

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Thinking About Art and Aesthetic Value
Richard Marshall, 3:16, 2021/02/16

I went into this post because I wanted to think about how it presented 'value' in art. I prefer not to use economics-laden terms like 'value' and 'worth'. So I though there might be a point of criticism to be made. What attracted me is the statement that "artistic value is pluralistic, because it is a composite, second-order value... it is composed of other values without being identical to any of them: aesthetic value, ethical value, cognitive value, art-historical value among others". Here philosopher Robert Stecker is arguing that "it is not aesthetic value that is pluralistic but artistic value." Here he is separating both artistic value and aesthetic value from economic or utilitarian value (such as hiding a hole in the wall). But values cannot always be separated; that's why Stecker describes ‘value entanglement’ for cases where different values cannot be separated, for example, the sentimental and the expressive values of a song.

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