philosopher1978

The most popular policy initiative in the world of OER is proving to have considerable appeal to a range of stakeholders.  Here’s a concise expression of it, courtesy of David Wiley, Cable Green, and Louis Soares at Center for American Progress.  (The arguments are developed further in Game Changers: Education and Information Technologies.)

We need to help policy leaders understand the affordability and flexibility of the digital world, and how public investments in educational resources, data, research, and science must be openly licensed and shared for the public to get its full return on investment. Finally, all governments—national, state, county, and local—along with educational institutions must adopt a simple public policy: “Publicly funded resources are openly licensed resources.” This means that if public investment helps create an educational resource, then that content is published under an open license… Because we know how to do this, and it is all but free to do so, we have a moral obligation and ethical responsibility to act.

The language is which this policy is couched is quite striking.  Not only is it merely prudential for us to adopt open policies, the authors contend, but it is a matter or moral and ethical obligation.

I’m not in any way trying to impede the incredible progress that the open educational movement is making.  It’s a fundamentally egalitarian position, and appeals to the principles of democracy and transparency in a way that I find welcome.  But it does seem to me that the central claim deserves further investigation.

The basic maxim seems to be sound.  Given that members of the public have already funded research through taxpayer contributions, it is unjust that they should be required to pay again to access the results of research, especially when these additional monies simply go to line the pockets of a publisher who asserts copyright over a journal publication or college textbook.  There’s no good reason to make taxpayers pay twice in order to preserve the profit margins of the publisher when all of the meaningful work is being done by academics who work largely for free.  Taxpayers, it is quite rightly suggested, should not have to pay to access research that they have effectively already paid for once.

By arguing along these lines, proponents of open policy make the issue one of justice.  (Contrast with the form of prudential arguments. Prudential arguments appeal to the interests of the parties involved, while arguments based on an idea of justice typically make no reference to self-interest.)  There is no necessary reason why justice and self-interest should coincide (though they often do).

The idea of justice implicitly appealed to by Green, Wiley and Soares has a certain symmetry to it:  because I am a taxpayer who has funded the production of educational materials I deserve to have access to them.  In return for ‘us’ (the public) funding these materials we require that they be openly licenced in a way that enables ‘us’ (the public’) to access them.

I consider this to be a neat contribution to the present debate about open policy.  However, the situation is not quite as clear as the proposed maxim suggests.

As I see it, the argument relies on the supposition that on the supply side there is a generally homogeneous group (‘the public’) which is correlate to the public domain within which consumption of educational materials takes place.  In practice, of course, this is rarely the case.  The first thing to note is that taxpayer groups tend to be defined by geographical location.  If we follow the justice-logic of the argument we may conclude that, for example,  American taxpayers have a right to access the research that their tax dollars have paid for.  But it’s not so clear that, for example, British taxpayers have a right to access the research that has been funded by American taxpayers.  So when we hear that all publicly funded materials should be publicly available, I find myself wondering ‘which publics?’  There may be good (prudential) reasons for sharing medical research discoveries among a global research community regardless of who has funded the research.  But it’s not so clear that the funders of that research are obligated to so do, regardless of how much of a good thing it would be if they were to.  (This is not the same as saying that they have no obligations.)  Failing to share everything that has been publicly funded on an open licence is not necessarily the same thing as moral failure.

One way around the objection is to subvert or disregard national boundaries (probably easier in principle than practice).  What is effectively implied by the belief that whenever any publicly funded works are produced they should be so done for the benefit of all publics everywhere is the idea of global citizenship.  This might not be a bad way for open policies to develop, but remains largely unrecognised in the current discourse around open policy.  It seems to me quite possible that one could agree with the ‘symmetry’ principle while maintaining that they are not obligated to share with anyone outside their own national context without provoking any kind of self-contradiction.  Similar issues could conceivably arise at a national level in the context of federal/county.

Now it might well be that the germ of trans-nationalism is there within the open education movement as a whole.  (After all, digital technologies are no great respecter of national and international boundaries.)  But it seems to me that it needs to be made absolutely explicit if open policies are to meet the ‘which publics?’ objection.

Here are some photos I took of the poster exhibition at Cambridge 2012 (#cam12).  They might be of interest if you weren’t able to visit yourself.  I do wonder why there isn’t a digital version of the poster exhibition as a standard conference procedure.  My first thought was that it would certainly increase exposure but that organisers still feel the need to encourage meat into the room (so to speak).  But in an appropriately ‘open’ fashion, the full proceedings of the conference (including video recordings) are made available online (ours are here).

This is a re-post from my neglected first blog, where I tried to get my head around blogging and how it might be used to help me to focus my research.  I posted a lot of different stuff, learning how to publish different types of media online.

I’m not sure how useful the experience of blogging was in terms of my PhD research (although it did help me to grips with the flow of information about jobs, conferences and bursaries).  I think that some of the material should probably have a home here, starting with this.  But first, the comments from the original posting…

Axel Honneth spoke in London last week as part of the Forum for European Philosophyseries of ‘Conversations’. He was talking to Peter Dews, and the conversation spanned from his confessions of undermotivated scholarship in the 1960s to a brief discussion of his latest work on reification. The talk – which was both interesting and informal – took place at the London School of Economics on 22nd March 2007. Here is my transcript of the event (which includes some of my own notes and should not be taken as a verbatim reconstruction of what was said).

Peter began by asking Axel about the origins of his interest in philosophy. Axel was candid enough to admit that he had not always been the most diligent of students, and his interest in philosophy was not something that had always been with him. In fact, his interest in philosophy began with the kinds of existential questions raised in novels and dramas during the 1950s, like Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller.

Honneth was at the University of Bonn at the end of the 1960s. At this time, he was obliged to read the traditional works of philosophy. He described the climate at the time as “conventional”, and populated by the remnants of scholars from the Nazi period whose survival can be attributed to the lack of opposition they presented.

Honneth studied at the Hegel Archives in the late 1960s. The Archives attracted a range of radical thinkers, and the atmosphere was somewhat politicized. It was at this time that Honneth’s involvement in the student movement began, and he joined the Social Democratic Party (SDP), which he found too Trotskyist. In 1972 he went to Berlin, leaving the SDP. He decided to join an anti-authoritarian movement which included Oskar Negt and other students of Habermas who were unconvinved by revolutionary politics. Honneth did not share the Marxist belief that the proletariat would be the agency of revolutionary change.

At this point, Peter noted that Honneth’s early work is nonetheless Marxist in orientation, albeit non-revolutionary. Honneth reiterated his doubts over the epistemological foundations of Marxism, which led him to sympathise with Popper’s critical rationalism. These two concerns – in Marxism and Critical Theory on the one hand, and the need for a robust epistemology on the other – would be found in synthesis in Habermas’s Knowledge and Human Interests (and particularly in “On the Logic of the Social Sciences”).

The political climate at the time meant there was something of an ideological divide between the radically Marxist elements in Berlin and the more theoretical approach of the Institut für Sozialforschung in Frankfurt. Honneth’s interest in the group led to him being derogotarily refered to as a ‘Habermasian”, though he had yet to meet Habermas himself.

After attending an Althusser reading group in Berlin, Honneth wrote a critical piece entitled “History and Interaction: On the Structuralist Interpretation of Historical Materialism” (which can now be found in Althusser: A Critical Reader). On the basis of this piece, Habermas invited Honneth to become his research assistant. Honneth wrote a thesis on Habermas, Foucault and Adorno (which would later becomeCritique of Power) in the attempt to reconcile strands of contemporary French and German thought.

Peter Dews noted that it has become common to view French and German thought as having undergone something of a divergence during the 20th Century, with French thought taking its lead from Nietzsche and Heidegger, while German thought retained something of a committment to a rational tradition. Adherents of these positions have often criticised each other for being politically dangerous and authoritarian respectively.

Honneth said that he was never convinced by the 1980s opposition between the Habermas of The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity and various Paris groups which attempted to hold on to a certain idea of rationality while remaining skeptical about universal rationality. He described this as an unhelpful, misleading concentration which has, happily, been abandoned.

In Honneth’s view, the rational potentiality and normative force of interaction can be found throughout the French and German traditions and, in fact, each points to frictions or tensions within the other.

Peter then asked about the genesis of Honneth’s own theory of recognition. Honneth made it clear that he thought Habermas’s attention to the realm of communicative reason (rather than production or instrumental reason) hd been the right one, and was substantiated by the phenomenology of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. The problem, as he saw it, was that the linguistic structure of communication does not provide an adequate pespective on actual social interaction. Honneth developed this thought by researching sociological theories of class interaction, and the psychological elements of social interaction like resepect/disrespect, conflict, shame and recognition. These phenomena, Honneth contends, are not really touched by the Habermasian model.

The emphasis, therefore, for Honneth, is one sense away from the abstract and towards the mundane. Although his project began as supplemental to the Habermas’s theory of norm-justification, it has taken on an Hegelian life of its own with the reconstruction of Hegel’s theory of recognition. For Hegel, forms of life are historical, and hence historical forms of reason structure the interactions of subjects. In contrast to Habermas’s simplistic, abstract conception of interaction, the theory of recognition offers the possibility of understanding social interaction as it is experienced. Honneth sees himself as radicalising Hegel’s project of ‘ethical life’ (Sittlichkeit). Habermas, on the other hand, has become increasingly focused on a post-Kantian, dialogical theory of rationality.

In response to this discussion of historical forms of subjectivity, Peter Dews noted that much of Honneth’s work exhibits a strong interest in anthropological constants, which would seem to be ahistorical.

Honneth responded by saying that forms of recognition are multi-dimensional, and characterised by different social relationships: significant modern historical forms including love (emotion), legal respect and social esteem. The modern lifeworld comes with these kinds of demands. But how are we, as humans, introduced to these forms of recognition at all? In his latest work, Honneth remarked, he follows Cavell’s notion of ‘acknowledgement’ in exploring an elementary form of recognition that underlies the possibility of normative distinctions brought about through historical process. However, this ‘elemental’ or ‘genetic’ [and presumably anthropological since it precedes historical forms - RF] aspect of recognition cannot, in itself, provide any normative content.

Bearing this in mind, we might well be justified in questioning the strength of this foundation for critique. As Peter asked, should we shift the forms of critique away from normative justification and towards the diagnosis of social ‘pathologies’? To put it another way, how do we get normativity from the identification of reification?

Honneth’s response was that in order to justify our own normative claims we have to provide a kind of teleological account of history. This involves a committment to the idea that modern forms of Sittlichkeit are in some sense superior to those that have come before. A consistent self-understanding of our moral practices presupposes historical moral progress, as it were.

Peter acknowledged that this came across in the book on reification, but argued that this would attribute modernity a normative status when critical theorists have normally identifed modernity with instrumental forms of rationality.

Honneth responded by suggesting that a lot depends on the teleological status of history. We have to presuppose this progress in order to make sense of our own times. We do this by, for example, reassessing the moral legitimacy of capital punishment. It does not follow that we need be absolutist about such a view; it simply reflects a progression in a particular form of ethical life. Our self-interpretation of our moral practices requires this kind of language and these kinds of categories. He went on to say that demands for recognition raise moral appeals that surpass our ability to satisfy them. Critical theory is able to articulate these, and defend existing demands for recognition.

Honneth identified two different types of social ‘misdevelopment’: forms of injustice (which constitute a violation of normative principles) and social pathologies (deficiencies of conditions of ‘the good life’). Speaking of the latter, he maintained that we can explain social pathologies only in terms of our forms of self-relationship, not through a critique of capitalism. Instrumental rationality still involves recognizing an individual as a human qua tool, and is therefore based upon a primordial or originary form of recognition. Self-reification is therefore the main focus of Honneth’s current work, which attempts to develop a more detailed theory of self-recognition.

This might be contrasted with Lacan, who thought that misrecognition was unavoidable and potentially productive. Honneth said that he thought Lacan lent misrecognition an inappropriate weight. Lacan takes recognition to mean some sort of ‘full’ recognition, and yet this is strange since it suggests that the capacity to be fully cognitively aware of the other. Honneth’s notion of recognition works at a deeper level – we recognise another in a certain aspect or situation, never fully. Lacan therefore confuses recognition’s dual meanings. Recognition has both a normative, regulative status but also refers to the epistemological circumstance of fully cognizing something.

Honneth went on to make an interesting comparison of Hegel and Aristotle. For Hegel, as for Aristotle, ethics was more a matter of dispositions than cognition. Although Hegel’s sense of morality is kind of Aristotelian, he presupposes that established forms of moral practice make up Sittlichkeit while Aristotle’s virtues are not institutionalised in an equivalent way.

Here are the slides from the presentation I gave at the annual Philosophy of Computer Games conference earlier this week (paper co-written with Jo Iacovides).

For this assignment we have been asked to get a sense of the diversity of those involved in the profession of elearning by looking at job opportunities in the field via jobs.ac.uk and conference announcements on ALT-C.

At the time of writing (16^th Jan 2012) there were 11 jobs with the keyword ‘e-learning’ and four with the keyword ‘elearning’ on jobs.ac.uk.  Here’s a screen capture.

Though some jobs appear under both keywords, there seems to be a slight tendency for salaries on the right hand column to be a little higher, even though the nature of the appointments is similar (at the officer/manager level).   Most of these jobs seem to reflect a supporting role for the educational technologist, though this doesn’t equate to a lack of seniority or executive power judging by the salaries and the various descriptions of duties.  At the same time, there are some roles here where elearning is mentioned as an afterthought or as lip-service to current trends in higher education.  For instance, the  Assistant/Associate Professor in European History at Qatar University is expected to be competent with elearning methods but it’s not clear how this is integrated with other aspects of the job or what kind of measures the university intends to use.  This gives the impression that the person writing the job specification may not themselves have a good understanding of elearning.

Moving on to the conference notices at ALT-C… there are currently four conferences being promoted here.  They are as follows:

The first two are online webinars run using Blackboard virtual learning environments and intended for assessors and candidates for the CMALT professional membership scheme for elearning practitioners.  Looking over the list of CMALT members at http://www.alt.ac.uk/sites/default/files/public/Cmalt%20holders%20list_20111121.pdf I noted that none of my OU colleagues seemed to be members (which is a bit surprising given the fact that  CMALT is mentioned in H808).

The third event is a webinar featuring two eminent learning technologists, Diana Laurillard and Stephen Downes.  There isn’t much in the way of detail about the content of the webinar – only the question ‘to what extent should learning design be supported computationally?’.  Most of the page is just biographical information which suggests that they’re relying on reputation alone to sell the event.

The final event is a conference which takes place in Manchester next September.  There aren’t many details here and you have to go to http://www.alt.ac.uk/altc2012 instead.  The motivating questions for this conference seem to be very general and focused on the core activities of learning technologists rather than anything particularly topical.  I suppose this lends weight to the idea that the activities of learning technologists can be highly diverse.

CMALT stands for Certified Membership of the Association for Learning Technology .  “CMALT is a portfolio-based professional accreditation scheme developed by ALT to enable people whose work involves learning technology to:

• have their experience and capabilities certified by peers;
• demonstrate that they are taking a committed and serious approach to their professional development.”

The CMALT prospectus mentions the following values in relation to professional accreditation.

• Commitment to ongoing professional development
• Gaining and providing recognition of skills, feedback
• Critical reflection on practice
• Keeping up to date with new technology
• Willingness to learn from colleagues and those with different backgrounds
• Effective communication and dissemination
• Awareness of wider context
• Understanding accessibility and assistive technologies
• Acknowledging copyright
• Ongoing evaluation and validation of professional skills

Possibly relevant but not mentioned:

• Effectively meeting obligations to students
• Staying focused on delivering results
• Awareness of institutional ethics

 Like a lot of ethical guidance, most of these are formal in nature.  Let’s think about how they compare with education ethics more generally conceived.  The Association of American Educators presents a number of principles and maxims in their code of ethics.  I don’t have the space to discuss them all here, but here are some highlights.

Overall this gives the impression that educators have a quite different set of responsibilities to learning technologists and, accordingly, a distinct set of ethical codes and principles.  There is more of a sense of duty of care and precaution in the educational ethics, while the CMALT values are more to do with innovation, future facing, and ongoing professional change.

An interesting conversation between David Roberts (Grist), Andrew Sullivan (The Daily Beast), and Matthew Yglesias (Slate).  Organized and chaired by Andrew Light (Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy)

www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDpFBvYDY5s

What do learning technologists do?  Well, this is a question I should be able to answer because at some level I claim to be a learning (educational) technologist.  According to the Association for Learning Technology, learning technologists are “people who are actively involved in managing, researching, supporting or enabling learning with the use of learning technology” (ALT, 2011).  This is quite a broad definition, and one which could apply to all kinds of professionals.  But we wouldn’t want to call everybody who fits this definition a learning technologist, would we?  After all, everybody who works in a university is arguably supporting learning.

For me, my professional identity is bound up with a committment to particular set of methods and domains of enquiry.  At the same time, working in research involves an openness to revising one’s views about the best methods to use for investigation.

Jacqui’s forum post argues that one problem is that the role of the technologist is not standardised across institutions.  However, I would suggest that this kind of standardisation is often prohibited by the nature of the work.  If one’s job is to innovate, then it can be difficult to enshrine this is a job description.  In practice, there is a somewhat abstract relationship between the nature of the work that I do in researching and supporting research projects and the eventual application of that research in reconsidered practice.  In any case, one thing I liked about the defintion that Jacqui provided was the idea of focusing on the outputs of a technologist: the design, delivery, support, management and development of technological solution for education.  This seems more specific than ALT defintion.  My first thought was that, as a professional, I don’t really do that unless one frames it in terms of ‘support’.  But thinking about it further, I do contribute to the development and delivery of technical solutions… though often one step removed.

Lisewski and Joyce (2003:63) suggest that many learning technologies are ‘highly reified’.  Thinking in terms of reification is one way of understanding a sense of distance or alienation from the products of one’s labour.  But I find the treatment of reificiation in the paper somewhat discomforting.  Wenger’s account seems to just refer to non-participation or ineffectiveness (something that can be quantified).  But true reification is surely concerned with the formation of human subjectivity through and in interaction with the world.   Reification affects the whole of the social world; else it doesn’t exist. It cannot be limited to a particular context because it necessarily represents or expresses an ideology.  Reification is not a Heideggerian term, but as Heidegger (1954) reminds us, technology by its nature reveals a certain interpretation of the world.  We need better ways of understanding the impact technology has on our thought, motivation and autonomy.  And that seems to be something to which a philosopher can contribute.

ALT (2011) What is Learning Technology? Available at: http://www.alt.ac.uk/about-alt/what-learning-technology [Accessed December 10, 2011].

Heidegger, M. (1954) “The Question Concerning Technology”, from Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings from “Being and Time” (1927) to “The Task of Thinking” (1964), rev. ed., edited by David Farrell Krell. Harper: San Francisco.

Lisewski, B. and Joyce, P. (2003) Examining the five‐stage e‐moderating model: Designed and emergent practice in the learning technology profession. Association for Learning Technology Journal, 11 (1). pp. 55-66. ISSN 0968-7769 Available from http://repository.alt.ac.uk/399/ [last accessed 30 Oct 2011].

Wenger, E. (1998), Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning and Identity, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.

The Scientific Annotated Review Database (or SARD), one of the major research outputs from the MOTILL Project, is now available at www.motill.eu.

The SARD collects more than fifty expert reviews of scientific literature relating to the areas of mobile and lifelong learning. It also contains commentary on a number of policy documents in these areas. Each review includes recommendations for policymakers who wish to promote or support this kind of lifelong learning.

The SARD is free to access and we hope that you will find it to be a useful resource.

JISC inspires UK colleges and universities in the innovative use of digital technologies, helping to maintain the UK’s position as a global leader in education. The New JISC strategy for 2010 is focused on improving the efficiency and effectiveness of universities and colleges, and places technology-enhanced learning at the core of the learning culture of the future.

A significantly enhanced culture of technology-enhanced learning is expected to be one of the main outcomes of this strategy. Students now expect a fully functioning technology-enhanced learning environment with content and resources available online 24 hours a day. A growing community of part-time and overseas students, lifelong learners and professionals, is enabled by flexible learning, meaning that its development will help to drive growth in the sector. A rich technology-enhanced learning culture will therefore also make UK colleges and universities more attractive in the domestic and global markets.

Support for technology-enhanced learning will include guidance on ways to provide new and innovative services, advice on designing a curriculum, a series of national programmes, and development of technical standards to support sharing between systems and institutions. Use of mobile technology, including smart phones, and online networks that support learning, are part of this new landscape.

Read the full executive summary.

A recent article in the Times Higher Education Supplement outlines the ways in which mobile technologies are beginning to become much more widely used in the classroom. The piece challenges widely held view about the role of mobile technology in the classroom situation and notes that many schools have overturned bans on the use of mobile phones in schools in recognition of their untapped potential to support learning. Projects at Sheffield College approach this from a contractual point of view, asking students to sign up to codes of behaviour for proper use at the start of each year.

Suggestions for manging the use of classroom mobile technology:

* Identify and support champions – volunteer teachers who are prepared to take some risks.
* Initiate discussions about using mobile phones for learning (perhaps using pupil voice work) and survey ownership, device capability and the ways mobile phones are already being used in the school.
* Involve those who have responsibility for curriculum, student management and technical support to plan how they will be used.
* Provide hands-on, small-scale opportunities for teachers to try out appropriate uses for mobile phones.
* Encourage teachers to design activities that make the learning purpose clear and to anticipate management issues at the classroom level (such as rules and etiquette).
* Inform parents of the learning purposes for mobile phones and involve them in establishing appropriate ownership, management and ethical arrangements.
* Anticipate and address technical issues ranging from battery-charging to network access, security and data protection.
* Develop new school policies that shift the focus of attention away from the device to the uses, security and behavioural issues that are the real concern.

Carly Shuler draws on interviews with mobile learning experts as well as current research and industry trends to illustrate how mobile devices might be more broadly used for learning. Examining over 25 handheld learning products and research projects in the U.S. and abroad, the report highlights early evidence of how these devices can help revolutionize teaching and learning. Pockets of Potential also outlines mobile market trends and innovations, as well as key opportunities, such as mobile’s ability to reach underserved populations and provide personalized learning experiences.

The report highlights five opportunities to seize mobile learning’s unique attributes to improve education:

1. Encourage “anywhere, anytime” learning
Mobile devices allow students to gather, access, and process information outside the classroom. They can encourage learning in a real-world context, and help bridge school, afterschool, and home environments.

2. Reach underserved children
Because of their relatively low cost and accessibility in low-income communities, handheld devices
can help advance digital equity, reaching and inspiring populations “at the edges” — children from economically disadvantaged communities and those from developing countries.

3. Improve 21st-century social interactions
Mobile technologies have the power to promote and foster collaboration and communication, which are deemed essential for 21st-century success.

4. Fit with learning environments
Mobile devices can help overcome many of the challenges associated with larger technologies, as they fit more naturally within various learning environments.

5. Enable a personalized learning experience
Not all children are alike; instruction should be adaptable to individual and diverse learners. There are significant opportunities for genuinely supporting differentiated, autonomous, and individualized learning through mobile devices.

Read the full report here or download the executive summary.

The MOTILL Project will be disseminated at the MoLeNET conference on 1st December 2009. http://www.molenet.org.uk/

The conference aims to…

• disseminate nationally the good practice, lessons learned, tips, tools and advice arising from MoLeNET to-date
• share research, and evidence of impact, from mobile learning projects including the MoLeNET programme
• demonstrate technologies, systems, learning materials and techniques
• provide an opportunity for networking and knowledge sharing
• encourage debate and inform strategic thinking about the future of technology enhanced teaching and learning

As well as following the MOTILL project on this blog or through the main portal, you can now also keep up to date through a number of Web 2.0 applications.  Here are some of the ways you can stay in touch.

You can also find more information on the project at the dedicated Open University pages.

An interesting article from boston.com describes the kind of generational shift that is taking place with respect to the uptake of new technologies.   The iPhone in particular in singled out for being intuitively accessible to infants, lacking a keyboard or mouse and being operated with a touch screen.

These “mobile kids” are the purest breed yet of natives to the wireless world where the rest of us are refugees. Their fluency with technology and expectations of instant access to everything will eclipse even those of their older siblings and cousins, the “digital kids” weaned on desktop computers wired to the Web.

But in addition to being irresistable to young children, mobile technology can actually promote their development. The article draws on Piaget’s model of cognitive development to show how mobile technology has advanced to the point where it can bring real pedagogical benefits.

“The future that we envisioned for so long is finally starting to happen,” says Warren Buckleitner, educational psychologist. “I’d love to bring Piaget back from the grave and give him an iPhone.”

Read the full article here.

Castle College in Nottingham are the beneficiaries of a sunstantial grant awarded by MoLeNET, the mobile learning network.

STUDENTS in Nottingham will benefit from £100,000 of new equipment – including Nintendo Wii consoles and iPods.

Castle College is hoping the gadgets will encourage 300 children from disadvantaged backgrounds to learn to use modern technology.

It will use £40,000 to increase its wireless internet capacity, so students can access the internet all over its campuses.

Up to £60,000 will be used to buy Nintendo Wiis, iPod Touch MP3 players and the new Nintendo DSi, which is a portable games console with a handheld camera.

Lyn Lall, Castle College’s development manager for new technologies, said: “Innovative methods and materials will make the learning experience more personalised and fun, which will result in increased engagement, retention and achievement levels of students.

The devices will be used as to support the development of literacy, numeracy and IT in vulnerable young people who are not in education, employment or training.  Read on here.

Here’s an interesting article about the development of contact lens technology towards a personal ‘heads up’ display which will display contextual information, translate in real time, relay information from the internet, and so on. Another interesting application of this kind of technology is biomonitoring. Just as a… blood test reveals all kinds of information about a person’s health, so the surface of the eye’s chemical composition can tell us about nutrition levels, blood glucose and other biomarkers. This information could be transmitted wirelessly and monitored in real time. So this kind of technology could be used to help individuals learn to live with a range of medical conditions.

Philosophy Spotlight is a free must-have app for philosophers brought to you by Wiley. This exciting new app gives you the following community features at your fingertips, anywhere, anytime -

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The 2012 lecture will be given by Professor Joseph Raz on the topic of Death in Our Life.

Tuesday 22nd May 2012
5pm – 6.30pm, Corpus Christi College, Oxford, UK

All are welcome to attend the lecture, which will be followed by a drinks reception for Society for Applied Philosophy members. Find out more here.

Previous Lectures 
2011: The Global Reach of Human Rights, Professor Amartya Sen

2010: Militant Modern Atheism, Professor Philip Kitcher

2009: Measuring Development, Poverty and Gender Equity, Professor Thomas Pogge

2008: Naturalism, Normativity, and Applied Ethics, Baroness Onora O’Neill

The dialectica 2012 essay prize topic has been announced! Submit your article on the topic of Cognitive Penetration before November 1st for your chance to win £1,500!

Cognitive penetration refers to the influence of beliefs, expectations, moods, desires or background theories on the content of perceptual processes or conscious experiences. This phenomenon has been in the forefront of the philosophy of science, the philosophy of perception, and the foundations of cognitive science. Philosophers of science have warned that cognitive penetration might threaten the epistemic role of perception as an objective source of knowledge and have used it to explain radical paradigm shifts. Philosophers of perception have tried to characterize the various ways in which perceptual processes or conscious experiences can be altered by other mental states or activities. Cognitive scientists have exploited this phenomenon as a starting point to motivate claims on the architecture of the human mind, including modularity and plasticity.

We invite submissions on any aspect of this phenomenon. Possible questions include: How is the influence of various mental states on perceptual processes or experiences to be characterized in psychological terms? Are there principled differences between the cognitive penetration of conscious experiences and that of subpersonal perceptual processes? What is the impact (if any) of cognitive penetration on the individuation of mental states? What kinds of cognitive penetration are there? Does cognitive penetration lend support to relativism? How does cognitive penetration relate to the confirmation of scientific theories by experience? Does cognitive penetration undermine (or support) some models of perceptual justification? Does the use of instruments to observe phenomena presuppose any form of cognitive penetration? What sorts of evidence can support or disconfirm claims about cognitive penetration? Could it shed new light on Kuhnian incommensurability?

Please send your submissions in pdf format to Philipp Keller, philipp.keller@unige.ch, by the 1st of November 2012. The author of the winning entry will receive £1500. All papers submitted will be considered submissions to the journal and should not be published or under review elsewhere.

This special online issue of the Hastings Center Report brings together disparate discussions of the ethical issues posed by genetic science. In early issues of the Report, in the 1970s, discussions of genetics often sought partly just imply to identify and organize the issues- and to argue, in effect, that this was a topic that bioethics should address. Since then, the discussion has turned to more narrowly drawn issues. In this issue, for example, a set of six essays addresses the prospect that genetic information will lead to an era of “personalized medicine, ” with implications not only for medical treatment but also for cost of care, biobanking, privacy, and access to information, among other things. In the lead article, legal scholar Mark Rothstein considers whether health policy should address genetic information separately from other kinds of medical information, and in an editorial on Rothstein founded in the column titled Another Voice, British philosopher Neil Manson explains why treating genetic information separately seems so attractive. A special supplement to this issue, by Hastings scholar Erik Parens, explores the ramifications of behavioral genetics, and other items branch off in still other directions, including (genuinely going afield here) into the prospect that genetic and other sciences might allow human beings to transcend the human condition. The items selected for this issue emphasize more recent scholarship and commentary, but were otherwise chosen precisely to capture as much as possible of the range of material that has appeared in the Report on this topic.

Click here to read the virtual issue.

We are pleased to invite you to the 2012 Mark Sacks lecture:
Perceptual experience: both relational and contentful
John McDowell

It seems right to say that perceptual experience puts experiencing subjects in (direct or immediate) relation with items in their environments. It is increasingly widely held that there is an inconsistency between that claim and the idea that perceptual experience has content. John McDowell will argue that there is no such inconsistency.

The paper from this lecture will be published in an upcoming issue of the European Journal of Philosophy and the lecture will be recorded and made available as a free podcast.

Date and time: 5.30pm, Friday 15th June 2012
Venue: Humanities Research Institute, University of Sheffield, 34 Gell Street, S3 7QY, UK

All are welcome to attend the lecture which will be followed by a drinks reception hosted by Wiley-Blackwell.

The texts of previous lectures in this series (formerly known as the EJP Annual Lectures) have been published as follows:

2011: Identity, Individuation and Substance, David Wiggins

2010: Why Are You Betraying Your Class?, Avishai Margalit

2009: Danish Ethical Demands and French Common Goods: Two Moral Philosophies, Alasdair MacIntyre

2008: Ethics for Communication, Onora O’Neill

> View the full list.

The editors of the Journal of Applied Philosophy are pleased to announce the winner of the 2011 annual article prize. Congratulations to Jakob Elster who was awarded the £1000 prize for his article How Outlandish Can Imaginary Cases Be?

 The Journal of Applied Philosophy will continue to award an annual prize of £1000 to the best article published in the year’s volume. The judgement as to the best article will be made by the editors of the journal; the Society for Applied Philosophy annual lecture, published in the journal, will not be eligible for the prize of best article.

We’re delighted to announce the appointment of the new editor of the Naturalistic Philosophy section of Philosophy Compass, Edouard Machery.

Edouard is Associate Professor in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh, a Fellow of the Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh, and a member of the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition (Pittsburgh-CMU). His research focuses on the philosophical issues raised by psychology and cognitive neuroscience with a special interest in concepts, moral psychology, the relevance of evolutionary biology for understanding cognition, modularity, the nature, origins, and ethical significance of prejudiced cognition, and the methods of psychology and cognitive neuroscience. He has published more than 60 articles and chapters on these topics in venues such as Analysis, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Cognition, Mind & Language, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, Philosophical Studies, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, and Philosophy of Science. He is the author of Doing without Concepts (OUP, 2009), and he has been an associate editor of The European Journal for Philosophy of Science since 2009. He is also involved in the development of experimental philosophy, having published several noted articles in this field.

Although it came out late last year, Alex Rosenberg’s book, The Atheist’s Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life Without Illusions hasn’t been getting the press it deserves. Indeed, the comparative attention lavished on Alain de Botton’s much less interesting Religion for Atheists seems downright unfair. Probably Rosenberg’s title is largely to blame. He has all but admitted choosing it as a marketing ploy. This was probably a mistake. The title does the book no justice, since one thing The Atheist’s Guide has relatively little to say about is atheism. This has led people like this Independent reviewer to focus on complaining that the book offers little to atheists (more sensitive to logical solecisms than de Botton, Rosenberg declines to offer them religion) while ignoring its real topic.

Its real topic is ‘scientism’ – a pejorative label Rosenberg hopes to reclaim as a badge of honour. Scientism is, as he puts it,

‘the conviction that the methods of science are the only reliable ways to secure knowledge of anything; that science’s description of the world is correct in its fundamentals; and that when “complete,” what science tells us will not be surprisingly different from what it tells us today’ (6-7).

The Southern Journal of Philosophy is celebrating its 50th anniversary in 2012! To commemorate this milestone and to honor all of those who have sustained this distinctive forum for the past half-century, each of the issues in this year’s volume has been specially commissioned, guest-edited, and dedicated to a timely topic from one of the areas in which the SJP regularly publishes (analytic philosophy, continental philosophy, and history of philosophy):

•  50.1: “Epistemic Coherentism,” ed. Ted Poston
• 50.2: “Continental Philosophy: What and Where Will It Be?” ed. Ted Toadvine
• 50.3: “Newton and Newtonianism,” ed. Mary Domski
• 50.4: “Relativism about Value,” eds. Max Kölbel and Dan Zeman

Together, these issues will offer a “state of the discipline” look at key debates in contemporary philosophy.To be alerted when new issues publish, visit the SJP homepage and click “Get New Content Alerts” from the top left Journal Tools menu.

We’re delighted to announce the appointment of the new chief editor of Philosophy Compass, Elizabeth Barnes, who will be coming on as of today and continuing the great work begun by Brian Weatherson. Elizabeth is an Associate Professor in the department of philosophy at the University of Leeds. Her research interests are split between metaphysics and ethics. In metaphysics, she’s written on indeterminacy, emergence, truthmaking, and the open future. In ethics, her work has focused on disability and wellbeing.

The team would also like to extend their warm thanks and appreciation to Brian for the leadership and vision he has shown in the 6 years since launch. During his tenure, the journal has gone from being a largely unknown online novelty to now playing a unique and respected role in philosophical scholarship.

Welcome Elizabeth, and thanks Brian!