Modelling human teaching tactics and strategies for tutoring systems

One of the promises of ITSs and ILEs is that they will teach and assist learning in an intelligent manner. Historically this has tended to mean concentrating on the interface, on the representation of the domain and on the representation of the student’s knowledge. So systems have attempted to provide students with reifications both of what is to be learned and of the learning process, as well as optimally sequencing and adjusting activities, problems and feedback to best help them learn that domain. We now have embodied (and disembodied) teaching agents and computer-based peers, and the field demonstrates a much greater interest in metacognition and in collaborative activities and tools to support that collaboration. Nevertheless the issue of the teaching competence of ITSs and ILEs is still important, as well as the more specific question as to whether systems can and should mimic human teachers. Indeed increasing interest in embodied agents has thrown the spotlight back on how such agents should behave with respect to learners. In the mid 1980s Ohlsson and others offered critiques of ITSs and ILEs in terms of the limited range and adaptability of their teaching actions as compared to the wealth of tactics and strategies employed by human expert teachers. So are we in any better position in modelling teaching than we were in the 80s? Are these criticisms still as valid today as they were then? This paper reviews progress in understanding certain aspects of human expert teaching and in developing tutoring systems that implement those human teaching strategies and tactics. It concentrates particularly on how systems have dealt with student answers and how they have dealt with motivational issues, referring particularly to work carried out at Sussex: for example, on responding effectively to the student’s motivational state, on contingent and Vygotskian inspired teaching strategies and on the plausibility problem. This latter is concerned with whether tactics that are effectively applied by human teachers can be as effective when embodied in machine teachers

The Enterprise of Socratic Metaethics

That human beings have the potential for rationality and the ability to cultivate it is a fact of human nature. But to value rationality and its subsidiary character dispositions - impartiality, intellectual discrimination, foresight, deliberation, prudence, self-reflection, self-control - is another matter entirely. I am going to take it as a given that if a person's freedom to act on her impulses and gratify her desires is constrained by the existence of others' equal, or more powerful, conflicting impulses and desires, then she will need the character dispositions of rationality to survive. The more circumscribed one's freedom and power, the more essential to survival and flourishing the character dispositions of rationality and the spirit may become

Animal Rights -‘One-of-Us-ness’: From the Greek Philosophy towards a Modern Stance

Animals, the beautiful creatures of God in the Stoic and especially in Porphyry’s sense, need to be treated as rational. We know that the Stoics ask for justice to all rational beings, but I think there is no significant proclamation from their side that openly talks in favour of animal’s justice. They claim the rationality of animals but do not confer any right to human beings. The later Neo-Platonist philosopher Porphyry magnificently deciphers this idea in his writing On Abstinence from Animal Food. Aristotle’s successor Theophrastus thinks that both animals and humans are made up of same tissues and like a human, animals also have the same way of perception, reasoning and appetites. My next effort would be to decipher how Porphyry illustrates Theophrastus’ perspective not in the way (the technical theory of justice) the Stoics argued. Porphyry’s stance seems more humanistic that looks for the pertinent reasons for treating animal rights from the contention of justice that Aristotle in his early writings defied since the animals can deal with reasons. The paper highlights on how much we could justificatorily demand the empathetic concern for animals from the outlook of the mentioned Greek thinkers and the modern animal rights thinkers as quasi-right of animals, even if my own position undertakes the empathetic ground for animals as an undeserving humanitarian way

An Analysis of the Suitability of Philosophy as a Core K-12 Public School Subject

In 2005 Michael Katz invited philosophers of education to reinvigorate the inquiry into what is required to provide a proper education for everyone to lead a productive life. In the literature review, I analyze the suitability of philosophy in teaching K-12 students how to think and reason logically—essential abilities for a productive life. I also examine the educational landscape through the philosophy of Nicholas Rescher’s Cognitive-Values Theory and address the value of learning philosophy. I present a Philosophical Dialectic that shows how epistemic diversity (aporetic clusters) justifies making philosophy a K-12 core subject while analyzing philosophers’ reasons for including philosophy as a core K-12 public school subject. Finally, I assess the Philosophical Dialectic by applying the Heuristic-Systematic Model. Because cognition and metacognition require training the mind, I show how philosophy is most suited to provide this systematically. I assess how Artificial Intelligence (general and generative) is interrupting pedagogy and how a K-12 philosophy curriculum can both mitigate and harness this positively. I demonstrate the importance of neuroscientific research and why this must inform curriculum construction. In Chapter Three, I provide a Scope and Sequence for a Philosophy K-12 curriculum to demonstrate how logic, reasoning, and critical thinking develop students’ cognition and metacognition. I present reasons why philosophy has become the elephant in the room, even though it is the subject best suited to teach children systematically how to think well. I present a rationale for why colleges of education must recruit trainee teachers educated in philosophy to be trained as philosophy teachers and why philosophy should be a core K-12 subject

Young children's research: children aged 4-8 years finding solutions at home and at school

Children's research capacities have become increasingly recognised by adults, yet children remain excluded from the academy, with reports of their research participation generally located in adults' agenda. Such practice restricts children's freedom to make choices in matters affecting them, underestimates children’s capabilities and denies children particular rights. The present paper reports on one aspect of a small-scale critical ethnographic study adopting a constructivist grounded approach to conceptualise ways in which children's naturalistic behaviours may be perceived as research. The study builds on multi-disciplinary theoretical perspectives, embracing 'new' sociology, psychology, economics, philosophy and early childhood education and care (ECEC). Research questions include: 'What is the nature of ECEC research?' and 'Do children’s enquiries count as research?' Initially, data were collected from the academy: professional researchers (n=14) confirmed 'finding solutions' as a research behaviour and indicated children aged 4-8 years, their practitioners and primary carers as 'theoretical sampling'. Consequently, multi-modal case studies were constructed with children (n=138) and their practitioners (n=17) in three ‘good’ schools, with selected children and their primary carers also participating at home. This paper reports on data emerging from children aged 4-8 years at school (n=17) and at home (n=5). Outcomes indicate that participating children found diverse solutions to diverse problems, some of which they set themselves. Some solutions engaged children in high order thinking, whilst others did not; selecting resources and trialing activities engaged children in 'finding solutions'. Conversely, when children's time, provocations and activities were directed by adults, the quality of their solutions was limited, they focused on pleasing adults and their motivation to propose solutions decreased. In this study, professional researchers recognised 'finding solutions' as research behaviour and children aged 4-8 years naturalistically presented with capacities for finding solutions; however, the children's encounters with adults affected the solutions they found

The Socratic challenge: reinventing Socratic irony's educational character

Irony is commonly defined as ‘the use of words that say the opposite of what you really mean, often as a joke and with a tone of voice that shows this’ (Oxford, 2000). Expanding the term’s focus from being merely linguistic to also including ironic action and serving philosophical conceptualisation, the same applies for Socratic irony (eironeia), which is furthermore traditionally related to mockery and deceit and, therefore, inextricably connected to a negative overtone and an unfavorable portrayal of Socrates when he exercises it. My research aims to reevaluate the significance of the philosophical use of eironeia as a phenomenon in Socrates’ methodology and support the claim that Socrates used all his tools – eironeia included – in an attempt to serve a novel pedagogical scheme, that of building his interlocutors’ epistemic character. This thesis attributes to Socratic eironeia a definitional refinement and a justified characterization as an epistemic device that can and should be fruitfully inserted in contemporary education. Socrates’ methodology is chiefly pedagogical but not in a conventional way since Socrates admits that he was not a teacher – at least not in the ordinary sense (“I have never been anyone’s teacher”, Apology 33a). He was, however, a certain type of educator, an ‘architect’ of the interlocutors’ intellectual character. In this epistemic mechanism eironeia works as a ‘sting’ and serves the purpose of enhancing the agent’s motivational feelings not to give up inquiry – after the state of aporia created by the elenchus hits them – but rather to eagerly desire to keep searching for truths. Firstly, my thesis focuses on eironeia’s refinement and presents a defense against the misjudgment of the concept as a linguistic phenomenon, which merely indicates a twist between words, actions and meanings with a connotation of mockery, deceit or humiliation. I will develop the unpopular theory that well-known scholars suggested when they innovatively separated the concept of eironeia from mockery and brought it closer to its interpretation as a device for profitable philosophical quest. And since in philosophy novel interpretations tend to flag disputes, I present an overview of the debate on whether eironeia can have constructive applications or not. Second, I proceed in justifying eironeia’s beneficial character through Aristotle’s understanding of Socrates as an eiron, focusing on eironeia’s function as a speech act and delineating its motivational aspect when employing it in a conversation with an agent, or a student. I establish that Socrates was not an arrogant boaster, as often stated, but rather a self-depreciator who intentionally understates his authority as part of his method. After embracing eironeia’s positive nature, my thesis moves on to defend Socrates’ knowledge of the good (aretē) against the assertion that his ignorance was honest and, consequently, his eironeia not significantly deep. For the purposes of this argumentation I appeal to Aristotle’s Virtue Ethics and his particularist understanding of morality, which further illuminates Socrates’ method when considering the nature of virtue, hence the nature of his subject teaching. Finally, this brings my thesis to the position of defending Socrates as a teacher not in the commonly held sense but as a peculiar type of educator that builds our epistemic character. The last section of this research enhances our understanding of Socratic Intellectualism and the crucial role it plays in decoding his technique, especially when camouflaged behind the eiron’s mask. Conclusively, I introduce Socrates as an Intellectual Character Builder, who uses eironeia essentially as a motivational tool to enhance the addressee’s disposition to discover truths and not give up in their inquiry. I shall call his technique The Socratic Challenge

Educational strategies meet the needs of Juvenile offenders

This study shows how correctional educators incorporate traditional as well as nontraditional teaching methods to address the specific problems associated with juvenile offenders

Self-Knowledge and Epistemic Virtues: Between Reliabilism and Responsibilism

This paper is about the role of self-knowledge in the cognitive life of a virtuous knower. The main idea is that it is hard to know ourselves because introspection is an unreliable epistemic source, and reason can be a source of insidious forms of self-deception. Nevertheless, our epistemic situation is such that an epistemically responsible agent must be constantly looking for a better understanding of her own character traits and beliefs, under the risk of jeopardizing her own status as a knower, ruining her own intellectual life

A call to action for librarians: Countering conspiracy theories in the age of QAnon

Librarians empower learners to become discerning citizens through a set of diverse skills and literacies. To cultivate critical thinkers, librarians continue to build innovative practices, even as technology rapidly evolves. However, the pervasiveness of misinformation and disinformation, most recently seen in the conspiratorial worldviews of QAnon, challenges librarians to center critical thinking in their information literacy praxis. In this article, we provide a concise overview of QAnon and the problems that contemporary internet conspiracy theories like it pose. We offer an epistemological shift for information literacy, from heuristics to mindsets and behaviors, drawing on disciplines external to librarianship. Finally, we consider the role that emotions play in the promotion and spread of conspiracism. Equipping librarians with a better understanding of conspiracy thinking and the tools to counter it will in turn empower the next generation of critical thinkers

What Rome Really Adopted from Ancient Greece

The Roman conquest of the Greek city-states and the appropriation of many aspects of its culture, especially architecture and art, is well known. But what of the many great philosophies that began in the various city-states of Ancient Greece? This piece is made in attempt to answer this question. The scope of these sources will start with the beginning of the Western Philosophical Tradition, with Thales of Miletus and the Milesian, all the way up to, but not including, the foundation of the Christian Philosophical Tradition. After the year 146 BC if a philosopher is born in a Greek-City state, they are to be considered Roman due to their induction into the Roman civilization. To this end, this text will be using translated original philosophical pieces, biographical articles and pieces, relevant historical data, and collected overviews of philosophical schools as sources. Using these sources the philosophies of Ancient Greece will each be described and have a representative appointed or each of them. Following this, the same procedure will be undertaken for the philosophies of Ancient Rome. After the outlining of these philosophies they will then be brought into comparison with one another, trying to track the lineage of a philosophy if possible, or even pairing up possibly unrelated philosophies that share distinct similarities. It is then that the philosophies will be compared and contrasted, their differences and similarities brought into light and reflected on before a final conclusion as to what Ancient Rome really adopted from Ancient Greece is drawn