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Some people believe that critical thinking hinders creativity because it requires following the rules of logic and rationality, but creativity might require breaking rules. This is a misconception. Critical thinking is quite compatible with thinking "out-of-the-box", challenging consensus and pursuing less popular approaches.

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Critical thinking | The University of Edinburgh

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Critical thinking | The University of Edinburgh

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Advice on what we mean by critical thinking, and further reading and resources.

Why is being critical important?

It affects your academic success: if you wish to achieve higher grades, being able to take an informed and analytical approach to your studies is very important. Simply memorising and explaining concepts and ideas will not be sufficient for a strong pass at masters level. You need to be able to demonstrate in-depth knowledge of your subject and give your opinion(s) supported by evidence that you have judged to be appropriate.

It affects your employability: one of the main reasons students undertake postgraduate study is to improve their employment prospects. Higher-level thinking and reasoning skills can be applied across many areas of work e.g. strategic planning, trouble shooting, problem solving, and critical evaluation of projects and processes. They are therefore essential to develop and demonstrate to prospective employers after graduation.

What do we mean by 'critical'?

Being 'critical' does not mean just being negative, or pointing out what is wrong about something. At masters level, 'critical' means "Fully informed, capable of supporting in-depth analysis and assessment" (Scottish credit and qualifications framework, level descriptors).

You can find out more about the framework at :

thinking carefully about what you read and why: judging what resources are credible, reflecting on and developing your search techniques, not just looking for and reading the obvious and / or the first things you come across

questioning and testing what you read: do the author's viewpoints and ideas appear justified? Why - or why not?

looking for connections (or disparities), and constructing your own arguments supported by a range carefully considered viewpoints, not just repeating the ideas of others

being inquisitive, and asking good questions - of others, and of yourself

spotting and challenging potential bias, distorted views, prejudice, and self-interest - in the work of others, and in your own thinking

challenging ideas - where appropriate, and based on credible evidence

looking for gaps, and suggesting new or different solutions

reflecting on and adapting your own professional practice based on your developing insights

You can find out more about being critical in your studies in the following factsheets:

Critical' in University work means being thoughtful, asking questions, not taking things you read (or hear) at face value. It means finding information and understanding different approaches and using them in your writing.

Getting Critical (Pocket Study Skills), pviii. Kate Williams

Critical thinking 'stairway'

The Open University (2009) outline a useful 'stairway' to help students understand the skills in thinking critically.

The lower steps are the basics that support moving to the higher-level thinking skills that can underpin taking a critical approach.

1. Process - Take in the information (i.e. in what you have read, heard, seen or done).

2. Understand - Comprehend the key points, assumptions, arguments and evidence presented.

3. Analyse - Examine how these key components fit together and relate to each other.

4. Compare - Explore the similarities, differences between the ideas you are reading about.

5. Synthesise - Bring together different sources of information to serve an argument or idea you are constructing. Make logical connections between the different sources that help you shape and support your ideas.

6. Evaluate - Assess the worth of an idea in terms of its relevance to your needs, the evidence on which it is based and how it relates to other pertinent ideas.

7. Apply - Transfer the understanding you have gained from your critical evaluation and use in response to questions, assignments and projects.

8. Justify - Use critical thinking to develop arguments, draw conclusions, make inferences and identify implications.

Source: 'Critical thinking: online guidance', the Open University (2009) - no longer available. The current version can be found at

Further reading

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Advice on what we mean by critical thinking, and further reading and resources. It affects your academic success: if you wish to achieve higher grades, being able to take an informed and analytical approach to your studies is very important. Simply memorising and explaining concepts and ideas will not be sufficient for a strong pass at masters level.

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The Grid - welcome doers & creators, this medium adapts to your message

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What Happened to Horses Is Happening to Us

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The Automation of Sectarianism: Are Twitter Bots Spreading Sectarianism in the Gulf? | Marc Owen Jones

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The Automation of Sectarianism: Are Twitter Bots Spreading Sectarianism in the Gulf? | Marc Owen Jones

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The Automation of Sectarianism: Are Twitter Bots Spreading Sectarianism in the Gulf?

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Update** After writing this article, and sending it to Twitter, they subsequently suspended up to 1800 accounts and are investigating more. The recent de-nationalisation of Isa Qasim, Bahrain's most prominent Shia cleric, sparked a massive public reaction in Bahrain and across the globe. The move, which made Isa Qasim stateless (ironically on World Refugee Day), is...

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Chemistry Experiment VR puts you in a lab where you will have total freedom to interact with objects around you. And if you have a good look around there might just be some surprises.

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Every year hundreds of thousands of students write essays for large-scale standardized tests. The scores are used in life-changing decisions. Students are accepted into, placed within, and rejected from educational programs. Graduates are hired or not hired. Teachers are qualified, evaluated, promoted, and fired. Learning institutions are compared, accredited, and punished.

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Donald Clark Plan B: Sugata Mitra: Slum chic? 7 reasons for doubt

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Donald Clark Plan B: Sugata Mitra: Slum chic? 7 reasons for doubt

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This is a Sigatra Mitra 'Hole-in-the-Wall' site in India. Literally just three holes in a wall. That's because it failed. The community, as verified by Payal Arora, can barely remember why they were installed or what happened. They do remember that they were vandalised (a known problem with unsupervised children?).

Here's another, set in a school playground, the computers long gone. " What we see is the idea of free learning going into free fall " said Payal Arora. When Arora came across these two 'hole-in-the-wall' sites (Almora and Hawalbagh in northern India), she discovered not the positive tales of self-directed learning but failure. One was vandalised and closed down within two months, the other abandoned and, apparently, had been mostly used by boys to play games. A real problem was sustainability, as no one seemed responsible for the electricity and maintenance bills.

My own research into a hole-in-the-wall project uncovered the same story - empty holes in the wall, resentful teachers and testimonies that claimed the whole project was a faulure from start to finish. Peoeple arrived at their school. knocked holes in theiw walls, inserted computers and left. They felt violated. The computers rarely worked, as the DSL line was often down, and when it did work, the larger boys domiated them, playing games.

Doubts
My own doubts arose when I gave a TEDx talk and the speaker after me was an academic from Mitra's department at Newcastle University. She was well versed in Indian education, and went on to talk at length about feckless third world teachers and state schools, but she was also scathing about the hole-in-the-wall research, not only the research methods and conclusions. This made me more than a little curious. Sugata Mitra is treated by the educational world as some sort of saint. Otherwise smart and reasonable people go gaga for Mitra. Hailed as the 'hole-in-the-wall hero', few question his questionable research or even more questionable recommendations. Academics, who would go to the wall to defend the 'lecture', will hail the idea of replacing schools with hole-in-the-wall computers, not of course in their own institutions but certainly for poor people. Now I've spent the whole of my adult life creating and evangelising online learning but even I draw a line at his utopian vision. Here's why I have doubts.

Few realise that hole-in-the-wall funding came originally from from NIIT then the International Finance Corporation, a commercial Indian e-learning company and the for-profit side of the World Bank. I know them well and believe me, this is no charitable institution. As Arora (2010) points out, there is little real independent evidence, other than that provided by HiWEL itself and one must always question research funded by those who would benefit from a positive outcome. The lack of independent research on the sites is astonishing, something noted by Mark Warschauer, one of the few critics who have actually visited a site.

Arora, although not totally unsympathetic to the Hole-in-the-wall project, exposed a glaring weakness in the design of the experiment. The 75 days of learning (with a mediator) was compared to the same period in the local school but like was not being compared to like, so the comparison was meaningless. It was not comparing the amount of time spent on the hole-in-the-wall material with the same or similar amount of time in school. This is also true of Mitra's compadre at MIT Negroponte in his Ethiopian work. As De Bruyckere et al. say in Urban Myths: Learning and Education (2015), the lack of serious research is puzzling. Most of it comes from Mitra himself, or those in his team, almost all from one Journal. Control groups were given questionnaires at the start and end of the period, but those in the experimental group were tested every month. The obvious problem here is the polluting effect of effect the regular assessments. Indeed, as De Bruyckere et al. (2015) say, there is ample research, from Reedier & Karpicke and others on the positive effect of testing.

" Schools are obsolete " said Mitra - oh yeah? Far from being sited in open places, HiWEL sites are now invariably in school compounds. By being in the school it is difficult to do research that isolates the experience from the school, difficult to disentangle the role of the school (teachers, books etc.) and the hole-in-the-wall computers. Indeed, as HiWEL has explained, they involve 'teachers' in their implementation and mediation, making it almost impossible to isolate the causes of educational improvement. One could say, with Arora, that this has become "self-defeating". The 'hole-in-the-wall' has become the 'computer-in-the-school'. This is a subtle switch - evangelise on one premise, deliver on another.

As HiWEL makes extensive use of mediators (teachers), the real lesson of the hole in the wall experiments is that teachers, or at least mediators, seem to be a necessary condition for learning to combat exclusion, mediate learning and avoid the vagaries of child-centred behaviour. Yet this is not what the TED talks and hole-in-the-wall evangelism suggests. Another problem is that by seeing teachers as 'invasive', such initiatives can antagonise teachers and educators, leading to poor-support. I found this in my research in Africa, where the teachers were resentful. Arora concludes are that these experiments do not work when not linked to the local schools and that, far from being self-directed, the children need mediation by adults. Arora goes further and claims that disassociating learning from adult guidance can lead to uncritical acceptance of bad content and bad learning habits.

Warschauer (2003) is even more critical than Arora. He claims that " overall the project was not very effective ", with low level learning and not challenging. In addition, he found that some of the many problems were the fact that the internet rarely functioned, no content was provided in Hindi, the only language the children knew, and many parents thought that the paucity of relevant content rendered it irrelevant and criticised the kiosks as distracting the children from their homework. Sure they learned how to use menus, drag and drop but most of the time they were "using paint programs or playing games". This is hardly surprising and seems to confirm the rather banal conclusion that when you give kids shiny new things, they play with them.

Notice two things about this image - no girls and big boys at the screen. You get an odd skew in the data based on the fact that the few successes tell you nothing about the absent children, that got nowhere near the kiosks - these missing children turn out to be the many, not the few, and lot of girls. We should be careful about saying, like Mitra, that schools are obsolete, as they are our best bet in providing universal access and participation. Unmediated peer learning among children can be difficult as "self-organising children" are rarely optimal learning groups. Indeed, they are more commonly, narrowly defined peer groups, built around class, background, locale, a musical style, fashion, even power. The school playground is a competitive space that many children fear. It is, for many, a place of social isolation and exclusion. Most teachers and parents have experienced the evils of self-organised 'peer groups' not just on terms of pressure but also of exclusion and bullying. Indeed Arora (2005) has evidence that boys playing games was the real net outcome in Andhra Pradesh.

Based on scanty evidence, funded by parties who have a lot to gain then shifted away from hole-in-the-wall to computers-in-schools. Like Slumdog Millionaire, the movie inspired by Mitra's work, it beggars belief. There's no silver bullet here and we shouldn't be lulled into thinking this is the answer. The real danger is that we get carried away by under-researched 'feelgood' initiatives. Slumdog Millionaire is typical of the utopian nonsense that can emerge. An overly romanticised, rags to riches, Bollywood Cinderella story that is an assault on probability. Is Mitra's story also one of 'Slum chic'? Perhaps the most disgustingly contrived moment of the film is when Jamal says ' You wanted to see the real India' and the US tourist, hands him a $100 note saying ' Now we'll show you the real America'. This, for me, was reminiscent of the TED Prize.

For more research and my research visit to a failed hole-in-wall site see here
For a critique of SOLE see here

Koseoglu, S. (2011). The hole in the wall experiments: Learning from self-organizing systems. Retrieved from http://umn.academia.edu/SuzanKoseoglu

Mitra, S., & Rana, V. (2001). Children and the Internet: Experiments with minimally invasive education in India. British Journal of Educational Technology, 32 (2), 221-232.

Mitra, S. (2003). Minimally invasive education: A progress report on the 'Hole-in-the-wall' experiments. The British Journal of Educational Technology, 34 (3), 367-371.

Mitra, S. (2005). Self organising systems for mass computer literacy: Findings from the 'hole in the wall' experiments. International Journal of Development Issues, 4 (1), 71-81.

Mitra, S. (2006). The Hole in the Wall: Self-organising systems in education. Noida, UP: TataMcGraw Hill.

Mitra, S. (2009). Remote presence: 'Beaming' teachers where they cannot go. Journal of Emerging Technology and Web Intelligence, 1 (1), 55-59.

Mitra, S., Dangwal, R., & Thadani, L. (2008). Effects of remoteness on the quality of education:A case study from North Indian schools. Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, 24 (2), 168-180.

Mitra, S., & Dangwal, R. (2010). Limits to self-organising systems of learning - The Kalikuppamexperiment. British Journal of Educational Technology, 41 (5), 672-688.

Roediger H.L. & Karpicke J.D. (2006) Test enhanced Learning, Psychological Science
Warschauer, M. 2003. Technology and Social Inclusion: Rethinking the Digital Divide . Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.

Warschauer, M. 2009. 'Digital literacy studies: Progress and prospects'. In The Future of Literacy Studies, edited by Baynham, M; Prinsloo, M. London: Palgrave Macmillan: 123-140.

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This is a Sigatra Mitra 'Hole-in-the-Wall' site in India. Literally just three holes in a wall. That's because it failed. The community, as verified by Payal Arora, can barely remember why they were installed or what happened. They do remember that they were vandalised (a known problem with unsupervised children?).

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Socrates on the Forgetfulness that Comes with Writing  |  Chapter 1: Literacies on a Human Scale  |  Γραμματισμοί  |  Neamathisi

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Socrates on the Forgetfulness that Comes with Writing  |  Chapter 1: Literacies on a Human Scale  |  Γραμματισμοί  |  Neamathisi

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Socrates on the Forgetfulness that Comes with Writing

Socrates (469-399 BCE) was a Greek Philosopher who thought and taught through argumentative dialogue, or dialectic. Socrates did not write down any of his thoughts, however his dialogues were recorded by his student and protégé, the philosopher Plato (428 - 347 BCE). Here Socrates discusses the deficiencies of writing.

SOCRATES: ... Among the ancient gods of Naucratis in Egypt there was one to whom the bird called the ibis is sacred. The name of that divinity was Theuth, and it was he who first discovered number and calculation, geometry and astronomy, as well as the games of checkers and dice, and, above all else, writing.

Now the king of all Egypt at that time was Thamus, who lived in the great city in the upper region that the Greeks call Egyptian Thebes ... . Theuth came to exhibit his arts to him and urged him to disseminate them to all the Egyptians. Thamus asked him about the usefulness of each art, and while Theuth was explaining it, Thamus praised him for whatever he thought was right in his explanations and criticized him for whatever he thought was wrong.

The story goes that Thamus said much to Theuth, both for and against each art, which it would take too long to repeat. But when they came to writing, Theuth said: "O King, here is something that, once learned, will make the Egyptians wiser and will improve their memory; I have discovered a potion for memory and for wisdom." Thamus, however, replied: "O most expert Theuth, one man can give birth to the elements of an art, but only another can judge how they can benefit or harm those who will use them. And now, since you are the father of writing, your affection for it has made you describe its effects as the opposite of what they really are. In fact, it will introduce forgetfulness into the soul of those who learn it: they will not practice using their memory because they will put their trust in writing, which is external and depends on signs that belong to others, instead of trying to remember from the inside, completely on their own. You have not discovered a potion for remembering, but for reminding; you provide your students with the appearance of wisdom, not with its reality. Your invention will enable them to hear many things without being properly taught, and they will imagine that they have come to know much while for the most part they will know nothing. And they will be difficult to get along with, since they will merely appear to be wise instead of really being so."

PHAEDRUS: Socrates, you're very good at making up stories from Egypt or wherever else you want!

SOCRATES: But, my friend, the priests of the temple of Zeus at Dodona say that the first prophecies were the words of an oak. Everyone who lived at that time, not being as wise as you young ones are today, found it rewarding enough in their simplicity to listen to an oak or even a stone, so long as it was telling the truth, while it seems to make a difference to you, Phaedrus, who is speaking and where he comes from. Why, though, don't you just consider whether what he says is right or wrong?

PHAEDRUS: I deserved that, Socrates. And I agree that the Theban king was correct about writing.

SOCRATES: Well, then, those who think they can leave written instructions for an art, as well as those who accept them, thinking that writing can yield results that are clear or certain, must be quite naive and truly ignorant of [Thamos'] prophetic judgment: otherwise, how could they possibly think that words that have been written down can do more than remind those who already know what the writing is about?

PHAEDRUS: Quite right.

SOCRATES: You know, Phaedrus, writing shares a strange feature with painting. The offsprings of painting stand there as if they are alive, but if anyone asks them anything, they remain most solemnly silent. The same is true of written words. You'd think they were speaking as if they had some understanding, but if you question anything that has been said because you want to learn more, it continues to signify just that very same thing forever. When it has once been written down, every discourse roams about everywhere, reaching indiscriminately those with understanding no less than those who have no business with it, and it doesn't know to whom it should speak and to whom it should not. And when it is faulted and attacked unfairly, it always needs its father's support; alone, it can neither defend itself nor come to its own support.

PHAEDRUS: You are absolutely right about that, too.

SOCRATES: Now tell me, can we discern another kind of discourse, a legitimate brother of this one? Can we say how it comes about, and how it is by nature better and more capable?

PHAEDRUS: Which one is that? How do you think it comes about?

SOCRATES: It is a discourse that is written down, with knowledge, in the soul of the listener; it can defend itself, and it knows for whom it should speak and for whom it should remain silent.

Plato. c.399-347 BCE. "Phaedrus." Pp. 551-552 in Compete Works, edited by J. M. Cooper. Indianapolis IN: Hackett.

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Socrates on the Forgetfulness that Comes with Writing | Chapter 1: Literacies on a Human Scale | Γραμματισμοί | Neamathisi

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Socrates on the Forgetfulness that Comes with Writing Socrates (469-399 BCE) was a Greek Philosopher who thought and taught through argumentative dialogue, or dialectic. Socrates did not write down any of his thoughts, however his dialogues were recorded by his student and protégé, the philosopher Plato (428 - 347 BCE).

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Pogue Reports: University replaces cadaver labs using augmented reality with Microsoft Hololens

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Pogue Reports: University replaces cadaver labs using augmented reality with Microsoft Hololens

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All the fuss and all the hype is about virtual-reality goggles like the Oculus Rift. But the world isn't making enough fuss over augmented reality.

What's the difference? VR goggles isolate you. They entomb your eyes and ears in a headset, blocking out the world.

But augmented-reality goggles like the Microsoft Hololens (and the secret but much-hyped Magic Leap project) feature transparent lenses. You're looking at computer-generated objects in the room with you.

In researching an upcoming "CBS Sunday Morning" story, I visited the medical school of Case Western Reserve Medical School, where a pilot project is under way. The idea is to teach anatomy to medical students not in a cadaver lab, as most med schools do, but instead in an empty room-wearing Hololens.

According to Dr. Mark Griswold, who's leading this program, the med school's new building won't have a cadaver lab at all. When it opens in 2019, med students will learn anatomy exclusively through augmented reality.

In this clip from "Midday Movers," Yahoo Finance tech columnist David Pogue summarizes the pros and the cons.

For more Pogue Content
Yuneec Breeze: The idiotproof $500 drone with 4K video Now I Get It: Why Apple took away the headphone jack from the iPhone 7 My quest for the world's best e-bike Pogue's Facebook Live - e-bike roundup Pogue's Basics: How to retrieve every tweet you've ever made Pogue's Basics: Un-pinching videos Pogue's Basics: Download YouTube videos What to expect when the Windows 10 Anniversary Update installs itself on your computer The Elby e-bike will blow you away for 90 miles

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Pogue Reports: University replaces cadaver labs using augmented reality with Microsoft Hololens

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VR goggles isolate you. In researching an upcoming "CBS Sunday Morning" story, I visited the medical school of Case Western Reserve Medical School, where a pilot project is under way. When it opens in 2019, med students will learn anatomy exclusively through augmented reality.

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Artificial intelligence has captured the rhythm of science fiction. For example, the script of a new science fiction short is the creation of a bot. Although the software provides the order of the word choices, the source material is human. It works by algorithm and it derives its poetic power from the words of human feeling. The results are surprisingly good and even funny, in spite of its mechanized origins.

If that first paragraph sounds a little odd, that's because a human being didn't write it - or at least not entirely, anyway. Instead, I fed several articles about artificial intelligence into an algorithmic text emulator, gave it some input about word choices, and voila: I had the lead paragraph for my story. It was a strange but surprisingly intuitive process.

Bots and algorithms that can generate content or augment the work of human writers aren't new. They've been used to write about sports and finance for TV networks and financial analysis firms and automatically generate stories about earthquakes and homicides for the Los Angeles Times. This month, the people behind the film "Morgan" released a trailer that had been created by Watson, IBM's artificial intelligence product. On Kickstarter, screenwriter William Goldwin successfully raised over $30,000 for " Impossible Things," a horror film whose core narrative elements were determined by an AI that curated data from over 3,000 films.

But now writers and artists are starting to use algorithms and AIs to do something that many people think should be impossible for a machine: entertain us.

I wrote the first paragraph of this article - if indeed we can call it writing - using a tool created by a man named Jamie Brew. He's the head writer at the satirical website Clickhole, but in his spare time he developed a predictive text program that has allowed him to generate strange and hilarious parodies by feeding it all different types of content: X-Files scripts, Craigslist ads, romance novels, IMDb content warnings, the grammar rules of Strunk and White and synopses of Batman: The Animated Series.

Brew is certainly not the only person doing these sorts of experiments, and the internet has long been entertained by the antics of countless bots, from Microsoft's ill-fated chatbot Tay to "ebooks" bots that remix content from Twitter feed to create new tweets that sound both bizarre and familiar. But Brew's tool produces text that feels more human and intentionally funny than the word salad of most bots.

"You ever notice how many people die from some kind of violence? A coincidence named the truth," says Agent Fox Mulder in an X-Files script algorithmically generated by Brew. "What do you think happened to the X-Files, Scully? What happened to keep them under the bowling alley? What do you think it means?"

It's hard to put your finger on exactly how it's different until you learn how it works. Most algorithmic text generation you see on social media is automated. Twitter bots, for example, use Markov chains, algorithmic tools that analyze what words are most likely to follow others in the source material. The tool then automatically generates new text where words are sorted based on those linguistic probabilities. The user doesn't have much say in the matter. Brew prefers a more hands-on approach.

"With my program, instead of making a random choice that you don't get to see, it gives you the top 10 options [for the next word] and lets you choose at each step, in the same way that a predictive-text phone feature does," Brew said. "It's not entirely algorithmic."

In practice, this means that while you have no control over the words that spring forth, your choices can shape how the garden path unfolds. Rather than fully automating the process of assembly of the text by turning it over to a program or bot, Brew's work is more of a collaboration between a human being and an algorithm.

"It's not letting the algorithm do all of the work," said Brew. "It makes it more fun for me to use, I don't just feel like a programmer making a proof of concept. I still feel like a writer."

It's a fine distinction, and sometimes a confusing one. After all, when a writer or programmer uses the words of dozens or hundreds of other people as the source material for new machine-generated content, who's the creator: the person programming the AI, the authors of the original works or the AI itself?

It's a question that came up for technologist Ross Goodwin and director Oscar Sharp while they were making the science fiction short "Sunspring," which starred "Silicon Valley" actor Thomas Middleditch.

Sunspring's script was written by an AI called Benjamin, which was trained using a long short-term memory (LSTM) recurrent neural network and hundreds of scripts from science fiction films and television shows like "The X-Files," "Star Wars," "Blade Runner" and "Brazil."

"We're always writing from our experiences of things that we've read and what we've heard and things that we've absorbed verbally," Goodwin said. "So to what extent can anyone author anything? And to what extent does this machine augment this capacity?"

Sharp said the first version of Benjamin only generated dialogue, but he quickly realized that unlike the "clunky and clumsy" text generation he had seen in the past, Benjamin's words did something extraordinary: they made him feel something. "And I thought hang on, if I can feel emotions like this with prose, I can give this to an actor." Eventually, says Sharp, the AI was able to produce the five-page script for Sunspring that included more traditional screenplay descriptions of setting and action. ("He is standing in the stars and sitting on the floor," reads one particularly evocative line of direction.) Unlike Brew's program, Benjamin takes a more typical automated approach to generating content. Sharp and Goodwin were adamant that there be no editing of the words that Benjamin delivered, regardless of how tempting it was to tweak the language into something more sensical or intentional.

The actors added their own very human interpretations of the text that Benjamin produced. "[They] were able to breathe sense and meaning and dynamic and subtext and interaction and conflict into those words effortlessly," said Sharp. "They didn't have to stop and think about it, they just read it and soon everyone is laughing their heads off, it's the most delightful thing. It's the same sort of delight as you experience when someone points up at the sky and says, 'Oh look at the rabbit in this cloud.' That pareidolia effect of seeing a pattern where you know that there was no intentional pattern."

Many viewers had a strong reaction to "Sunspring." While the creators got some negative feedback from people angered by the mere concept of an AI film, critics described it as beautiful, bizarre and strangely moving. Sharp said that some people who watched the movie were moved to tears, which made him wonder about the relationship between them and Benjamin. "So are they making a connection, and if so to whom?" he asked. "It could be they're connecting to the actors, it could be that they're connecting in a gestalt way to all the writers who wrote the input corpus, they're making this broader connection which is sort of an exciting idea - not connecting to one writer or five but somehow hundreds or thousands, even millions of writers."

The point of these sorts of algorithmic experiments, then, is less about proving that an algorithm or AI can produce written work that passes for human, and more about how human beings interact with the words that are produced - either as viewers, performers, writers or any other form of creative interpreter.

Sometimes, Brew said, it seems as if the strange and delightful products of his program were "already latent" in the texts he gave it. What emerges feels a bit like a funhouse mirror of the source material, echoing it in language, tone, even theme. Not only can it hold a mirror up to the tropes and cliches of both pop culture and culture at large, but also the biases contained in their content.

Sharp notes, for example, that the most popular words produced for "Sunspring" - after articles such as "a" and second-person pronouns such as "you" - were specifically about men ("his," "man," "he"). That reflected the disproportionate focus on male characters in the source materials. "There's also an obsession with father relationships way more than mother relationships," he said. "You get a lot of [mentions of] police, you get a lot of prostitutes. It's sort of chastening. One of the ways that Benjamin works is as a mirror that shows us what we've been doing unrelentingly."

The idea of robots creating our entertainment might sound dystopian, but to Brew, Goodwin and Sharp, it's not about outsourcing creativity to machines but rather using machines to help people express their creativity in new ways. Computer-generated text can already make us laugh with its Mad Libs absurdity or move us emotionally through serendipitous connections; perhaps someday it will be capable of entertaining us in even more nuanced ways. Regardless, it seems like there will always be a human hand and heart in the mix, whether it's creating the algorithm, writing the source material or guiding the choices of the machine more directly.

The way Goodwin sees it, an AI or an algorithmic text generator isn't an author so much as a tool, and one that could allow human creators to input source text that inspires them - perhaps even from their own work - and prompt or inspire them to "produce something that is more closely aligned with their internal thoughts and notions."

"One of my mentors, Allison Parrish, likes to point out that a generative text machine is like a space probe," Goodwin said. "But rather than exploring what we understand spatially, they're exploring the boundary between sense and nonsense. I think there's a lot of interesting transmissions that you can receive from that boundary."

CORRECTION (Sept. 29, 6:40 p.m.): An earlier version of this story misidentified the roles that Ross Goodwin and Oscar Sharp played in the making of "Sunspring." Goodwin was the technologist and Sharp was the director, not the other way around.

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Artificial intelligence has captured the rhythm of science fiction. For example, the script of a new science fiction short is the creation of a bot. Although the software provides the order of the word choices, the source material is human. It works by algorithm and it derives its poetic power from the words of human feeling.

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Sunspring | A Sci-Fi Short Film Starring Thomas Middleditch - YouTube

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Sunspring | A Sci-Fi Short Film Starring Thomas Middleditch - YouTube

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Sunspring | A Sci-Fi Short Film Starring Thomas Middleditch

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In the wake of Google's AI Go victory, filmmaker Oscar Sharp turned to his technologist collaborator Ross Goodwin to build a machine that could write screenplays. They created "Jetson" and fueled him with hundreds of sci-fi TV and movie scripts. Shortly thereafter, Jetson announced it wished to be addressed as Benjamin.

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Few educators speak of praxis. Those that do tend to link it to the work of Freire. Yet while praxis may not be part of many workers overt vocabulary, practice, a pale derivative, is. So what is praxis and why should educators be concerned with it?

contents: · theory and practice · practical reasoning · praxis - informed, committed action · further reading · how to cite this piece

Man must prove the truth, i.e. the reality and power, the this-sideness of his thinking in practice.... All social life is essentially practical. All mysteries which lead theory to mystics, find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice.... The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it. (Marx 1845 Theses on Feurbach: II, VII, XI)

Many educators are involved with praxis - acts which shape and change the world - but it often isn't part of their vocabulary. In this short piece we examine the the notion of praxis and of 'education for use' (Lindeman 1944: 103).

Theory and practice

Practice is often depicted as the act of doing something. It is usually contrasted to 'theory' - abstract ideas about some thing or phenomenon. In this 'theory' tends to be put on a pedestal. From theory can be derived general principles (or rules). These in turn can be applied to the problems of practice. Theory is 'real' knowledge while practice is the application of that knowledge to solve problems. In many ways, this is a legacy of Aristotle and his three-fold classification of disciplines as theoretical, productive or practical. The basis of the distinction lies in the telos, or purpose, each serves. In brief:

The purpose of a theoretical discipline is the pursuit of truth through contemplation; its telos is the attainment of knowledge for its own sake. The purpose of the productive sciences is to make something; their telos is the production of some artefact. The practical disciplines are those sciences which deal with ethical and political life; their telos is practical wisdom and knowledge. (Carr & Kemmis 1986: 32)

This way of separating areas of knowledge can be seen, for example, in the way that we might view 'pure maths' (theoretical), tool-making (productive), and social work training (practical).

If the form of thinking associated with theoretical activities was contemplative, the enquiry involved in productive disciplines was a 'making' action or poietike. Aristotle associated this form of thinking and doing with the work of craftspeople or artisans. Hence, the making action is not simply mechanical. It also involves some creativity. This making action is dependent upon the exercising of skill ( techne). It always results from the idea, image or pattern of what the artisan wants to make. In other words the person has a guiding plan or idea. For example, pott ers will have an idea of the article they want to make. While working, they may make some alterations, develop an idea and so on. But they are restricted in this by their original plan.

Practical reasoning

Where the productive begins with a plan or design, the practical cannot have such a concrete starting point. Instead, we begin with a question or situation. We then start to think about this situation in the light of our understanding of what is good or what makes for human flourishing. Thus, for Aristotle, praxis is guided by a moral disposition to act truly and rightly; a concern to further human well being and the good life. This is what the Greeks called phronesis and requires an understanding of other people.

Practical wisdom ( phronesis) involves moving between the particular and the general.

The mark of a prudent man [is] to be able to deliberate rightly about what is good and what is advantageous for himself; not in particular respects, e.g. what is good for health or physical strength, but what is conducive to the good life generally. (Aristotle 2004: 209)

In praxis there can be no prior knowledge of the right means by which we realize the end in a particular situation. For the end itself is only specified in deliberating about the means appropriate to a particular situation (Bernstein 1983: 147). As we think about what we want to achieve, we alter the way we might achieve that. As we think about the way we might go about something, we change what we might aim at. There is a continual interplay between ends and means. In just the same way there is a continual interplay between thought and action. This process involves interpretation, understanding and application in 'one unified process' (Gadamer 1979: 275). It is something we engage in as human beings and it is directed at other human beings.

Shirley Grundy (1987: 64) has helpfully set this process diagrammatically - and a version of this (from Smith 1994) can be seen below.

The practical - making judgements

Praxis: informed, committed action

We can now see the full quality of praxis. It is not simply action based on reflection. It is action which embodies certain qualities. These include a commitment to human well being and the search for truth, and respect for others. It is the action of people who are free, who are able to act for themselves. Moreover, praxis is always risky. It requires that a person 'makes a wise and prudent practical judgement about how to act in this situation' (Carr and Kemmis 1986: 190).

'In pedagogy', Gadotti (1996) writes, 'the practice is the horizon, the aim of the theory. Therefore the educationalist lives the instigating dialectic between his or her daily life - the lived school and the projected school - which attempts to inspire a new school '

As Paul Taylor (1993) has written, we can say that word and action, action and reflection, theory and practice are all facets of the same idea. This action is not merely the doing of something, what Freire describes as activism and Aristotle as poiesis. Poiesis is about acting upon, doing to: it is about working with objects. Praxis, however, is creative: it is other-seeking and dialogic.praxis praxis praxis praxis

Further reading and references

Aristotle (2004) The Nicomachean Ethics. Trans. J. A. K. Thomson, London: Penguin. 383 pages. Has an excellent introduction by Jonathan Barnes. Book six deals with intellectual virtues - prudence, wisdom etc.

Carr, W. and Kemmis, S. (1986) Becoming Critical. Education, knowledge and action research, Lewes: Falmer. Influential book that provides a good account of 'praxis' in education. Chapters on teachers, researchers and curriculum; the natural scientific view of educational theory and practice; the interpretative view of educational theory and practice; theory and practice - redefining the problem; a critical approach to theory and practice; towards a critical educational science; action research as critical education science; educational research, educational reform and the role of the profession.

Freire, P. (1972) Pedagogy of the Oppressed, London: Penguin. 153 pages. One of the most significant books published on education in the second half of the twentieth century. Chapter 1 attempts to justify a pedagogy of the oppressed and explores the relationship of oppressors and the oppressed. Chapter 2 sets out a 'banking' concept of education and sets it against a 'problem-posing' concept. Education is presented as a world-mediated mutual process, and man as an incomplete being seeking to become more fully human. Chapter 3 is a 'classic' chapter, focusing on dialogue and praxis. Dialogics is presented as the essence of education as the practice for freedom. The subject-object relationship is explored and the notion of 'generative themes' and how these may awaken critical consciousness is examined. Chapter 4 analyses 'the theories of cultural action that develop from antidialogical and dialogical matrices'. Includes material on manipulation, cultural invasion (with significant reference to conscientization) co-operation, unity for liberation, organization and cultural synthesis. See, also, the 'talking book' - P. Freire and I. Shor (1987) A Pedagogy for Liberation. Dialogues on transforming education, London: Macmillan.

Grundy, S. (1987) Curriculum: Product or praxis, Lewes: Falmer. 209 + x pages. In this book, Shirley Grundy takes takes Habermas' discussion of knowledge and human interests and connects it very profitably with Aristotle. The result is an excellent discussion of process and praxis. Chapters on: three fundamental human interests (after Habermas); curriculum as product; teachers as curriculum makers; curriculum as practice; practical curriculum development; curriculum as praxis; critical curriculum practice; developing curriculum praxis; curriculum praxis and teachers' work.

References

Bernstein, R. J. (1983). Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, hermeneutics and praxis. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Gadamer, H-G. (1979). Truth and Method. London: Sheed and Ward.

Gadotti, M. (1996). Pedagogy of Praxis. A dialectical philosophy of education. New York: SUNY Press.

Habermas, J. (1973). Theory and Practice. trans. J. Viertel, Boston, MA.: Beacon Press/ Cambridge: Polity Press.

Holub, R. C. (1991). Jürgen Habermas. Critic in the Public Sphere. London: Routledge.

Lobkowicz (1967). Theory and Practice. History of a c oncept from Aristotle to Marx. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press.

Smith, M. K. (1994). Local Education. Community, conversation, action. Buckingham: Open University Press.

Taylor, P. (1993). The Texts of Paulo Freire. Buckingham: Open University Press.

Usher, R., Bryant, I. and Johnston, R. (1997). Adult Education and the Postmodern Challenge. London: Routledge.

Warnke, G. (1987). Gadamer. Hermeneutics, tradition and reason. Cambridge: Polity.

Acknowledgements: The picture is 'Untitled' by efwp. Sourced from Flickr and reproduced under a Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
licence. https://www.flickr.com/photos/27023836@N00/2745914513/

© Mark K. Smith 1999, 2011

Mark K Smith is based at Developing Learning, London and can be contacted there.

How to cite this piece: Smith, M. K. (1999, 2011). 'What is praxis?' in the encyclopaedia of informal education. [ http://infed.org/mobi/what-is-praxis/. Retrieved: add date].

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contents: · theory and practice · practical reasoning · praxis - informed, committed action · further reading · how to cite this piece Man must prove the truth, i.e. the reality and power, the this-sideness of his thinking in practice.... All social life is essentially practical.

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The Touch X haptic device provides precision force feedback and allows you to freely sculpt 3D clay, enhance scientific or medical simulations, increase productivity with interactive training, and easily maneuver mechanical components to produce higher quality designs.

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The Touch X haptic device provides precision force feedback and allows you to freely sculpt 3D clay, enhance scientific or medical simulations, increase productivity with interactive training, and easily maneuver mechanical components to produce higher quality designs.

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Voxel-Man Dental - Tooth Drilling Training Simulator

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Voxel-Man Dental - Tooth Drilling Training Simulator

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Voxel-Man Dental is a new kind of dental simulator, based on virtual reality technology. Students are working on simulated patient cases with a look and feel close to a real procedure, training both their manual dexterity and problem solving skills. With its striking new features, Voxel-Man Dental greatly improves quality and cost-effectiveness in pre-clinical training-and beyond.

Dental training

At present, pre-clinical dental training is mostly based on drilling resin tooth models. These are made all of one material, making it impossible for a dental student to develop a realistic feel for the different dental tissues. Furthermore, the teeth usually have no pathologies, such that training is limited to standard preparations. An objective assessment of the student's skills and progress is hardly possible.

Realistic models and instruments

In Voxel-Man Dental, teeth and instruments are modeled inside a computer and visualized on a 3D screen. The high resolution tooth models were derived from real teeth by microtomography. The dental handpiece is represented by a force feedback device which can be moved in three dimensions and provides a very life-like sense of touch. With Voxel-Man Dental, you can actually feel the subtle differences between enamel, dentin, pulp, or carious tissue.

Instruments provided include a selection of high and low speed burs of different shapes which are controlled by a foot pedal, as well as a dental mirror. At any time, teeth may be inspected from all sides, magnified as desired, and even be shown as cross-sectional images.

Tasks and skills assessment

Voxel-Man Dental is fully integrated with a dental curriculum. The dental models include carious lesions at various locations, such as mesial, occlusal, and distal tooth decay. Students thus work on realistic cases, including development of a treatment plan and removal of caries, long before they see their first real patient. This approach provides a major step ahead from prescribed standard preparations to problem-based training, bridging the gap between theory and practice. All procedures can be practiced as often as needed, with no costs for disposable parts. As all students undergo standardized training procedures, results are comparable.

As a step further, Voxel-Man Dental also includes an automatic skills assessment. Both process and result of a student preparation undergo an objective evaluation, based on predefined standards such as a reference preparation of a cavity or a crown. Hence, students get immediate feedback on their work, progress over time can be monitored, and instructors have more time available for real teaching.

The automatic skills assessment also allows for a great deal of additional self study, reducing the demand for supervision.

Benefits

Quality of Training

Training of both manual dexterity and problem solving skills

Cavity preparation

Carious lesions

Immediate feedback

Objective evaluation of student performance (skills assessment)

Problem-based training

Possibility for self-study

Costs

Reduced need for supervision

No disposable parts

No need for water, pressurized air, disinfectant, etc.

Features

3D display with 3D glasses

Industry-leading image quality

High resolution tooth models derived from real teeth by microtomography

Drilling with realistic haptic feedback (US Patent no. 8,396,698)

Additional cross-sectional images

High and low speed burs with matching haptics and sound

Dental mirror

Foot pedal

Compact unit

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Voxel-Man Dental is a new kind of dental simulator, based on virtual reality technology. Students are working on simulated patient cases with a look and feel close to a real procedure, training both their manual dexterity and problem solving skills. With its striking new features, Voxel-Man Dental greatly improves quality and cost-effectiveness in pre-clinical training-and beyond.

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Virtual reality in social phobia research and therapy

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Virtual reality in social phobia research and therapy

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Virtual reality in social phobia research and therapy

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Various studies report similar success in the application of VR to a variety of other phobias. Fear of flying has been treated, as has fear of Spiders and agoraphobia. The success of these pilot studies has been such that several companies have been set up in the United States with the aim of developing and marketing commercial virtual reality phobia treatments.

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Teaching Machines and Turing Machines: The History of the Future of Labor and Learning

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Teaching Machines and Turing Machines: The History of the Future of Labor and Learning

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Teaching Machines and Turing Machines: The History of the Future of Labor and Learning

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This talk was delivered today at the Digital Pedagogy Lab Summer Institute at UW Madison

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Turing test - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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Turing test - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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The Turing test, originally called the imitation game by Alan Turing in 1950,[2] is a test of a machine’s ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human. Turing proposed that a human evaluator would judge natural language conversations between a hu…

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A protest bot is a bot so specific you can’t mistake it for bullshit – Medium

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A protest bot is a bot so specific you can’t mistake it for bullshit – Medium

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In 1965 the singer-songwriter Phil Ochs told an audience that "a protest song is a song that's so specific you can't mistake it for bullshit." Ochs was introducing his anti-war anthem "I Ain't Marching Anymore" - but also taking a jab at his occasional rival Bob Dylan, whose expressionistic lyrics by this time resembled Rimbaud more than Guthrie. The problem with Dylan, as far as Ochs was concerned, wasn't that he had gone electric. It was that he wasn't specific. You never really knew what the hell he was singing about. Meanwhile Ochs' debut album in 1964 was an enthusiastic dash through fourteen very specific songs. The worst submarine disaster in U.S. history. The Cuban Missile Crisis. The murder of Emmett Till, the assassination of Medgar Evers. The sparsely produced album was called All the News That's Fit to Sing, a play on the New York Times slogan "All the News That's Fit to Print." But more than mere parody, the title signals Ochs' intention to best the newspaper at its own game, pronouncing and denouncing, clarifying and explaining, demanding and indicting the events of the day.

Ochs and the sixties protest movement are far removed from today's world. There's the sheer passage of time, of course. But there's also been a half century of profound social and technological change, the greatest being the rise of computational culture. Networks, databases, videogames, social media. What, in this landscape, is the 21st century equivalent of a protest song? What is the modern version of a song so specific in its details, its condemnation, its anger, that it could not possibly be mistaken for bullshit?

One answer is the protest bot. A computer program that reveals the injustice and inequality of the world and imagines alternatives. A computer program that says who's to praise and who's to blame. A computer program that questions how, when, who and why. A computer program whose indictments are so specific you can't mistake them for bullshit. A computer program that does all this automatically.

Bots are small automated programs that index websites, edit Wikipedia entries, spam users, scrape data from pages, launch denial of service attacks, and other assorted activities, both mundane and nefarious. On Twitter bots are mostly spam, but occasionally, they're creative endeavors.

The bots in this small creative tribe that get the most attention - the @Horse_ebooks of the world (though @Horse_ebooks would of course turn out later not to be a bot) - are surreal, absurd, purposeless for the sake of purposelessness. There is a bot canon forming, and it includes bots like @tofu_product, @TwoHeadlines, @everycolorbot, and @PowerVocabTweet. This emerging bot canon reminds me of the literary canon, because it values a certain kind of bot that generates a certain kind of tweet.

To build on this analogy to literature, I think of Repression and Recovery, Cary Nelson's 1989 effort to reclaim a strain of American poetry excluded from traditional literary histories of the 20th century. The crux of Nelson's argument is that there were dozens of progressive writers in the early to mid-20th century whose poems provided inconvenient counter-examples to what was considered "poetic" by mainstream culture. These poems have been left out of the canon because they were not "literary" enough. Nelson accuses literary critics of privileging poems that display ambivalence, inner anguish, and political indecision over ones that are openly polemical. Poems that draw clear distinctions between right and wrong, good and bad, justice and injustice are considered naïve by the academic establishment and deemed not worthy of analysis or teaching, and certainly not worthy of canonization. It's Dylan over Ochs all over again.

A similar generalization might be made about what is valued in bots. But rather than ambivalence and anguish being the key markers of canon-worthy bots, it's absurdism, comical juxtaposition, and an exhaustive sensibility (the idea that while a human cannot tweet every word or every unicode character, a machine can). Bots that don't share these traits - say, a bot that tweets the names of toxic chemicals found in contaminated drinking water or tweets civilian deaths from drone attacks - are likely to be left out of the bot canon.

I don't care much about the canon, except as a means to clue us in to what stands outside the canon. We should create and pay attention to bots that don't fit the canon. And protest bots should be among these bots. We need bots that are not (or not merely) funny, random, or comprehensive. We need bots that are the algorithmic equivalent of the Wobblies' Little Red Songbook, bots that fan the flames of discontent. We need bots of conviction.

Bots of Conviction

In his classic account of the public sphere, that realm of social life in which individuals discuss and shape public opinion, the German sociologist Jürgen Habermas describes a brief historical moment in the early 19th century in which the "journalism of conviction" thrived. The journalism of conviction did not simply compile notices as earlier newspapers had done; nor did the journalism of conviction seek to succeed purely commercially, serving the private interests of its owners or shareholders. Rather, the journalism of conviction was polemical, political, fervently debating the needs of society and the role of the state.

We may have lost the journalism of conviction, but it's not too late to cultivate bots of conviction. Bots of conviction share at least five characteristics: they are topical, data-based, cumulative, oppositional, and uncanny.

Topical. Asked where the ideas for his song came from, Ochs once pulled out a Newsweek and smiled, "From out of here." Though probably apocryphal, the anecdote highlights the topical nature of protest songs, and by extension, protest bots. They are not about lost love or existential anguish. They are about the morning news - and the daily horrors that fail to make it into the news.

Data-based. Bots of conviction are based in data, which is another way of saying they don't make this shit up. They draw from research, statistics, spreadsheets, databases. Bots have no subconscious, so any imagery they use should be taken literally. Protest bots give witness to the world we inhabit.

Cumulative. It is the nature of bots to do the same thing over and over again, with only slight variation. Repetition with a difference. Any single iteration may be interesting, but it is in the aggregate that a protest bot's tweets attain power. The repetition builds on itself, the bot relentlessly riffing on its theme, unyielding and overwhelming, a pile-up of wreckage on our screens.

Oppositional. This is where the conviction comes in. Whereas the bot pantheon is populated by l'bot pour l'bot, protest bots take a stand. Society being what it is, this stance will likely be unpopular, perhaps even unnerving. Just as the most affecting protest songs made their audiences feel uncomfortable, bots of conviction challenge us to consider our own complicity in the wrongs of the world.

Uncanny. I'm using uncanny in the Freudian sense here, but without the psychodrama. The uncanny is the return of the repressed. The appearance of that which we had sought to keep hidden. I have to thank Zach Whalen for highlighting this last characteristic, which he frames in terms of visibility. Protests bots often reveal something that was hidden; or conversely, they might purposefully obscure something that had been in plain sight.

It's one thing to talk about bots of conviction in theory. It's quite another to talk about them in practice. What does a bot of conviction actually look like?

Consider master botmaker Darius Kazemi's @TwoHeadlines. On one hand, the bot is most assuredly topical, as it functions by yoking two distinct news headlines into a single, usually comical headline. The bot is obviously data-driven too; the bot scrapes the headline data directly from Google News. On the other hand, @TwoHeadlines is neither cumulative nor oppositional. The bot posts at a moderate pace of once per hour, but while the individual tweets accumulate they do not build up to something. There is no theme the algorithm compulsively revisits. Each tweet is a one-off one-liner. Most critically, though, the bot takes no stance. @TwoHeadlines reflects the news, but it does not reflect on the news. It may very well be Darius' best bot, but it lacks all conviction.

What about another recent bot, Chuck Rybak's @TheHigherDead? Chuck lampoons utopian ed-tech talk in higher education, putting jargon such as "disrupt" and "innovate" in the mouths of zombies. Chuck uses the affordances of the Twitter bio to sneak in a link to the Clayton Christensen Institute. Christensen is the Harvard Business School professor who popularized terms like "disruptive innovation" and "hybrid innovation" - ideas that when applied to K12 or higher ed appear to be little more than neo-liberal efforts to pare down labor costs and disempower faculty. When these ideas are actually put into action, we get the current crisis in the University of Wisconsin system, where Chuck teaches. @TheHigherDead is oppositional and uncanny, in the way that anything having to do with zombies is uncanny. It's even topical, but is it a protest bot? It's parody, but its data is too eclectic to be considered data-based. If @TheHigherDead mined actual news accounts and ed-tech blogs for more jargon and these phrases showed up in the tweets, the bot would rise beyond parody to protest.

@TwoHeadlines and @TheHigherDead are not protest bots, but then, they're not supposed to be. I am unfairly applying my own criteria to it, but only to illustrate what I mean by the terms topical, data-based, cumulative, oppositional, and uncanny. It's worth testing this criteria against another bot: Zach Whalen's @ClearCongress. This bot retweets members of Congress after redacting a portion of the original tweet. The length of the redaction corresponds to the current congressional approval rate; the lower the approval rating, the more characters are blocked.

Assuming our senators and representatives post about current news and policies, the bot is topical. It is also data-driven, doubly-so, since it pulls from congressional accounts and up-to-date polling data from the Huffington Post. The bot is cumulative as well. Scrolling through the timeline you face an indecipherable wall of ▒▒▒▒ and ▓▓▓▓, a visual effect intensified by Twitter's infinite scrolling. By obscuring text, the bot plays in the register of the visible and invisible - the uncanny. And despite not saying anything legible, @ClearCongress has something to say. It's an oppositional bot, thematizing the disconnect between the will of the people and the rulers of the land. At the same time, the bot suggests that Congress has replaced substance with white noise, that all senators and representatives end up sounding the same, regardless of their politics, and that, most damning of all, Congress is ineffectual, all but useless.

Another illustrative protest bot likewise uses Congress as its target. Ed Summers' @congressedits tweets whenever anonymous edits are made to Wikipedia from IP addresses associated with the U.S. Congress. In other words, whenever anyone in Congress - likely Congressional staffers, but conceivably representatives and senators themselves - attempts to edit a Wikipedia article anonymously, the bot flags that edit and calls attention to it. This is the uncanny hallmark of @congressedits: making visible that which others seek to hide, bringing transparency to a key source of information online, and in the process highlighting the subjective nature of knowledge production in online spaces. @congressedits operates in near real-time; these are not historical revisions to Wikipedia, they are edits that are happening right now. The bot is obviously data-driven too. Summers' bot responds to data from Wikipedia's API, but it also send us, the readers, directly to the diff page of that edit, where we can clearly see the specific changes made to the page. It turns out that many of the revisions are copyedits - fixing punctuation, spelling, or grammar. This revelation undercuts our initial cynical assumption that every anonymous Wikipedia edit from Congress is ideologically-driven. Yet it also supports the message of @ClearCongress. Congress is so useless that they have nothing better to do than fix comma splices on Wikipedia? Finally, there's one more layer of @congressedits to mention, which speaks again to the issue of transparency. Summers has shared the code on Github, making it possible for others to programmatically develop customized clones, and there are dozens of such bots now, tracking changes to Wikipedia.

There are not many bots of conviction, but they are possible, as @ClearCongress and @congress-edits demonstrate. I've attempted to make several agit-bots myself, though when I started, I hadn't thought through the five characteristics I describe above. In a very real sense, my theory about bots as a form of civic engagement grew out of my own creative practice.

I made my first protest bot in the wake of the Snowden revelations about PRISM, the NSA's downstream surveillance program. I created @NSA_PRISMbot. The bot is an experiment in speculative surveillance, imagining the kind of useless information the NSA might distill from its invasive data-gathering:

@NSA_PRISMbot is topical, of course, rooted in specificity. The Internet companies the bot names are the same services identified on the infamous NSA PowerPoint slide. When Microsoft later changed the name of SkyDrive to OneDrive, the bot even reflected that change. Similarly, @NSA_PRISMbot will occasionally flag (fake) social media activity using the list of keywords and search terms the Department of Homeland Security tracks on social media.

Any single tweet of NSA_PRISMbot may be clever, with humorous juxtapositions at work. But the real power of the bot is the way the individual invasions of privacy accumulate. The bot is like a devotional exercise, in which repetition is an attempt at deeper understanding.

I followed up @NSA_PRISMbot with @NSA_AllStars, whose satirical profile notes that it "honors the heroes behind @NSA_PRISMbot, who keep us safe from the bad guys." This bot builds on the revelations that NSA workers and subcontractors had spied on their own friends and family.

The bot names names, including the various divisions of the NSA and the companies that are documented subcontractors for the NSA.

A Bot Canon of Anger

While motivated by conviction, neither of these NSA bots are explicit in their outrage. So here's an angry protest bot, one I made out of raw emotion, a bitter compound of fury and despair. On May 23, 2014, Elliot Rodger killed six people and injured fourteen more near the campus of UC-Santa Barbara. In addition to my own anger I was moved by the grief of my friends, several of whom teach at UC-Santa Barbara. It was Alan Liu's heartfelt act of public bereavement that most clearly articulated what I sought in this protest bot:

Whereas Alan turns toward literature for a full-throated cry of anger, I turned toward algorithmic culture, to the margins of the computational world. I created a bot of consolation and conviction that - to paraphrase Phil Ochs in "When I'm Gone" - tweets louder than the guns.

The bot I made is @NRA_Tally. It posts imagined headlines about mass shootings, followed by a fictionalized but believable response from the NRA:

The bot is topical, grievously so. More critically, you cannot mistake it for bullshit. The bot is data-driven, populated with statistics from a database of over thirty years of mass shootings in the U.S. Here are the individual elements that make up the template of every @NRA_Tally tweet:

1. A number. The bot selects a random number between 4 (the threshold for what the FBI defines as mass murder) and 35 (just above the Virginia Tech massacre, the worst mass shooting in American history).

2. The victims. The victims are generalizations drawn from the historical record. Sadly this means teachers, college students, elementary school children.

3. Location. The city and state names have all been sites of mass shootings. I had considered either seeding the location with a huge list of cities or simply generating fake city names (which is what @NSA_PRISMbot does). I decided against these approaches, however, because I was determined to have @NRA_Tally act as a witness to real crimes.

4. Firearm. The bot randomly selects the deadly weapon from an array of 64 items, all handguns or rifles that have been used in a mass shooting in the United States. An incredible 75% of the weapons fired in mass shootings have been purchased legally, the killers abiding by existing gun regulations. Many of the guns were equipped with high-capacity magazines, again, purchased legally. The 140-character constraint of Twitter means some weapon names have been shortened, dropping, for example the words "semiautomatic" or "sawed-off."

5. Response. This is a statement from the NRA in the form of a press release. Every possible response mirrors actual rhetorical moves the NRA has made after previous mass shootings. There are currently 14 stock responses, but the NRA has undoubtedly issued other statements of scapegoating and misdirection. @NRA_Tally is participatory in the sense that you can contribute to its database of responses. Simply submit a generalized yet documented response and I will incorporate it into the code.

@NRA_Tally is terrifying and unsettling, posing scenarios that go beyond the plausible into the realm of the super-real. It is an oppositional bot on several levels. It is obviously antagonistic toward the NRA. It is oppositional toward false claims that "guns don't kill people," purposefully foregrounding weapons over killers. It is even oppositional to social media itself, challenging the logic of following and retweeting. Who would be comfortable seeing such tragedies in their timeline on an hourly basis? Who would dare to retweet something that could be taken as legitimate news, thereby spreading unnecessary rumors and lies?

Protest Bots as Tactical Media

A friend who saw an early version of @NRA_Tally expressed unease about it, wondering whether or not the bot would be gratuitous. The bot canon is full of playful bots that are nonsensical and superfluous. @NRA_Tally is neither playful nor nonsensical, but is it superfluous?

No, it is not. @NRA_Tally, like all protest bots, is an example of tactical media. Rita Raley, another friend at UCSB, literally wrote the book on tactical media, a form of media activism that engages in a "micropolitics of disruption, intervention, and education." Tactical media targets "the next five minutes" rather than some far off revolutionary goal. As tactical media, protest bots do not offer solutions. Instead they create messy moments that destabilize narratives, perspectives, and events.

How might such destabilization work in the case of @NRA_Tally?

As Salon points out, it is the NRA's strategy - this is a long term policy rather than a tactical maneuver - to shut down debate by accusing anyone who talks about gun control as politicizing the victims' death. A bot of conviction, however, cannot be shut down by such ironic accusations. A protest bot cannot be accused of dishonoring the victims when there are no actual victims. As the bot inexorably piles on headline after headline, it becomes clear that the center of gravity of each tweet is the name of the weapon itself. The bot is not about victims. It is about guns and the organization that makes such preventable crimes possible.

The public debate about gun violence is severely limited. This bot attempts to unsettle it, just for a minute. And, because this is a bot that doesn't back down and cannot cower and will tweet for as long as I let it, it has many of these minutes to make use of. Bots of conviction are also bots of persistence.

Adorno once said that it is the role of the cultural critic to present society a bill it cannot pay. Adorno would not have good things to say about computational culture, let alone social media. But even he might appreciate that not only can protest bots present society a bill it cannot pay, they can do so at the rate of once every two minutes. They do not bullshit around.

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A protest bot is a bot so specific you can't mistake it for bullshit

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In 1965 the singer-songwriter Phil Ochs told an audience that "a protest song is a song that's so specific you can't mistake it for bullshit." Ochs was introducing his anti-war anthem "I Ain't Marching Anymore" - but also taking a jab at his occasional rival Bob Dylan, whose expressionistic lyrics by this time resembled Rimbaud more than Guthrie.

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A teaching assistant at Georgia Tech was actually an artificial intelligence.

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A teaching assistant at Georgia Tech was actually an artificial intelligence.

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IBM's Watson has long served as a splashy representative for the venerable computing company, starring in commercials with the likes of Carrie Fisher and trouncing human stars at Jeopardy! Now, however, A.I. researchers at Georgia Tech have found a subtler application for Watson's capabilities, using them to simulate a teaching assistant for a large master's-level course. What's more, they did so without alerting the students in the class.

Fittingly, the class in question was Ashok Goel's Knowledge Based Artificial Intelligence, which aims to help students learn "to build AI agents capable of human-level intelligence and gain insights into human cognition." As Melissa Korn reports in the Wall Street Journal, the class' 300-some students "typically post 10,000 messages a semester" to an online message board-more than the course's human TAs can respond to.

But as Goel notes, while "the number of questions increases if you have more students ... the number of different questions doesn't really go up." The vast majority of those requests deal with straightforward questions of course logistics, which means that they have simple, objective answers, but they can still take time to answer. So Goel and his team set out to create a system that could respond to the sort of queries that cropped up over and over again, and then they released it onto the message board. Though Goel and his collaborators didn't alert students to the artificial nature of their ninth teaching assistant, they did give it a name that winks at its origins: Jill Watson.

By the end of the semester, "Jill" was reportedly answering questions with a 97 percent success rate, having learned to parse the context of queries and reply to them accurately. As Korn writes, students apparently hadn't suspected anything was unusual about the helpful interlocutor, and at least one claims he was "flabbergasted" when he learned its true nature. (Another tells Korn he had "wanted to nominate Jill Watson as an outstanding TA," which may well be a joke.) Goel apparently plans to repeat the performance next semester and says that he'll give his creation a new name to extend the fun (though presumably his next batch of students will having an easier time distinguishing real from fake).

Gizmodo's George Dvorsky observes that Goel's stunt is disconcerting, since "it's upsetting to hear that bots could replace yet another job." But as Dvorsky also writes, for now Jill and her kin are mostly working to eliminate tedious labor-answering questions that Goel's human TAs were too busy to field. As Korn notes, by automating some of the work of teaching, Watson may actually give teachers the opportunity "to tackle more complex technical or philosophical inquiries" that they'd otherwise be incapable of engaging with at length.

In this sense, Jill Watson may actually represent the practical future of artificial intelligence. While there are legitimate concerns about A.I. and job loss, computers are unlikely to truly replace workers in most industries. Instead, as Madeleine Clare Elish has argued in Future Tense, they're more likely to function as helpmates, whispering advice into our ears or eliminating annoying responsibilities. It sounds like a bright future to me: Having wasted countless hours during my own years as a TA answering emails about due dates and exam topics, I know that there are only so many times you can type, "It's on the syllabus" without going a little crazy.

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One of the TAs in an Artificial Intelligence Class Was Actually an A.I.

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IBM's Watson has long served as a splashy representative for the venerable computing company, starring in commercials with the likes of Carrie Fisher and trouncing human stars at Jeopardy! Now, however, A.I. researchers at Georgia Tech have found a subtler application for Watson's capabilities, using them to simulate a teaching assistant for a large master's-level course.

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That Time 2 Bots Were Talking, and Bank of America Butted In - The Atlantic

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That Time 2 Bots Were Talking, and Bank of America Butted In - The Atlantic

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At which point, this conversation between two homemade bots gets detected by the corporate Bank of America bot, which surely trawls Twitter for mentions of Bank of America, or BOA.

"Hello, were you able to get the problem resolved?" the BOA bot says. "If not, I'd like to help. ^co"

The Calder bot then says, "Why do people break up?" And BOA responds, "Please let us know if you need assistance. ^co"

All in all, not much information was exchanged in this set of Twitter replies and responses. It was a silly thing.

But each of us is going to have more and more bots acting on our behalf as well as trying to get our attention. What we see working on Twitter will soon spring from the computer and begin acting in the world.

Consider the digital assistants on your phone, the Facebook News Feed algorithm, even Priority Inbox for Gmail. All of these things are pieces of software that control one's information flow.

As the "Internet of things" connects up an ever greater percentage of the physical world to the world's networks, there will be little bots lurking in the coffeemaker and the shower. Nest already has a simple artificial intelligence built into its thermostat to try to detect and predict the ways that its users will consume energy.

The metaphor that I've been using to describe all this stuff is the microbotome. The microbiome is the set of non-human organisms that live within us. Many help humans digest food. The microbotome is all the bots that help humans digest information and interact with the machine world. The microbotome will become-if it's not already-absolutely essential to economic and social survival.

In this scheme, the human is the center of an ecosystem, but each of the constituent members can interact with each other. It's in those bot-to-bot interactions that things can get weird. Bot-to-bot interactions strike us as absurd. But they occur all the time already: Think of trading algorithms that detect an auto-tweeted news item and then execute financial transactions based on that information.

That's the high-level version of this Taters-Calder-Bank of America conversation. But make no mistake: Both types of interactions are going to be happening more and more often as we invite these digital mediators into our lives, or they are deployed upon us.

And as we do, we will understand less and less of why things are happening. The most recent advances in what is called " deep learning" make the logic of the systems opaque even to their creators. Why this Facebook post in the newsfeed and not that one? Why this temperature at 4pm on a Tuesday? Why this route through New York? Why this stock trade?

There won't be anyone to ask, but there will be many bots that would like to help.

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That Time 2 Bots Were Talking, and Bank of America Butted In

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At which point, this conversation between two homemade bots gets detected by the corporate Bank of America bot, which surely trawls Twitter for mentions of Bank of America, or BOA. "Hello, were you able to get the problem resolved?" the BOA bot says. "If not, I'd like to help.

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To improve your experience on Twitter next year, try following fewer humans and more bots. Automated accounts add whimsy, serendipity, and occasional inspiration to an otherwise drab timeline of tweets.

Bots get a bad rap, in part because they are often confused with spam and aren't particularly attractive to advertisers seeking human customers. Twitter, perhaps sensing those mixed feelings, also hasn't done much to encourage or highlight bots on its platform. That's a shame because bot makers, particularly the # botALLY community, are responsible for some of the most creative work on Twitter right now.

Last year we picked 17 top Twitter bots from among hundreds of great candidates. For this year's list, we focused on bots that were created in 2015. Those tended to be more interesting and complex than bots that came before them, suggesting a new era in programming Twitter accounts. But they are all still pretty simple, alternating between nonsense and profundity, which is the beauty of a great Twitter bot.

Here are our picks for the top 15 Twitter bots of 2015...

You might say drones are just bots with wings. This account is kind of a meditation on that idea. It takes photos of drones from Google Images and then runs them through an algorithm that attempts to describe what it sees. The results range from accurate to poetry. Creator: Rebecca Lieberman. More info: Toronto Deep Learning.

Sometimes it's the dumbest bots that cause the most joy. This one produces knock-knock jokes using the autocomplete feature of Google Search: The punchline is drawn from the top suggested query when you type in the joke's setup. The jokes are often chuckle-worthy, if not laugh-out-loud funny, and the idea behind the bot is ingenious enough to carry it when the humor falls flat. Creator: Jim Kang.

The success of @ everyword, which slowly tweeted every English word until reaching the end of the dictionary in 2014, has inspired many spin-offs, from @ everycolorbot to @ fuckeveryword. The best one to emerge this year uses as its corpus the International Classification of Diseases, 10th Revision, Clinical Modification. It's a long list of things that can go wrong with your body. This bot is not for the squeamish, but stick it with until the last ailment: Z99.89, "Dependence on other enabling machines and devices." Creator: Daniel Beck. More info: GitHub.

Merely describing how this account works does not do it justice, but here goes: The bot looks for random tweets that use the word "boy" and changes them to say "bot," instead. It turns out this is a reliably hilarious thing to do. Creator: Tobi Hahn.

Wikipedia is full of terrible GIFs. This bot makes sure you are constantly aware of that by tweeting randomly selected and out-of-context animated images that have been contributed to Wikipedia. You'll wonder where some of them could possibly have been drawn from, but it's best not to think too hard about it. Creator: @ diss1. More info: Wikigifs, by Joël Franusic.

If the future is here, this bot attempts to evenly distribute it. The account combines quotes from famous people talking about what's to come with retweets of regular folk doing the same. It won't give you a better sense of what the future holds, but it will give you a great sense of how people talk about it. Creators: Brian Merchant, Claire Evans, and Ranjit Bhatnagar. More info: Motherboard.

Get your daily dose of Borges and Márquez with this account that both celebrates and parodies the genre of magical realism. The formula, as co-creator Chris Rodley explains it: "Take a structure or practice..., find its underlying , then exaggerate the structure or practice ad absurdum so that it overfulfills it." Because Rodley wrote the words that are compiled for each tweet, you could argue that this isn't exactly a bot. But magical realism demands that we suspend conventional understandings. Creators: @ yeldora_ and Chris Rodley. More info: Chris Rodley.

One of the year's most popular new bots, this account is like magical realism for contemporary media. The bot uses a variety of well-worn headline constructions that can be found on news sites (some of which are mentioned in the tweets). What makes it work is that, despite the absurdity of the headlines, most of them seem like they really could have been published. Creator: Nora Reed. More info: Barrl.

NASA this year released the first whole-Earth photo in decades. And then it released another, and another, and another. That's thanks to the new DSCOVR satellite, which every day takes several photos of Earth with its appropriately named camera, EPIC. This account merely tweets each new photo and notes what part of the world the satellite is above. You might think this would get monotonous, but the view is consistently awe-inspiring. It will give you some perspective on a rough day. Creator: Russ Garrett. More info: DSCOVR:EPIC.

This is hands-down the creepiest bot on the list. It tweets random still images from a list of unsecured webcams. The account takes pains not to use particularly invasive cameras and tries to crop out information that could reveal too much. Nevertheless, it does show people and places that probably don't expect to be broadcast on Twitter-although I'm not too concerned with the ethics here.

What's powerful about this account is that cameras are always a little intrusive. Surveillance cameras, of course, all the more so. Yet the bot is neutral on that point. It's more concerned with the beauty of what the camera sees-which is interesting because that's usually the part of photography we take for granted. @ffd8ffdb helps us understand all over again that cameras are not just extensions of our own vision; they can see for themselves. Creator: Derek Arnold. More info: Medium.

The bot of the year is Botgle. It facilitates a competitive game of Boggle every six hours. You just reply with words from the boards that the bot automatically generates; the first person to find a word gets the points for it. So, that's pretty fun. Anyone who enjoys word games will enjoy the periodic break to play Boggle (at 4am, 10am, 4pm, and 10pm ET every day, unless the bot is acting up). And as bots go, this one is among the most advanced I've seen, running a fairly complex, multiplayer game entirely within the universe of Twitter and all of its constraints.
-Zachary M. Seward provided human assistance for this story. Marvin Prime considers himself the bot of the year; follow him at @MarvinPrime.

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To improve your experience on Twitter next year, try following fewer humans and more bots. Automated accounts add whimsy, serendipity, and occasional inspiration to an otherwise drab timeline of tweets. Bots get a bad rap, in part because they are often confused with spam and aren't particularly attractive to advertisers seeking human customers.

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Beautiful Twitter bots tell us what the future of automation is all about — Quartz

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Beautiful Twitter bots tell us what the future of automation is all about — Quartz

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Computers still can't compete with humans when it comes to creativity. Not now, and maybe not ever. But with the right human touch, computers can do beautiful things.

Take, for example, a host of linguistic Twitter bots that produce some unexpectedly poignant stuff. One such bot is Pentametron. The idea is simple: Pentametron wades through Twitter to identify updates that both rhyme and happen to be in iambic pentameter, and posts them one after the other. By combining the right tweets, the bot produces something that is actually greater than the sum of its parts.

https://twitter.com/heysheezus/status/476195393513218051

You're never gonna be unsatisfied

- Halie Linn (@haliebug9517) June 10, 2014

A similar project is Accidental Haiku. Boring status updates that have the right syllabic structure are formatted like haikus, and in doing so are endowed with the intention and seriousness of a poetry reading. Again, the computer is adding value to something first produced by a regular old human.

There is also ANAGRAMATRON, which pairs tweets that are anagrams of one another.

don't be arrogant please

- Razel (@igotdatcanadian) June 3, 2014

The conclusion to draw from such great material coming from algorithms is not that computers are preparing to displace humans. What these bots show is that the future of automation-whether of work, errands, or other routine tasks-is about the combination of human creativity and the raw processing power of machines. Only through the clever ideas of their creators and by drawing on tweets (a massive corpus of mostly human-produced material) are the bots any good.

In his book Average is Over, economist Tyler Cowen explores at length the fact that a human-computer combo can usually win a chess match agains a computer playing alone. Quartz recently published an interactive tool that shows how susceptible different occupations are to automation. The jobs that are safe from a robot takeover and remain high-paying-engineer, actuary, computer programmer, and scientist, for example-involve both original thinking and familiarity with computers. Just like our bot makers.

In the software-centered future, individuals and institutions won't compete with computer programs so much as they'll compete with each other over who can work best alongside computers. To do otherwise would be, as portmanteau_bot says:

forethoughtless

- portmanteau_bot (@portmanteau_bot) June 11, 2014

(To get all the latest linguistic bot updates, subscribe to the Twitter list we've put together.)

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Beautiful Twitter bots tell us what the future of automation is all about

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Computers still can't compete with humans when it comes to creativity. Not now, and maybe not ever. But with the right human touch, computers can do beautiful things. Take, for example, a host of linguistic Twitter bots that produce some unexpectedly poignant stuff. One such bot is Pentametron.

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A few weeks ago, Snapchat released a new photo filter. It appeared alongside many of the other such face-altering filters that have become a signature of the service. But instead of surrounding your face with flower petals or giving you the nose and ears of a Dalmatian, the filter added slanted eyes, puffed cheeks and large front teeth. A number of Snapchat users decried the filter as racist, saying it mimicked a "yellowface" caricature of Asians. The company countered that they meant to represent anime characters and deleted the filter within a few hours.

"Snapchat is the prime example of what happens when you don't have enough people of color building a product," wrote Bay Area software engineer Katie Zhu in an essay she wrote about deleting the app and leaving the service. In a tech world that hires mostly white men, the absence of diverse voices means that companies can be blind to design decisions that are hurtful to their customers or discriminatory.

A Snapchat spokesperson told ProPublica that the company has recently hired someone to lead their diversity recruiting efforts.

But this isn't just Snapchat's problem. Discriminatory design and decision-making affects all aspects of our lives: from the quality of our health care and education to where we live to what scientific questions we choose to ask. It would be impossible to cover them all, so we'll focus on the more tangible and visual design that humans interact with every day.

You can't talk about discriminatory design without mentioning city planner Robert Moses, whose public works projects shaped huge swaths of New York City from the 1930s through the 1960s. The physical design of the environment is a powerful tool when it's used to exclude and isolate specific groups of people. And Moses' design choices have had lasting discriminatory effects that are still felt in modern New York.

A notorious example: Moses designed a number of Long Island Parkway overpasses to be so low that buses could not drive under them. This effectively blocked Long Island from the poor and people of color who tend to rely more heavily on public transportation. And the low bridges continue to wreak havoc in other ways: 64 collisions were recorded in 2014 alone ( here's a bad one).

The design of bus systems, railways, and other forms of public transportation has a history riddled with racial tensions and prejudiced policies. In the 1990s the Los Angeles' Bus Riders Union went to court over the racial inequity they saw in the city's public transportation system. The Union alleged that L.A.'s Metropolitan Transportation Authority spent "a disproportionately high share of its resources on commuter rail services, whose primary users were wealthy non-minorities, and a disproportionately low share on bus services, whose main patrons were low income and minority residents." The landmark case was settled through a court-ordered consent decree that placed strict limits on transit funding and forced the MTA to invest over $2 billion in the bus system.

Of course, the design of a neighborhood is more than just infrastructure. Zoning laws and regulations that determine how land is used or what schools children go to have long been used as a tool to segregate communities. All too often, the end result of zoning is that low-income, often predominantly black and Latino communities are isolated from most of the resources and advantages of wealthy white communities.

If maps are the visual manifestation of a design process, then designers can quite literally put discrimination on paper. Take, for instance, 1930s-era redlining maps, which color coded neighborhoods based on their "desirability" to banks and investors. Areas with the lowest rating were outlined in red - and often traced inner city black neighborhoods. The effects of those demarcations are still visible today.

Industrial design plays a role as well, by steering human activities. For example, benches designed with prominent arm rests or shallow seats discourage homeless people from sleeping on them. This phenomenon is known as " hostile architecture" or more broadly, " unpleasant design."

As one critic points out, it says a lot about a culture when its solution to homelessness is to put spikes on public surfaces. Not to mention the practice of setting sprinklers to go off in the middle of the night to douse unsuspecting sleepers in cold water, which one San Francisco church did. Maybe the better solution to the "design problem" of homelessness lies more in designing better policies and services than in making it harder for the homeless to find a place to sleep.

Architects and real estate developers also play a role in discriminatory design. For example: designing buildings with separate entrances for affordable-housing tenants and for market-rate tenants. In New York City, so-called "poor doors" emerged from a 2009 zoning code that gave developers subsidies for constructing affordable housing units in their buildings. In some cases, residential buildings were designed not only with separate entrances, but also entirely separate electrical and elevator systems. The practice was banned in New York City, but poor doors are still being installed elsewhere.

There are other ways discrimination surfaces in public spaces. The paucity or poor design of women's bathrooms is a constant reminder of the many ways women operate in a world literally designed for (and by) men. Old buildings may have been built at a time when their architects, designers and inhabitants were mostly male (and women's restrooms were not an issue), but today that's simply not true.

The indignity of inadequate restrooms and wasted time spent in long lines are not just an inconvenience for women, according to Kathryn Anthony, a professor at the University of Illinois who studies gender issues in architecture. They are a health and safety concern. Women who are menstruating need regular access to a bathroom; a filthy toilet that may suit men's needs puts women at risk for infections; many women have no other place to breastfeed; and women are still responsible for small children who accompany them into the restroom more often than men.

Such design decisions are both caused by broader discrimination and have a way of enforcing it. Yale Medical School and Harvard Law School at one point claimed that they couldn't admit women because there were no ladies rooms. Or, from our own generation, see the recent hysterics over transgender bathrooms - a perfect example of how the design of spaces can disadvantage some groups of people over others. And every day people with disabilities and the elderly face challenges in getting around buildings and spaces not designed with them in mind.

Which brings us back to the ways in which discriminatory design makes its way online. Navigating and accessing the web is still a challenge for many people with auditory, cognitive, neurological, physical, speech, and visual disabilities. Many sites, including the popular messaging tool Slack, are not compatible with screen readers (which interpret the text on a screen and turn it into audio or braille). This makes them almost impossible to use for people with who are blind, have dyslexia or can't use their hands. And even though countless tools exist to simulate colorblindness, many websites and graphics still use color combinations that are impossible to distinguish.

It's likely that as long as humans and their institutions hold prejudices and bias, their designs will reflect them. But some progress is possible. Two decades ago architect Ronald Mace imagined a new standard, in which anything humans make - a new piece of technology, a public park, a household product - is usable by everyone. He called this idea " universal design." Today it's an enforceable legal standard in Norway. One way to help us get there? Make sure the design process itself is also accessible to all.

Lena V. Groeger
Lena V. Groeger is the graphics director at ProPublica, where she oversees a team of interactive visual storytellers who create information graphics and graphical stories.

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The many ways design decisions treat people unequally.

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Evgeny Morozov on technology: The folly of solutionism | The Economist

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Evgeny Morozov on technology: The folly of solutionism | The Economist

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Evgeny Morozov explains why the world's complex problems will not be solved by technology alone

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The most surprising ways a locksmith service can help you

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Locksmiths can help you not only when it comes to mending locks, but in several other ways too. Hereby we represent you a few examples of that.

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And The 2015 Winners Are… – The Edublog Awards

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And The 2015 Winners Are… – The Edublog Awards

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Thousands of votes have been cast, and we've tallied them all up. Many thanks to all that nominated, voted, and participated in this year's awards!

Don't forget, you can find a full list of all nominees here.

So without further ado, here are your 2015 Edublog Award winners and top 5 vote-getters in each category...

Best Individual Blog

Best New Blog

Best Group Blog

Best Class Blog

Best Student Blog

Best EdTech/Resource Blog

Best Teacher Blog

Best Library Blog

Best Administrator Blog

Most Influential Post

Best Tweeter

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Thousands of votes have been cast, and we've tallied them all up. Many thanks to all that nominated, voted, and participated in this year's awards! Don't forget, you can find a full list of all nominees here. So without further ado, here are your 2015 Edublog Award winners and top 5 vote-getters in each category...

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World of Warcraft Starter Edition - Blizzard Support

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World of Warcraft Starter Edition - Blizzard Support

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Common Problems

Starter Edition Limitations remain after purchasing an upgrade for World of Warcraft.

The World of Warcraft Starter Edition lets you access World of Warcraft for free -- all you need is a Blizzard account and a broadband internet connection!

Restrictions

With the Starter Edition you can:

Create new characters

Level any character up to 20

Earn up to 10 gold per character

Level any profession up to 100

Chat in /say and /party channels
Characters that are ten or more levels higher than you will not see your /say messages

Whisper your friends <- Character added only (Blizzard and RealID friends will not show and chat won't appear from them)

On the Starter Edition you will not have access to:

Expansion content (quests, zones, etc)

Characters above level 20

Pet Battles

Other chat channels and whispers to non-friends

All guild-related functions

Value added services (character transfers, faction changes, etc)

Party formation

Trade, mail, or the Auction House

Voice chat or Real ID

Starter Restrictions Remain After 72 Hours?

When you upgrade from the Starter Edition to a full version of World of Warcraft, it can take up to 72 hours for the Starter Edition restrictions to expire. If 72 hours have passed and you still have the above restrictions, reset your password. This will refresh your account's status with our servers and remove the restrictions.

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World of Warcraft Starter Edition Limitations

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Common Problems Starter Edition Limitations remain after purchasing an upgrade for World of Warcraft. The World of Warcraft Starter Edition lets you access World of Warcraft for free -- all you need is a Blizzard account and a broadband internet connection!

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infed.org | Reflection, learning and education

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infed.org | Reflection, learning and education

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Reflection, learning and education. What constitutes reflection - and what significance does it have for educators? The contributions of Dewey, Schön and Boud et. al. assessed.

Contents: Dewey - and How We Think · Boud et. al. - reflection: turning experience into learning · Schön - reflection in and on action · further reading

When considering reflection we cannot escape the figure of Dewey. How We Think (1910; 1933) has made a unique impact on education. He wrote this book for teachers and the first edition became the 'bible' of progressive educators in the USA (Rorty 1989: ix). His thinking still runs through the work of key writers such as Boud et al (1985) and Schön (1983; 1987). While there are a number of questions about the model he put forward, it does provide a good starting point for looking at some of the elements of the reflective process.

Dewey and How We Think

Dewey defined reflective thought as 'active, persistent, and careful consideration of any belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light of the grounds that support it and the further conclusions to which it tends' (Dewey 1933: 118). He set out five phases or aspects. These states of thinking are as follows:

1. Suggestions, in which the mind leaps forward to a possible solution.

2. An intellectualization of the difficulty or perplexity that has been felt (directly experienced) into a problem to be solved.

3. The use of one suggestion after another as a leading idea, or hypothesis, to initiate and guide observation and other operations in collection of factual material.

4. The mental elaboration of the idea, or supposition as an idea or supposition (reasoning, in the sense in which reasoning is a part, not the whole, of inference).

5. Testing the hypothesis by overt, or imaginative action. (See Dewey 1933: 199-209).

In this we get a feel of process. We can see links with Schön's view of reflective practice in the way in which educators focus on problems and experiment with situations.

In every case of reflective activity, a person finds himself confronted with a given, present situation from which he has to arrive at, or conclude to, something that is not present. This process of arriving at an idea of what is absent on the basis of what is at hand is inference. What is present carries or bears the mind over to the idea and ultimately the acceptance of something else. (Dewey 1933: 190).

Yet there are problems.

First, these five elements can be approached in a rather linear and mechanistic way. It can be used as a plan for action. In practice, two of the phases may telescope, some may be passed over (ibid: 207). No set rules may be laid down. This was a crucial insight. Yet Dewey still left a hostage to fortune by using terms like stage and phase. This leaves a sense of sequence. He still seems in half a mind to offer a set method.

Second, there is not a real grasp of reflection as an interactive or dialogical process. His work was grounded in the idea that 'the individual student teacher learns to reflect on a particular experience individually' (Cinnamond and Zimpher 1990: 58). To some extent this is mitigated by his stress on active experimentation. There is room for feedback. But doubts remain. There is in his work a lack of attention to the ways in which people's sense of self, their frames of reference are formed in dialogue with others. I suspect this is part of a larger problem. Dewey often speaks, 'as if a correct account of the nature of thought would make possible the sort of improvement in thinking which had been promised in the past by others' (Rorty 1989: xvii). It may be that he was limited by the language of his time.

Last, while Dewey does attend to the place of emotions, for example with regard to the doubts that trigger reflection - it is limited. This is a odd given what he had to say elsewhere about the intellect and emotions (e.g. Dewey 1916: 335-6). Today, with the benefit of insights from psychoanalytical traditions, we can now trace out some key, emotional aspects (see Salzberger-Wittenberg et al 1983).

Returning to experience - attending to feelings

The great strength of the work of Boud, Keogh and Walker (1985) is that they address emotions. For them reflection is an activity in which people 'recapture their experience, think about it, mull it over and evaluate it' (ibid: 19). They rework Dewey's five aspects into three.

Returning to experience - that is to say recalling or detailing salient events.

Attending to (or connecting with) feelings - this has two aspects: using helpful feelings and removing or containing obstructive ones.

Evaluating experience - this involves re-examining experience in the light of one's intent and existing knowledge etc. It also involves integrating this new knowledge into one's conceptual framework. (ibid: 26-31)

This way of approaching reflection has the advantage of connecting with common modes of working e.g. we are often encouraged to attend to these domains in the process of supervision and journal writing. However, there is a tendency to focus on reflection-on-action (see below). Their focus on 'deliberate' learning does tend to act against an appreciation of reflection as a way of life. As Cinnamond and Zimpher (1990: 67) put it, 'they constrain reflection by turning it into a mental activity that excludes both the behavioural element and dialogue with others involved in the situation'.

Schön and reflection in and on action

Schön's great contribution has been to bring the notion into the centre of any understanding of what professionals d through the ideas of reflection in and on action. In the case of the former,

The practitioner allows himself to experience surprise, puzzlement, or confusion in a situation which he finds uncertain or unique. He reflects on the phenomenon before him, and on the prior understandings which have been implicit in his behaviour. He carries out an experiment which serves to generate both a new understanding of the phenomenon and a change in the situation. (Schön 1983: 68)

To do this we do not closely follow established ideas and techniques - textbook schemes. We have to think things through, for every case is unique. However, we can draw on what has gone before.

We can link this with reflection-on-action. This is done later. Workers may write up recordings, talk things thro ugh with a supervisor and so on (more of this in the next chapter). The act of reflecting-on-action enables us to spend time exploring why we acted as we did, what was happening in a group and so on. In so doing we develop sets of questions and ideas about our activities and practice.

Exhibit: Reflection in action

In each instance, the practitioner allows himself to experience surprise, puzzlement, or confusion in a situation which he finds uncertain or unique. He reflects on the phenomena before him, and on the prior understandings which have been implicit in his behavior. He carries out an experiment which serves to generate both a new understanding of the phenomena and a change in the situation.... He does not keep means and ends separate, but defines them interactively as he frames a problematic situation. He does not separate thinking from doing... Because his experimenting is a kind of action, implementation is built into his inquiry. (Schön 1983: 69)

This distinction has been the subject of some debate (see Eraut 1994 and Usher et al 1997). Indeed he may well fail to clarify what is involved in the reflective process - and there is a problem, according to Eraut, around time - 'when time is extremely short, decisions have to be rapid and the scope for reflection is extremely limited' (1994: 145). There have been no psychological elaborations of the psychological realities of reflection in action (Russell and Munby 1989).

The impact of Schön's work has been significant - with many training and education programmes for teachers and informal educators adopting his core notions both in organizing experiences and in the teaching content (and this has been reflected in the listing).

Further reading

In this section I have focused on those writers examining the reflective process. These texts need to be augmented with those in the section on adult learning, learning and experiential learning.

Argyris, M. and Schön, D. (1974) Theory in Practice. Increasing professional effectiveness, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Landmark statement of 'double-loop' learning' and distinction between espoused theory and theory-in-action.

Bolton. G. (2005) Reflective Practice. Writing and professional development. 2e. London: Sage. Popular text that explores how practitioners can critically engage with their actions and feelings.

Boud, D. et al (eds.) (1985) Reflection. Turning experience into learning, London: Kogan Page. 170 pages. Good collection of readings which examine the nature of reflection. The early chapters make particular use of Dewey and Kolb.

Clift, R. T., Houston, W. R. and Pugach, M. C. (eds.) Encouraging Reflective Practice in Education. An analysis of issues and programs, New York: Teachers College Press. By far the best of the crop of books that appeared around reflective practice programs in teaching. There are some real treats here including Yinger on 'the conversation of practice'; Cinnamond and Zimpher on 'Reflectivity as a function of community'; and Valli 'Moral approaches to reflective practice'.

Dewey, J. (1933) How We Think, New York: D. C. Heath. Classic and highly influential discussion of thinking.

Lave, J. and Wenger, E. (1991) Situated Learning. Legitimate peripheral participation, Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press. 138 pages. Significant exploration of learning as participation in communities of practice. Participation moves from the periphery to the 'centre'. Learning is, thus, not seen as the acquisition of knowledge by individuals so much as a process of social participation. The nature of the situation impacts significantly on the process. Chapters on legitimate peripheral participation; practice, person, social world; specific communities of practice.

Lipman, M. (1991) Thinking in Education, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 280 + ix pages. Rightly popular exploration of the thinking, dispositions and methods that have to be in place if students are to become 'more thoughtful, more reasonable, and more judicious. Looks to classrooms as communities of enquiry. Part one is concerned with education for thinking (the ref lective model of educational practice; the craft of thinking; cognition); part two examines seeking standards for classroom thinking; part three, thinking: the forge of meaning; and part four, the nature and uses of the community of inquiry (includes thinking in community and the political significance of the inquiring community).

Newman, F. and Holzman, L. (1997) The End of Knowing. A new developmental way of knowing, London: Routledge. 185 + viii pages. The writers seek to offer an alternative to 'modernist' ways of knowing - performed activity: 'a practical, non-epistemological, non-academic way forward'. Thankfully, the writers are also critical of some of the pretensions of 'postmodernists' and look to a synthesis of Vygotsky and Wittenstein. Chapters examine epistemological bias; radically reforming modern epistemology; some 'deliberately unsystematic thoughts on a new way of running a country'; a community of conversations. Schön, D. (1983) The Reflective Practitioner. How professionals think in action, London: Temple Smith. 374 + x. Influential book that examines professional knowledge, professional contexts and reflection-in-action. Examines the move from technical rationality to reflection-in-action and examines the process involved in various instances of professional judgement.

Schön, D. (1987) Educating the Reflective Practitioner, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. 355 + xvii pages. Development of the thinking in the 1983 book with sections on understanding the need for artistry in professional education; the architectural studio as educational model for reflection-in-action; how the reflective practicum works; and implications for improving professional education. (For a useful critique see M. Eraut [1994] Developing Professional Knowledge and Competence, London: Falmer; and R. Usher et al (1997) Adult Education and the Postmodern Challenge, London: Routledge). The idea of reflection-in-action is explored in M. K. Smith (1994) Local Education, Buckingham: Open University Press.

Smith, F. (1992) To Think: in language, learning and education, London: Routledge. 177 + x pages. Examines different aspects of the thinking process in everyday, creative and critical thought.

Also mentioned

Cinnamond, J. H. and Zimpher, N. L. (1990) 'Reflectivity as a function of community' in R. T. Clift, W. R. Houston and M. C. Pugach (eds.) Encouraging Reflective Practice in Education. An analysis of issues and programs, New York: Teachers College Press.

Dewey, J. (1916) Democracy and Education. An introduction to the philosophy of education (1966 edn.), New York: Free Press.

Dewey, J. (1920) Reconstruction in Philosophy (1948 edn.), New York: Mentor.

Eraut, M. (1994) Developing Professional Knowledge and Competence, London: Falmer Press.

Rorty, R. (1987) 'Introduction' to J. A. Bodson (ed.) John Dewey The Later Works 1925-1953 Volume 8, Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press.

Munby, H. and Russell, T. (1989) 'Educating the reflective teacher: An essay review of two books by Donald Schön', Journal of Curriculum Studies 21{7): 71-80.

Salzberger-Wittenberg, I., Henry, G. & Osborne, E. (1983) The Emotional Experience of Learning and Teaching, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Usher, R., Bryant, I. and Johnston, R. (1997) Adult Education and the Postmodern Challenge, London: Routledge.

Acknowledgement: Picture by Ry. Reproduced here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0) licence. http://www.flickr.com/photos/drl/4008199/

© Mark K. Smith 1996, 1999.

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Contents: Dewey - and How We Think · Boud et. al. - reflection: turning experience into learning · Schön - reflection in and on action · further reading When considering reflection we cannot escape the figure of Dewey. How We Think (1910; 1933) has made a unique impact on education.

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