OLDaily

Engaging with an artwork leaves you and the art transformed
Miranda Anderson, Psyche, 2022/03/30

Obviously if you transform a piece of art, by, say, adding eyes, museum security are going to be called. But there's a sense, I think, in which each person's experience with a piece of art folds back into the wider social conception of that work, and it's in this wider conception where the meaning of the work is contained (it is certainly not in the work itself). This artwork, or even something so mundane as the directions to the museum, is an example of the what Andy Clark and David Chalmers "called the 'extended mind' in which the world plays an 'active role' in cognitive processes." According to this article, "Clark and Chalmers argued that, for something to become part of the 'extended mind', it should play a role equivalent to neural processes." All of the posts in today's newsletter, in one way or another, explore this idea, at least as I am reading them. (p.s. it's better with eyes. Just saying.)

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Breaking the Discipline/Degree Nexus
Alex Usher, Higher Education Strategy Associates, 2022/03/30

I've seen this idea floated in other circles and was quite suprised - but not disappointed at all! - to see it appear here: "allow the institution to offer degrees on any basis it wishes except that of disciplinarity. No history degrees. No physics degrees. Kill disciplinarity... For instance, why not have a university which has just 17-degree programs: one for each of the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals? A degree in poverty eradication would necessarily take in courses in history, politics, sociology, anthropology and economics..." I think that once upon a time long ago you could have divided occupations by academic disciplines, but not today.

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Sentence length and syntactic complexity
Don Keyser, Language Log, 2022/03/30

What I found remarkable about this post was how lucid and clear I found the excerpts from Ivanhoe to be. I've never read the novel (I will, now) but I luxuriated in the cadence of the sentence as it led me from thought to thought, drawing a picture of the story Walter Scott wanted me to comprehend. Ironic, thus, to find these as examples used to demonstrate syntactic complexity. To be sure, viewed a certain way (for example, as an exercise in diagramming sentences a la Chomsky) they are complex. But, I think, they were never meant to be understood in terms of rules and structures. Nor, I think, are most works. (p.s. I rarely use semicolons to wrestle myself into syntactic contortions, but I make liberal use of brackets and dashes to achieve the same effect.)

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How the design and complexity of concept maps influence cognitive learning processes
Felix Krieglstein, Sascha Schneider, Maik Beege, Günter Daniel Rey, Educational Technology Research and Development, 2022/03/30

The idea of cognitive load theory (CLT) is that our capacity to learn is limited and therefore we need to limit extraneous information in the presentation of learning materials. This paper (20 page PDF) applies CLT to the use of concept maps in learning, formulates some hypotheses, and studies it in practice. The result? All but one hypothesis is tossed, and the one remaining hypothesis is only tangentially related to CLT. Now before anyone jumps off the CLT bandwagon it should be noted that this is a small and unrepresentative study. It would be interesting to see the method formalized and validated and applied in a large number of diverse cases. Not that I think the results would be any different.

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Networks and Learning: A View from Physics
Adrienne Traxler, Journal of Learning Analytics, 2022/03/30

This article (9 page PDF) doesn't take us deeply into the subject but nonetheless offers an insight on learning networks from the perspective of physics education research (PER). "Insights from physics education research suggest combining social and interaction networks with other data sources and looking for finer-grained details to use in constructing networks." In particular, suggests Adrienne Traxler, if student interactions are important to the learning of physics, as they seem to be (because, Traxler observes, simply understanding the mathematics is insufficient to understanding the subject) then how might network analysis play a role in evaluating them in physics classes? Image: Koponen and Nousiainen.

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Investigating Cognitive Network Models of Learners’ Knowledge Representations
Cynthia S. Q. Siew, Journal of Learning Analytics, 2022/03/30

This is an interesting topic though it's also relatively new, so it may take some time for me to get a good feel for it. 10 page PDF. Essentially, " Cognitive Network Science (CNS) is an emerging area of research in cognitive psychology where network science techniques are used to study various aspects of cognition, including language processing, memory, learning, language acquisition, and creativity (for an overview see Siew et al., 2019)... The core idea underlying CNS is that these language networks provide a fruitful way of representing the complexity of the mental lexicon, the part of long-term memory that resides in the minds of people." CNS feels like a lot of the stuff that we've been trying to do with MOOCs, but there's a whole extra dimension where (it seems to me) the idea is that the physical representation of a cognitive network in some way mirrors a corresponding cognitive representation.

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