Speculation: The Future(s) of a Global Education Market

This dissertation establishes a structural understanding of what is necessary to imagine in material terms the future of how education will be financed and how education knowledge will be circulated on a global scale. Making explicit a governmentality perspective for examining neoliberal constructions of education policy and practice first, this dissertation applies that perspective to understanding the trajectory of World Bank policies on financing and governing education over the last twenty years. While the first three chapters draw on existing conceptual and policy work, the chapters combine aspects of them in new ways which reveal a clear understanding of an economic government of education and how it is operationalized by World Bank policy. The latest iteration of this economic government of education is the World Bank’s Systems Approach for Better Education Results, SABER, examined in detail in Chapter 4. Speculations on futures of education finance and knowledge circulation are made plausible because of the work of earlier chapters, when put side by side with emerging online social technologies examined in the final chapter. The dissertation concludes that a social economy for finance and policy construction may emerge, the distinction between education and economic knowledge will likely continue to collapse, but that the balance between social and economic capital could be rebalanced compared to its current dynamic in this field

Time, Knowledge, and Choice (PRELIMINARY REPORT)

Abstract. This article considers the link between theory and practice in agentoriented programming. We begin by rigorously defining a new formal specification language for autonomous agents. This language is the expressive branching time logic CTL  , enriched by the addition of two further modal connectives, for representing knowledge and seeing to it that (stit). These connectives are grounded: given a concrete semantics in terms of the states and actions of an agent. This grounding makes it possible to establish a precise relationship between the specification language and deterministic automata, and in particular, the automatic synthesis of agents from logical specifications becomes a possibility. This possibility, and the potential problems associated with it, are discussed at length. The paper closes with a summary of future research issues and directions.