My talk for the ResearchEd National conference, 9th September 2023. Introduction My aim here is to show how our discussions involving many of our basic education concepts (knowledge, learning, memory, attention etc) are riddled with confusion, and how we can clear that mess up. I want to describe two specific afflictions: Logical Hallucinations: things we… Continue reading What are we on about? Making sense of educational concepts
From time to time, I get bad eczema. One winter, when I was about 16, I had quite a bad outbreak. My face looked pretty unsightly. Another kid shouted at me, ‘Urrgh! What’s that on your face?!’ A teacher overhead and had a go at the child, and they replied, ‘I’m just asking questions! Oh… Continue reading Does bullying have to be repetitive?
What do we need to know? The first signs of water appeared in the streets at about 7.40pm. By 7.50pm, garages were inundated, and cars, trucks, and lorries were being thrown around in the torrent. … As I drove back from school, the sky was black and the winds were high. The street lights were… Continue reading The Curriculum
Here we all are, underfunded, huge SEND backlogs, teacher shortages. If only there were a great wizard of AI who could help solve our problems! The government has announced it will put £4 million into a project to ‘bring teachers and tech companies together to develop and use trustworthy AI tools that can help mark… Continue reading The Wonderful Wizard of AI
In 1895, Lewis Carroll wrote a little dialogue for the Journal, Mind, in which he imagined a conversation between the Tortoise and Achilles of the famed paradox by Zeno. In this dialogue, the Tortoise challenges Achilles to make him accept the conclusion of a deductive argument. Briefly put, we’d normally accept that this conclusion follows from… Continue reading What the Tortoise said to John Sweller
The following is just a collection of notes that I've made. They're not edited or finished at all and I haven't put in citations (I have mostly drawn on Toulmin, Ryle, and AR White here). I'm posting them in response to a question from Oliver Caviglioli. Possibilities, characteristics, and necessities: rules and modal words We… Continue reading Some very rough notes on informal logic
In this third blog on the meaning of life, I want to carry on exploring different kinds of wants and goals. What is it that justifies my goals, that makes the goals themselves worthwhile. In the first blog, I discussed the distinction between meaning-as-intention and meaning-as-significance. In the second blog, I discussed terminative vs regulative goals. This left our concept map looking like this: In… Continue reading On the Meaning of Life (3): What Then?
This is my second blog on the topic of ‘the meaning of life’. In the first blog, I discussed the difference between meaning-as-intention and meaning-as-significance, and I argued that ‘life’ is really the sort of thing that would be meaningful in the second sense of the word rather than the first. That said, our sense… Continue reading On the meaning of life (2): The Arrival Fallacy
On the meaning of life I’ve decided to have a go at the big one. I mean, literally, what is the point of answering other abstruse questions about education if I’ve got no answer to questions about the meaning of life? Some people think that the question is meaningless. I’m certainly not one of those… Continue reading On the meaning of life (1)
The differences between medicine and teaching are often not a difference in degree, but in kind. We often see teaching compared to other professions, perhaps most notably to medicine. Recently, in testimony to a US Senate Committee, Robert Pondisco argued that if we trained surgeons like we train new teachers, we’d tell them ‘there’s no… Continue reading The wrong diagnosis?
Socrates: Erm, excuse me! Sorry! Hello. Professor No-Cognitive-Scientist-in-particular, I was wondering whether I might have five minutes. Professor No-Cognitive-scientist-in-particular: I’m sorry, but who are you? S: Hello Professor. I'm so sorry to bother you. My name is Socrates, I’m probably best known as a philosopher. I just wanted to ask you a couple of questions… Continue reading Socrates and No-Cognitive-Scientist-in-particular
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