Humanization in the Digital Age: A Critique of Technophilia in Education

Despite ongoing claims that education is trapped in a bygone era resistant to innovation, educational practitioners, scholars, and policy makers have been enthusiastic about infusing technology into the everyday lives of children in schools. In the face of this dramatic uptick in the presence of technology in schools, little attention has been devoted to understanding how this constant exposure to technology is impacting the way students learn and experience the world. Overall, educational scholars and practitioners debate how, not whether, to incorporate the latest technology into schools. The centrality of technology in education rises to the level of technophilia, a world-view that sees all new technology as inherently positive and beneficial to human life. I will argue that the current landscape of educational policy and practice is characterized by a problematic relationship with technology that rises to the level of technophilia, and call for a reassessment of the relationship between education and technology in order to fulfill the demands of a robust, democratic educational program

Towards Surveillance Education: An Investigation Into the Relationship Between Surveillance Capitalism, Education, and Identity

This thesis is a philosophical investigation that tracks the increasing influence of surveillance capitalism and its relationship to changes in identity, behaviour, and the classroom to create surveillance education. Education is key in the behavioural development of students and a critical social environment in the development of self-identity. Surveillance capitalism’s practitioners could author student identity by controlling the feedback about behavioural expression in the classroom and create citizens who accept surveillance as a legitimate part of their participation in society. This places humans in the position of a simple natural resource to be stacked, sorted, and manipulated as Heidegger suggested. This thesis begins with an examination of Shoshana Zuboff’s book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism and traces the interconnected nature of these concepts. Zuboff’s arguments are refocused towards identity. An examination of how education is changing and aiding in the adoption of surveillance methods is then undertaken. This leads to the conclusion that humans are now a natural resource and that education plays role in this outcome. Possible solutions to change the course are suggested. Future areas of research are also proposed that will continue to shed light on the emergence and effects of surveillance education

Switch choice in applied multi-task management

2014 Summer.Little to date is known concerning how operators make choices in environments where cognitive load is high and they are faced with multiple different tasks to choose from. This dissertation reviewed a large body of voluntary task switching literature concerning basic research into choice in task switching, as well as what literature was available for applied task switching. From this and a prior model, a revised model of task switching choice that takes into account specific task attributes of difficulty, priority, interest and salience, was developed. In the first experiment, it was shown that task difficulty and priority influenced switching behavior. While task attributes were hypothesized to influence switching, a second major influence is time on task. In the second experiment, it was shown that tasks indeed vary in their interruptability over time, and this was related in part to what task was competing for attention as well as the cognitive processing required for the ongoing task performance. In a third experiment, a new methodology was developed to experimentally assess the role of diminishing rate of returns for performing a task. This declining rate was expected (and did result in) a general increase of switching away from an ongoing task over time. In conclusion, while task attributes and time on task play a major role in task switching in the current studies, defining the time period for theorized effects appears to be the next major step toward understanding switching choice behavior. Additionally, though the experiments are novel and certainly make a major contribution, to the extent that behavior is only represented in them, the methodology may miss some amount of `other' task behavior, such as visual sampling

Problem Solving in Teams and Groups

This project was funded by KU Libraries’ Parent’s Campaign with support from the David Shulenburger Office of Scholarly Communication & Copyright and the Open Educational Resources Working Group in the University of Kansas Libraries.This textbook covers content relevant to COMS342: Problem Solving in Teams and Groups at the University of Kansas. Content in this textbook is adapted from The Open University, OpenStax, The Noba Project, and Wikipedia. Each chapter presents the source in the top header and each chapter has its own version of the Creative Commons (CC) license, noted at the bottom of the chapter. This book (commonly called an Open Educational Resource, OER) was made possible through a generous grant through the KU Libraries. Special thanks to Karna Younger, Josh Bolick, and William Hoffman for helping with this project. This textbook is designed with several purposes: 1.The primary purpose is to save students money. 2.Additionally this book is designed to cater the class reading content to the students’ needs. 3.Finally this book was created as a text that can easily change based on the needs of the course.University of Kansas Librarie

The emperor\u27s new clothes: how the new atheists are reminding the humanities of their place and purpose in society.

This dissertation will examine the social and intellectual impact of the so-called “New Atheism” as evidenced by the writings and public careers of its four principal protagonists: evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, philosopher Daniel Dennett, journalist Christopher Hitchens, and neuroscientist Sam Harris. I will argue that the New Atheists together provide an account of reality philosophically superior to that of theism, including those superficially sophisticated variations espoused in the writings of scholars William Lane Craig, John Lennox, Allister McGrath, Alvin Plantinga, etc. Yet, even if this were not so, I would still contend that the accessible, informative, and provocative style of the New Atheists’ prose nevertheless epitomizes precisely what academic writing could and should be. Their commitment to the Enlightenment principles of philosophical objectivity, reason, and the successes of the scientific method stands in stark contrast not only to the more malleable methodology of their religious opponents, but also to the prevailing (and ideologically-conflicting) traditions of deconstructive postmodernism and post-structuralism (as exemplified in the works of Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, and others) which have greatly influenced humanities’ scholarship in recent decades. Therefore, while I very much intend to defend the substance of the New Atheists’ arguments against the various objections of their philosophical, religious, and scientific critics, I simultaneously mean to defend their stylistic choices as well (not only against their critics but also as compared to the obscurant, equivocal, and highly subjective style so often employed by postmodernists). It is my fervent hope that even those who should ultimately disagree with either the New Atheists’ assertions or my defense of them will still be able to see the value of their (and hopefully my) clear, concise brand of communication. For theirs is a style no longer widely employed within the confines of the academy. That said, I believe that the humanities disciplines of history, literary theory, cultural studies, and philosophy would greatly benefit, were they to adopt (or perhaps re-embrace) the communicative model and underlying realist epistemology of the New Atheists

Business Writing For Everyone

Business Writing For Everyone is an inclusive guide to writing in the workplace. The book takes a process-oriented, storytelling approach to composition: focusing lesson genre and more on the decisions that effective business communicators make. Business Writing For Everyone also contains interactive H5P activities for students to test their learning, and activities for further reflection that instructors can use in the classroom or assign as homework.This PDF is a representation of the book as it was on May 7, 2020. The online version may have been updated. For the most recent version, please visit the book url

What makes an interruption disruptive? Understanding the effects of interruption relevance and timing on performance

Interruptions disrupt activity, hindering performance and provoking errors. They present an obvious challenge in safety-critical environments where momentary slips can have fatal consequences. Interruptions are also a problem in more workaday settings, like offices, where they can reduce productivity and increase stress levels. To be able to systematically manage the negative effects of interruptions, we first need to understand the factors that influence their disruptiveness. This thesis explores how the disruptiveness of interruptions is influenced by their relevance and timing. Seven experimental studies investigate these properties in the context of a routine data-entry task. The first three experiments explore how relevance and timing interact. They demonstrate that the relevance of interruptions depends on the contents of working memory at the moment of interruption. Next, a pair of experiments distinguish the oft-conflated concepts of interruption relevance and relatedness. They show that interruptions with similar content to the task at hand can negatively affect performance if they do not contribute toward the rehearsal of goals in working memory. By causing active interference, seemingly useful interruptions that are related to the task at hand have the potential to be more disruptive than entirely unrelated, irrelevant interruptions. The final two experiments in this thesis test the reliability of the effects observed in the first five experiments through alternative experimental paradigms. They show that relevance and timing effects are consistent even when participants are given control over interruptions and that these effects are robust even in an online setting where experimental control is compromised. The work presented in this thesis enhances our understanding of the factors influencing the disruptiveness of interruptions. Its primary contribution is to show that when we talk about interruptions, ‘relevance’, ‘irrelevance’ and ‘relatedness’ must be considered in the context of the contents of working memory at the moment of interruption. This finding has implications for experimental investigations of interrupted performance, efforts to under- stand the effects of interruptions in the workplace, and the development of systems that help users manage interruptions

Task, interrupted: understanding the effect of time costs on task interruptions during data entry

Computer-based work often involves looking up information from different sources. Though these interruptions are required to progress with work, switching away from a task can be disruptive: it slows people down, increases errors and it is challenging to remain focused on work. This thesis investigates how interruption management tools can better support people in managing these types of work-required interruptions in the context of data entry work. The first part of the thesis reports two qualitative studies looking at understanding data entry in an office setting. They demonstrate that physical interruptions are postponed until a convenient moment in the task if they are expected to take time, but digital interruptions are addressed immediately as these are presumed to be quick to deal with. The second part of the thesis reports three controlled experiments to test the hypothesis that people manage interruptions by avoiding time costs. Results show that if people are able to learn the expected time costs of digital interruptions, they avoid interruptions with a high time cost. They reduce the number of these interruptions and postpone them until later in the task, and address interruptions with low time costs first. The third part of the thesis reports an online experiment and a field study that evaluate a design intervention showing people the duration of their interruptions. These studies demonstrate that making people aware of the time costs of digital interruptions makes people reflect on what they were doing during an interruption, reduces the duration of interruptions, and makes people faster and more accurate in completing data entry tasks. Taken together, this thesis demonstrates that people manage interruptions based on expected time costs, and that giving people feedback on the time they spend on interruptions can help them manage their interruptions better. It makes a theoretical contribution by showing how people adapt to small changes in time costs by reducing the number and duration of interruptions, and postponing them until later in a task. It makes a practical contribution by showing that giving people feedback on time costs can help them to reduce the duration of interruptions, and improve their focus on the task at hand

Mindfulness in the classroom: An exploration of teachers' perceptions of well-being in relation to mindfulness-based classroom practices

The intersection between mindfulness and well-being is particularly salient, given a nascent field of international study has grown out of interest in what mindfulness can offer to enhance human well-being. Despite well-being forming an integral part of the health and physical education learning area of the New Zealand curriculum, there is a surprising paucity of current research into teacher well-being in New Zealand, and an even greater scarcity of New Zealand based research into the potential impact of mindfulness-based practices on teacher and student well-being. This thesis aims to address this significant gap by exploring teachers’ perceptions of well-being in relation to mindfulness-based practices. Drawing upon hermeneutic phenomenology as a method of inquiry, this study reveals the essence of the ontological experiences of a group of nine New Zealand primary (elementary) school teachers as they explored the notion of well-being, considered the mindfulness construct in relation to their personal and professional well-being, interpreted and ultimately applied mindfulness principles to their classroom programmes. Data were collected in two phases over a 10 week period by way of teacher focus group meetings, in-class observations, de-briefings, and student focus group meetings. Researcher reflexivity is acknowledged through the use of autobiographical diary entries, woven throughout, as the super-ordinate themes of well-being and mindfulness are explored in relation to identity, authenticity, autonomy and ‘Being’. The findings have implications for educational theory, policy and practice. A key finding points to the development of a theory signifying the paradoxical nature of well-being as both an experience and a state of ‘Being’, and not necessarily as the result of being well. A second theory introduces the concept of authenonomy, suggesting the continuous interplay between authenticity and autonomy, when acknowledged and acted upon, may heighten teacher well-being. Finally, three broadly based categorisations of mindfulness classroom activities are presented, resulting in a framework created to assist teachers in implementing practices into their short and long term planning in manageable and creative ways. However, any such practices are not homogeneous, and need to be responsive to particular social and cultural contexts, and the character of students and schools