Mind the gap: infilling Stiegler’s philosophico-educational approach to social innovation

According to Bernard Stiegler, social innovations in the educational field are an antidotical cure for social pathologies wrought by the digitalisation of society. This article explores how Stiegler’s social pharmacology links to the human-technical co-constitution thesis that he first expounded in Technics and Time, 1. Not only do we identify in the Stieglerian corpus a lack of conceptual clarity about social innovation, but also problems in the anthropo-philosophy on which this latter work rests. Tying up the loose threads of Stiegler’s philosophical tapestry is accomplished in three steps. In the first, we retrofit Stiegler with an enactivist view of cognition. The second involves precisely defining social innovation, and then pinpointing open education as a ‘pure’ social innovation situated on the socially curative side of Stiegler’s digital ledger. The third closes the loop by identifying complementarity between enactivism and socio-educational innovation in an age of mass empowerment by means of networked computers.     

The Relationship Between Body Weight and Motor Skill Competence in Hispanic Low-SES Preschool Children

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between motor competence and BMI in Hispanic preschool children from low SES backgrounds. One hundred and forty-eight Hispanic low SES preschool children (male = 81, female = 67 participated in this study. All children were measured on gross and fine motor competence using the Peabody Developmental Motor Scales-2 (PDMS-2). Body Mass Index (BMI) was calculated for all participants. A Pearson correlation was used to analyze the relationship between the preschool children’s BMI and PDMS-2 performance. A 2 (gender) × 3 (BMI) MANOVA was conducted to assess the gender and BMI differences on each PDMS-2 subtest. Nearly one-third of children in the study demonstrated gross and fine motor delays and slightly over one-third of the children were classified as overweight or obese. A significant negative correlation was found between BMI and visual motor integration scores. The MANOVA analysis showed that low SES Hispanic boys were significantly better in gross motor skill competence and girls were more advanced in fine motor performance. These findings will make a significant contribution to the literature in identifying relationship between motor competence and children’s body weight. This study is also beneficial to practitioners and educators in designing intervention and preschool curriculum to improve children identified with motor delays and to reduce BMI through physical activity.     

Motor Skill Performance by Low SES Preschool and Typically Developing Children on the PDMS-2

The purpose of this study was to compare the motor skill performance of preschool children from low socioeconomic (SES) backgrounds to their age matched typically developing peers using the Peabody Developmental Motor Scales-2 (PDMS-2). Sixty-eight children (34 low SES and 34 typically developing; ages 3–5) performed the PDMS-2. Standard scores from each subtest (i.e., stationary, locomotion, object manipulation, grasping, and visual-motor integration) and three quotient scores were calculated for the children identified as low SES and typically developing children. A MANOVA was used to analyze the PDMS-2 standard score and quotient score differences between the children identified as low SES and the typically developing children. All preschool children identified as low SES scored at average or lower on total motor quotient scores. Specifically, 88.2 % of children identified as low SES were classified as average, and 11.8 % of children were in the below average performance category. The MANOVA analysis showed that children identified as low SES scored significantly lower than the typically developing children on the visual-motor integration subtest, F(1,64) = 7.232, p = .009; locomotion subtest, F(1,64) = 11.449, p = .001; and TMQ, F(1,64) = 4.732, p = .033. Children identified as low SES were significantly delayed in both fine and gross motor skill areas when compared to their typically developing age and gender matched peers. Researchers are recommended to provide comprehensive assessments for preschool children and to include motor tasks when designing early intervention programs.     

What really happens in cohorts

Togetherness, academic help, peer support—all good things for a college student, right? Mostly. Michelle Maher followed several students co‐enrolled in a cohort around for almost a year to discover what's good, what's not so good, and what we can do with both.     

Classical Political Economy and the Role of Universities in the New Knowledge Economy

Higher education has become the new star ship in the policy fleet for governments around the world. The public policy focus on higher education, in part, reflects a growing consensus in macroeconomics of 'new growth' or 'endogenous growth' theory, based on the work of Solow, Lucas and Romer that argues that the driving force behind economic growth is technological change (i.e. improvements in knowledge about how we transform inputs into outputs in the production process). Knowledge about technology and levels of information flow are now considered critical for economic development and can account for differential growth patterns. In short, universities are seen to be a key driver towards the knowledge economy. Accordingly, higher education institutions have been encouraged to develop links with industry and business in a series of new venture partnerships. This emphasis in higher education policy also accords with initiatives to promote greater entrepreneurial skills and activity within so-called national systems of innovation. This paper focuses upon the economic importance of higher education as a key component of the knowledge economy. It discusses the genealogy and contributing strands to the newly emerging discourse and considers universities in the knowledge-driven economy by reference to the UK White Paper Our Competitive Future. It also considers the arguments advanced by Joseph Stiglitz (ex-Chief Economist of the World Bank) for the 'analytics of the knowledge economy' and discusses universities in terms of 'knowledge cultures'. Finally, the paper provides a critique of the policy discourse of the knowledge economy as a basis of the new challenges facing universities under knowledge capitalism.     

Joint Attention and Conversation in Mother-Infant-Sibling Triads

The current study investigated the general nature of joint attentional and conversational interaction in mother-infant-sibling triads. 9 19-month-old infants and 9 24-month-old infants were videotaped during 20 min of free play with their mothers and preschool-aged siblings around a common activity. Analyses revealed that even 19-month-old infants were capable of participating in triadic interactions and conversations, and that the proportional frequency of both these measures increased with age. Triadic conversations were nearly 3 times longer and elicited nearly twice as many infant turns per conversation as dyadic conversations. Infants were more likely to join into an ongoing conversational topic than to initiate one themselves, and they were more likely to take a turn in those conversations if they were in a joint attentional state with the speaker. Infants were just as likely to respond to a comment or request directed to another person as they were to one directed to themselves, indicating reliable comprehension of language not addressed to them. These results suggest that the mother-infant-sibling interactive context differs in important ways from the mother-infant dyadic context and that it is a richer language learning environment than previously supposed.     

The Longitudinal Connections Between Undergraduate High Impact Curriculum Practices and Civic Engagement in Adulthood

Research in Higher Education - There is concern that civic engagement in the U.S. has declined recently especially among the younger generations. It is known that one of the strongest predictors of...     

Soup-can Pendulum

In these studies, a vegetable can containing fluidwas swung as a pendulum by supporting its end-lipswith a pair of knife edges. The motion was measuredwith a capacitive sensor and the logarithmic decrementin free decay was estimated from computer-collectedrecords. Measurements performed with nine differenthomogeneous liquids, distributed through six decadesin the viscosity η, showed that the damping ofthe system is dominated by η rather than externalforces from air or the knife edges. The log decrementwas found to be maximum (0.28) in the vicinity ofη = 0.7 Pa s and fell off more than 15 fold(below 2 × 10^-2) for both small viscosity(η < 1 × 10^-3 Pa s) and also for largeviscosity (η > 1 × 10³ Pa s). A simple modelhas been formulated, which yields reasonable agreementbetween theory and experiment by approximating therelative rotation of can and liquid.