K-State First: A Proposal to Create a First-Year Program at Kansas State University

K-State First, University's First Year Experience ProgramA proposal to start a first-year student experience program at Kansas State University. The report provides an outline of recommendations for the implementation of the program, research regarding first-year retention and graduation rates, a summary of the proposal, and a future vision

A New Vision of Liberal Education: The Good of the Unexamined Life

Alistair Miller’s book, A New Vision of Liberal Education, is a dilation of his doctoral thesis, but it is enormously ambitious in aim: “My specific aim in this book is to explore whether aspects of the two traditions [of Enlightenment and Aristotelian ethics] might be synthesised in the concrete form of a liberal-humanist education” (NVLE, 11). Indeed, the arc of Miller’s argument ranges from these contrasting traditions of moral philosophy, through alternate versions of liberal education, to a proposal for curricular content. The book is well researched and proceeds dialectically, as Miller sifts through scholarship on liberal education, moral education, and curricula, oscillating between exploratory analysis and prescription. With an abundance of arguments, Miller’s “new vision” emerges from a series of intellectual hybridizations. The overarching motivation for Miller, however, is to describe an educational vision that is “liberal” and yet embraces the goodness of ordinary experience — “the unexamined life” — and thereby to reject the presump- tion that human flourishing requires a philosophical or intellectual life. Whether his hybrid vision is conceptually stable; whether and how his vision is “new”; whether the exploration succeeds in its ambitions — all issues I will discuss — Miller advances a serious and provocative set of proposals for educational theory and practice. [excerpt

Seeing, Sensing, and Scrutinizing

Large changes in a scene often become difficult to notice if made during an eye movement, image flicker, movie cut, or other such disturbance. It is argued here that this <i>change blindness</i> can serve as a useful tool to explore various aspects of vision. This argument centers around the proposal that focused attention is needed for the explicit perception of change. Given this, the study of change perception can provide a useful way to determine the nature of visual attention, and to cast new light on the way that it is—and is not—involved in visual perception. To illustrate the power of this approach, this paper surveys its use in exploring three different aspects of vision. The first concerns the general nature of <i>seeing</i>. To explain why change blindness can be easily induced in experiments but apparently not in everyday life, it is proposed that perception involves a <i>virtual representation</i>, where object representations do not accumulate, but are formed as needed. An architecture containing both attentional and nonattentional streams is proposed as a way to implement this scheme. The second aspect concerns the ability of observers to detect change even when they have no visual experience of it. This <i>sensing</i> is found to take on at least two forms: detection without visual experience (but still with conscious awareness), and detection without any awareness at all. It is proposed that these are both due to the operation of a nonattentional visual stream. The final aspect considered is the nature of visual attention itself—the mechanisms involved when <i>scrutinizing</i> items. Experiments using controlled stimuli show the existence of various limits on visual search for change. It is shown that these limits provide a powerful means to map out the attentional mechanisms involved

User Experience Modeling Method for a Vision of Knowledge Graph-based Process Automation

This research proposes a User Experience modelling method which is an early-stage component of a research project’s vision of innovating Robotic Process Automation with the help of Knowledge Graphs and Natural Language Processing. The core idea is to integrate, in RDF graphs, a representation of the user experience and contextual information about the organization and relevant data sources for that experience. Existing RPA tools use workflow repositories that employ XML-based descriptions for both processes and UI elements. They also provide built-in workflow designers that are not tailored for design-time analysis (e.g., model queries, reporting, reasoning) but instead are just raising the abstraction level of traditional scripting – from writing code to visually connecting pre-programmed pieces of functionality. The proposal detailed in this paper makes use of Domain-Specific Modeling Language engineering to repurpose an open source BPMN implementation for describing User Experience. We rely on a metamodeling platform to ensure that the resulting diagrams are also machine-readable and take advantage of an existing plug-in to make them available as RDF graphs that can be used by other components of an automation architecture. The paper focuses on the modelling method and tool as one of the early steps of the project’s vision

Blur and perceptual content

Intentionalism about visual experiences is the view according to which the phenomenal character of a visual experience supervenes on the content of this experience. One of the most influential objections to this view is about blur: seeing a fuzzy contour clearly and seeing a sharp contour blurrily have different phenomenal character but the same content. I argue that this objection does not work if we understand perceptual content simply, and not particularly controversially, as partly constituted by the sum total of perceptually attributed properties, some determinable, some determinate

From Collection Analysis, to Reimagined Spaces: How One Collection Management Project Led to Enhanced Student-centered Spaces

In October 2017, the CALD (Council of Academic Library Directors) reviewed a proposal for a cooperative approach to managing print collections. One objective in the proposal is to “[a]llow participating libraries to reclaim space for local needs and other purposes that are beneficial for their community members.” As more libraries evaluate their space needs versus maintaining large collections of print materials that are not circulating, this presentation will provide an overview of one academic library’s experience in reclaiming and repurposing space for much-needed teaching as well as learning spaces. This presentation will provide background on our collection analysis project, our original goals, our vision, and how a fortuitous need elsewhere on campus led to the development and completion of an entire new look on the second floor of the DeWitt Wallace Library, Macalester College in less than 8 months. Participants in this session will have an opportunity to imagine a space in their own libraries and identify how they might create “neighborhoods” for development; Neighborhoods being spaces such as those to reflect, tinker, meet, collaborate, learn, and showcase

Neural correlates of consciousness are not pictorial representations

O'Regan & Noe (O&N) are pessimistic about the prospects for discovering the neural correlates of consciousness. They argue that there can be no one-to-one correspondence between awareness and patterns of neural activity in the brain, so a project attempting to identify the neural correlates of consciousness is doomed to failure. We believe that this degree of pessimism may be overstated; recent empirical data show some convergence in describing consistent patterns of neural activity associated with visual consciousness