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New Paper in Draft: Dispositionalism, Yay! Representationalism, Boo! Plus, the Problem of Causal Specification
Eric Schwitzgebel, The Splintered Mind, 2023/01/25

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I totally agree with this. "We should be dispositionalists rather than representationalists about belief," writes Eric Schwitzgebel. "According to dispositionalism, a person believes when they have the relevant pattern of behavioral, phenomenal, and cognitive dispositions. According to representationalism, a person believes when the right kind of representational content plays the right kind of causal role in their cognition. Representationalism overcommits on cognitive architecture, reifying a cartoon sketch of the mind."

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Niagara Falls bets on a new private university for economic growth — University Affairs
Moira MacDonald, University Affairs, 2023/01/25

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Here we read, "In an effort to revitalize its long-neglected downtown core, the Ontario city has partnered with an international business group specializing in higher education." I just want to take this moment to warn that any private enterprise, including a private university, will be looking only for cheap land and subsidies, not to revitalize a downtown economy. It would be an error to expect anything different.

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Why AI surveillance at work leads to perverse outcomes
Karen Levy, Psyche, 2023/01/25

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We don't use AI tracking of employees where I work, at least, not so far as I know. But our managers spend a great deal of time tracking performance in order to maximize productivity, and I can speak from experience about the results. Something like this: "in practice, these systems can perversely disincentives workers from the real meat of their jobs – and also results in them being tasked with the additional labour of making themselves legible to tracking systems." It also creates perverse incentives (like developing systems to jiggle the mouse) and creates "psychological burdens... raising stress levels and impeding creativity." You have to expect similar results in learning environments.

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Why PID Strategies Are Having A Moment - And Why You Should Care
Alice Meadows, The Scholarly Kitchen, 2023/01/25

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"It feels increasingly like the adoption of persistent identifiers (PIDs) and, critically, the metadata associated with them, are at a tipping point," writes Alice Meadows. As Phill Jones says, "systems like ORCID single sign-on and metadata registries won't remove all administrative burden, but they will eliminate much of it." But crucially, "no one benefits until everyone benefits. Whatever the approach to expanding PID adoption and integrations, it's in everyone's interests to ensure that smaller and/or less financially secure organizations can participate on an equal footing with their larger, wealthier counterparts." And while Meadows doesn't say so explicitly, large publishers have been unwilling to share with the wider community, which has from my perspective long been a stumbling block.

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One expert on what students do wrong
Jill Barshay, The Hechinger Report, 2023/01/25

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This article - an interview with Dan Willingham - is far too short. It would also be helpful to have the text of Willingham's recommendations, but of course the book isn't open access. Still, we get a sense of what he has been up to lately. As the author reports, Willingham's career has revolved around  frequently engaging in pop culture battles armed with (selected) academic research about learning styles, critical thinking, phonics, and other ideas favoured by an instruction-based community out there. In his current work he proposes a set of almost 100 tips for how to be a better student, some of which are research-based. The points highlighted centre on studying by probing your memory - in other words (and as expressed differently by people outside that community) activity-based learning. That is, using your knowledge rather than just reviewing it.

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We publish six to eight or so short posts every weekday linking to the best, most interesting and most important pieces of content in the field. Read more about what we cover. We also list papers and articles by Stephen Downes and his presentations from around the world.

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