Dialogue is a seminal concept within the work of the Brazilian adult education theorist, Paulo Freire, and the Russian literary critic and philosopher, Mikhail Bakhtin. While there are commonalities in their understanding of dialogue, they differ in their treatment of dialectic. This paper addresses commonalities and dissonances within a Bakhtin-Freire dialogue on the notions of dialogue and dialectic. It then teases out some of the implications for education theory and practice in relation to two South African contexts of learning (...) that facilitate the access to education of disadvantaged groups, one in higher education and the other in early childhood education. (shrink)

The information explosion and digital modes of learning often combine to inform the quest for the best ways of transforming information in digital form for pedagogical purposes. This quest has become more urgent and pervasive with the ‘turn’ to online learning in the context of COVID-19. This can result in linear, asynchronous, transmission-based modes of teaching and learning which commodify, package and deliver knowledge for individual ‘customers’. The primary concerns in such models are often technical and economic (...) – technology as a cost-effective ‘solution’ to educational challenges. In this paper I argue for the importance of dialogic learning space in teaching and learning by means of Information and Communication Technologies, whether in the form of fully online learning, blended learning or face-to-face encounters using ICT affordances. Although the 20th Century theorists Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975) and Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002) produced their seminal works before the advent of ICTs, they were both concerned with the quality and authenticity of human engagement with texts and with other persons and contexts. Besides a shared interest in dialogue as an ontological feature of human life and being, they both used spatiotemporal concepts for understanding and interpreting texts. The article draws on Gadamer’s notions of dialogue and horizon, and Bakhtin’s notions of dialogue and chronotope, to conceptualize dialogic possibilities for online education. Its purpose is to provide a framework, grounded in Bakhtin’s and Gadamer’s ideas, for a dialogic approach to online teaching and learning in higher education. (shrink)

Some empirical evidence in the artificial language acquisition literature has been taken to suggest that statistical learning mechanisms are insufficient for extracting structural information from an artificial language. According to the more than one mechanism (MOM) hypothesis, at least two mechanisms are required in order to acquire language from speech: (a) a statistical mechanism for speech segmentation; and (b) an additional rule-following mechanism in order to induce grammatical regularities. In this article, we present a set of neural network (...) studies demonstrating that a single statistical mechanism can mimic the apparent discovery of structural regularities, beyond the segmentation of speech. We argue that our results undermine one argument for the MOM hypothesis. (shrink)

Phonological rules create alternations in the phonetic realizations of related words. These rules must be learned by infants in order to identify the phonological inventory, the morphological structure, and the lexicon of a language. Recent work proposes a computational model for the learning of one kind of phonological alternation, allophony . This paper extends the model to account for learning of a broader set of phonological alternations and the formalization of these alternations as general rules. In Experiment 1, (...) we apply the original model to new data in Dutch and demonstrate its limitations in learning nonallophonic rules. In Experiment 2, we extend the model to allow it to learn general rules for alternations that apply to a class of segments. In Experiment 3, the model is further extended to allow for generalization by context; we argue that this generalization must be constrained by linguistic principles. (shrink)

Through the development of a comparative analysis that explores the conceptions of the Golden Rule that are expressed in the teachings of Confucius, Christianity and the Hatatas, the article shows that the combined insights that emerge from these three teachings have a contemporary significance in the attempt to develop a complementary learning process with the Other. Throughout its variations, the Golden Rule is grounded on the need to treat others as how we want to be treated. Such (...) a moral vision occupies a central importance in Confucius’s ren, Christianity’s Gospel of Matthew and the commandments, and the Hatatas’ principle of harmony. The comparative exercise in contending conceptions of the Golden Rule that are found in Confucius’, the Christian and the Hatatas’ approaches leads into the emergence of a learning process that goes beyond the mere tolerance of the Other. In a globalized world, where there is a search for a moral guideline that can serve as a common source of motivation, the Golden Rule can serve as a foundation of a process of learning that is mutually supportive, supplementary and is hence complementary. (shrink)

Using the Chinese Ring Puzzle (Kotovsky & Simon, Citation1990; P. J. Reber & Kotovsky, Citation1997), we studied the effect on rule discovery of having to plan actions or not in order to reach a goal state. This was done by asking participants to predict legal moves as in implicit learning tasks (Experiment 1) and by asking participants to make legal moves as in problem-solving tasks (Experiment 2). Our hypothesis was that having a specific goal state to reach has (...) a dual effect on rule discovery. The first effect is positive and related to feedback from moves done in order to attain the goal: generalising the results of action and associating them to the conditions in which they were obtained allows discovery of the rule and learning it. The second effect is negative. In attempting to reach a specific goal, participants first tend to reduce the distance that separates the current state from the goal state (hill climbing) and so neglect the kind of exploration that facilitates rule and procedure discovery because this would seem to be a detour from the goal. Results show that having to plan actions improved performance in implicit learning tasks (Experiment 1), yet it impaired performance in problem-solving tasks (Experiment 2). Although implicit learning and problem solving are based on rule discovery, and entail noticing regularities in the material, in both cases, rule discovery processes appear to be task-dependent. (shrink)

Rational Rules argues that moral learning can be understood in terms of general-purpose rational learning procedures. Nichols provides statistical learning accounts of some fundamental aspects of moral development, combining aspects of traditional empiricist and rationalist approaches.

This paper proposes an approach to investigate norm-governed learning agents which combines a logic-based formalism with an equation-based counterpart. This dual formalism enables us to describe the reasoning of such agents and their interactions using argumentation, and, at the same time, to capture systemic features using equations. The approach is applied to norm emergence and internalisation in systems of learning agents. The logical formalism is rooted into a probabilistic defeasible logic instantiating Dung’s argumentation framework. Rules of this logic (...) are attached with probabilities to describe the agents’ minds and behaviours as well as uncertain environments. Then, the equation-based model for reinforcement learning, defined over this probability distribution, allows agents to adapt to their environment and self-organise. (shrink)

Learning to solve a class of problems can be characterized as a search through a space of hypotheses about the rules for solving these problems. A series of four experiments studied how different learning conditions affected the search among hypotheses about the solution rule for a simple computational problem. Experiment 1 showed that a problem property such as computational difficulty of the rules biased the search process and so affected learning. Experiment 2 examined the impact of (...) examples as instructional tools and found that their effectiveness was determined by whether they uniquely pointed to the correct rule. Experiment 3 compared verbal directions with examples and found that both could guide search. The final experiment tried to improve learning by using more explicit verbal directions or by adding scaffolding to the example. While both manipulations improved learning, learning still took the form of a search through a hypothesis space of possible rules. We describe a model that embodies two assumptions: the instruction can bias the rules participants hypothesize rather than directly be encoded into a rule; participants do not have memory for past wrong hypotheses and are likely to retry them. These assumptions are realized in a Markov model that fits all the data by estimating two sets of probabilities. First, the learning condition induced one set of Start probabilities of trying various rules. Second, should this first hypothesis prove wrong, the learning condition induced a second set of Choice probabilities of considering various rules. These findings broaden our understanding of effective instruction and provide implications for instructional design. (shrink)

Quality improvement is an important function of learning health systems, and public policy should promote QI activities. Use of systematic methodologies in QI has prompted substantial confusion regarding when QI is human subjects research under the Common Rule, and this confusion persists with the revised Rule. Difficulty distinguishing research from QI imposes costs on the quality improvement process. I offer guidance to IRBs to mitigate these costs and suggest a new regulatory exclusion for minimal risk quality improvement (...) activities. (shrink)

Are rules processes or similarity processes the default for acquisition of grammatical knowledge during natural second language acquisition? Whereas Pothos argues similarity processes are the default in the many areas he reviews, including artificial grammar learning and first language development, I suggest, citing evidence, that in second language acquisition of grammatical morphology “rules processes” may be the default.

We claim that scientists working with deep learning (DL) models exhibit a form of pragmatic understanding that is not reducible to or dependent on explanation. This pragmatic understanding comprises a set of learned methodological principles that underlie DL model design-choices and secure their reliability. We illustrate this action-oriented pragmatic understanding with a case study of AlphaFold2, highlighting the interplay between background knowledge of a problem and methodological choices involving techniques for constraining how a model learns from data. Building successful (...) models requires pragmatic understanding to apply modelling strategies that encourage the model to learn data patterns that will facilitate reliable generalisation. (shrink)

The authors discuss findings from a qualitative research project concerning applied ethics that was undertaken at a general family counseling agency in southern Ontario. Interview data suggested that workers need to dialogue about ethical dilemmas, but that such dialogue demands a high level of risk taking that feels unsafe in the organization. This finding led the researchers to examine their own sense of "breaking rules" by suggesting an intersubjective view of ethics that requires a "safe space" for ethical dialogue. The (...) authors critique the individualistic tendency of professional ethics as an effect of power that is tied to the history of professionalism, and discuss the role of bureaucracies in diminishing a central role for ethics in helping services. The authors call for elaboration of critical perspectives on ethics in order to promote the centrality of ethics in the helping professions. (shrink)

A significant part of everyday learning occurs incidentally — a process typically described as implicit learning. A central issue in this and germane domains such as language acquisition is the extent to which performance depends on the acquisition and deployment of abstract rules. In an attempt to address this question, we show that the apparent use of such rules in a simple categorisation task of artificial grammar strings, as reported by Shanks, Johnstone, and Staggs (1997), can be simulated (...) by means of a simple recurrent network, and may thus turn out not be incompatible with the acquisition of statistical regularities rooted in the processing of exemplars of the presented material. (shrink)

Purpose This study aims to investigate the trending term: “Netiquette” as an important element in the effective digital citizenship. The research suggests a systematic framework of netiquette rules in the field of online education based on the classical core rules of netiquette and according to the digital citizenship scale (DCS). The research also studies the corresponding responsibilities of both educators and students to raise awareness towards using technology in a balanced, safe, smart and ethical way as the shift towards the (...) digital activities increased significantly in the post-corona time. Design/methodology/approach The research used the qualitative data that were based on the everyday observation and analysis of the online education experience at the university of Jordan in the academic year 2020/2021; the online group discussions of students and teachers; and investigating the guidelines of the online learning netiquette rules in various academic institutes. Comparative analysis was conducted to merge and eliminate redundant rules and to add sub rules, and then to cluster them into groups. The suggested clustered groups were distributed into the classical core rules outline of netiquette. In each core rule, the sub rules were reclassified and recategorized according to the DCS by studying the complexity levels and their corresponding factors. The suggested framework updates and adds DCS levels and factors considering the exceptional experience of online education through the pandemic. Findings The research finds that “Netiquette” had been neglected in cyber ethics literature, and so it has to be rediscovered through the lens of digital citizenship that becomes very noticeable issue in the post-COVID era. So, the research presents a systematic framework that outlines more than 150 netiquette sub rules in the field of online education, and that were clustered according to DCS and the classical core rules of netiquette. It also adds a new factor to the bottom level of DCS which is the primarily skills and traits, and also updates the internet and political activism fac-tor by adding the social perspective. Originality/value A novel classification of the classical core rules of netiquette was proposed in the field of online education to serve as a spectrum of identifying the complexity of digital citizenship levels and factors. This research can be a starting point of more works on netiquette research in online education and on other fields such as online business meetings, social media networking and online gaming. (shrink)

A significant part of everyday learning occurs incidentally — a process typically described as implicit learning. A central issue in this domain and others, such as language acquisition, is the extent to which performance depends on the acquisition and deployment of abstract rules. Shanks and colleagues [22], [11] have suggested (1) that discrimination between grammatical and ungrammatical instances of a biconditional grammar requires the acquisition and use of abstract rules, and (2) that training conditions — in particular whether (...) instructions orient participants to identify the relevant rules or not — strongly influence the extent to which such rules will be learned. In this paper, we show (1) that a Simple Recurrent Network can in fact, under some conditions, learn a biconditional grammar, (2) that training conditions indeed influence learning in simple auto-associators networks and (3) that such networks can likewise learn about biconditional grammars, albeit to a lesser extent than human participants. These findings suggest that mastering biconditional grammars does not require the acquisition of abstract rules to the extent implied by Shanks and colleagues, and that performance on such material may in fact be based, at least in part, on simple associative learning mechanisms. (shrink)

A significant part of everyday learning occurs incidentally — a process typically described as implicit learning. A central issue in this domain and others, such as language acquisition, is the extent to which performance depends on the acquisition and deployment of abstract rules. Shanks and colleagues [22], [11] have suggested (1) that discrimination between grammatical and ungrammatical instances of a biconditional grammar requires the acquisition and use of abstract rules, and (2) that training conditions — in particular whether (...) instructions orient participants to identify the relevant rules or not — strongly influence the extent to which such rules will be learned. In this paper, we show (1) that a Simple Recurrent Network can in fact, under some conditions, learn a biconditional grammar, (2) that training conditions indeed influence learning in simple auto-associators networks and (3) that such networks can likewise learn about biconditional grammars, albeit to a lesser extent than human participants. These findings suggest that mastering biconditional grammars does not require the acquisition of abstract rules to the extent implied by Shanks and colleagues, and that performance on such material may in fact be based, at least in part, on simple associative learning mechanisms. (shrink)

This article examines the learning of a scientific procedure, and its connection to the greater scientific community through the notion of Wittgensteinian rules. The analysis reveals this connection by demonstrating that learning in interaction is largely grounded in rule-based community descriptions and judgments rather than any inner process. This same analysis also demonstrates that learning processes are particularly suited for such an analysis because rules and concomitant phenomena comprise a significant portion of any learning interaction. (...) This analysis further reveals the elucidating merit of Wittgensteinian rules, their relation to community and the concept of practice, and promotes the efficacy of participant-generated rule-formulations as analytic descriptors. (shrink)

Integrating RDF datasets has become a relevant problem for both researchers and practitioners. In the literature, there are many genetic proposals that learn rules that allow to link the resources that refer to the same real-world entities, which is paramount to integrating the datasets. Unfortunately, they are context-unaware because they focus on the resources and their attributes but forget about their neighbours. This implies that they fall short in cases in which different resources have similar attributes but refer to different (...) real-world entities or cases in which they have dissimilar attributes but refer to the same real-world entities. In this article, we present a proposal that learns context-aware rules that take into account both the attributes of the resources and their neighbours. We have conducted an extensive experimentation that proves that it outperforms the most advanced genetic proposal. Our conclusions were checked using statistically sound methods. (shrink)