Imitation games: Turing, Menard, Van Meegeren

For many, the very idea of an artificialintelligence has always been ethicallytroublesome. The putative ability of machinesto mimic human intelligence appears to callinto question the stability of taken forgranted boundaries between subject/object,identity/similarity, free will/determinism,reality/simulation, etc. The artificiallyintelligent object thus appears to threaten thehuman subject with displacement and redundancy.This article takes as its starting point AlanTuring's famous 'imitation game,' (the socalled 'Turing Test'), here treated as aparable of the encounter between human originaland machine copy – the born and the made. Thecultural resonances of the recent on-lineperformance of a 'Turing Test' for computergenerated art are then explored. Arttraditionally taken to stand for all that isconsidered quintessentially human – andtherefore resistant to mechanisation –represents in this sense a kind of 'criticalcase' in the advance of machine intelligence.The article focuses on the moral status of thebody, human agency, and social knowledge in theongoing (re-)constructions of copy, original,and of the difference between them.     

Paradigm revisited: Another look at the physical and social sciences

The study reexamines the paradigm concept as presented by Lodahl and Gordon with respect to the concept of consistency in professional life. The results show that high paradigm disciplines are more consistent than low paradigm disciplines on selected measures of educational background and professional activity. The conclusions of this investigation suggest first that the paradigm concept works well by itself in researching academic professions, and second that the concept of consistency offers a new way of both classifying faculty and exploring the dimensions of faculty characteristics.     

Promoting Mother–Infant Book Sharing and Infant Attention and Language Development in an Impoverished South African Population: A Pilot Study

The low rates of child literacy in South Africa are cause for considerable concern. Research from the developed world shows that parental sharing of picture books with infants and young children is beneficial for child language and cognitive development, as well as literacy skills. We conducted a pilot study to examine whether such benefits might extend to an impoverished community in South Africa, by evaluating the impact of training mothers in book sharing with their 14–18 month old infants. Seventeen mothers received book sharing training; and 13 mothers did not, but instead received a comparison training in toy play. We assessed the mothers’ behavior during both book sharing and toy play before and after training, and we also assessed infant attention and language. Mothers receiving book sharing training engaged well with it, and they also benefited from it; thus, compared to the comparison group mothers, they became more sensitive, more facilitating, and more elaborative with their infants during book sharing, and they also became more sensitive to their infants during toy play. In addition, infants whose mothers received the book sharing training showed greater benefits than the comparison group infants in both their attention and language. Training in book sharing for families living in conditions of marked socio-economic adversity in South Africa has the potential to be of considerable benefit to child developmental progress. A large scale controlled trial is required to confirm this.     

Collaborative learning practices: teacher and student perceived obstacles to effective student collaboration

While the educational literature mentions several obstacles affecting the effectiveness of collaborative learning (CL), they have often been investigated through the perceptions of only one actor, either teachers or students. Therefore, some sources of obstacles that teachers and students encounter may not have been revealed. In this study, 19 teachers and 23 students in different disciplines at a pre-service teacher education faculty at a university in Vietnam were interviewed. In total, 47% of the teachers taught science subjects and 53% taught social subjects; 35% of the students majored in science subjects, 57% in social subjects, and 8% in primary education. With regard to study cohorts, 22% of the students were in the first and second year while 78% were in the third and fourth year of their four-year bachelor’s programme. These programmes produce qualified teachers for primary and secondary schools nationwide. Based on grounded theory analysis, four common obstacles to collaboration were identified: students’ lack of collaborative skills, free-riding, competence status, and friendship. Furthermore, the results showed three interrelated antecedents that contribute to these obstacles. Central to the antecedents is the strong focus of the teachers on the cognitive aspects of CL, which led the participating teachers to neglect the collaborative aspects of CL. These antecedents were demonstrated in the ways teachers set CL goals, provided instruction, and assessed student collaboration. This study may be useful for educators, designers, and researchers to foster the quality of student collaboration.     

Mapping mentor teachers’ roles in mentoring dialogues

This literature study deals with the issue of how to conceptualize the supervisory behaviour of mentor teachers in mentoring dialogues by systematically examining empirical literature on key aspects of mentor teachers’ behaviour during dialogues with prospective teachers. From the findings a model is derived which can be used to study mentor teachers’ behaviour in mentoring dialogues. The model may be helpful in the further development of the quality of mentor teachers’ behaviour in mentoring dialogues.     

Multidimensional performance characteristics and standard of performance in talented youth field hockey players: a longitudinal study

To identify performance characteristics that could help predict future elite field hockey players, we measured the anthropometric, physiological, technical, tactical, and psychological characteristics of 30 elite and 35 sub-elite youth players at the end of three consecutive seasons. The mean age of the players at the end of the first season was 14.2 years (s = 1.1). Repeated-measures analyses of covariance, with standard of performance and measurement occasion as factors and age as a covariate, showed that the elite players fared better than the sub-elite players on technical and tactical variables. Female elite youth players also scored better on interval endurance capacity, motivation, and confidence. Future elite players appear to have excellent tactical skills by the age of 14. They also have good specific technical skills and develop these together with interval endurance capacity better than sub-elite youth players in the subsequent 2 years. To verify our conclusions, we will be tracking these players into adulthood.     

The research and evaluation of serious games: Toward a comprehensive methodology

The authors present the methodological background to and underlying research design of an ongoing research project on the scientific evaluation of serious games and/or computer‐based simulation games (SGs) for advanced learning. The main research questions are: (1) what are the requirements and design principles for a comprehensive social scientific methodology for the evaluation of SGs?; (2) to what extent do SGs contribute to advanced learning?; (3) what factors contribute to or determine this learning?; and (4) to what extent and under what conditions can SG‐based learning be transferred to the real world? In the Netherlands between 2005 and 2012, several hundred SG sessions with 12 SGs were evaluated systematically, uniformly and quantitatively to create a dataset, which comprises data on 2488 respondents in higher education or work organizations. The authors present the research model, the quasi‐experimental design and the evaluation instruments. This focus in this paper is on the methodology and dataset, which form a sound foundation for forthcoming publications on the empirical results.     

General education. Homogenised education for the globalized world?

Societies need to make sure that the next generation is ready and capable to take over in due time, be it in working life, culture, civil society, politics or families. Therefore, society at large and specifically state governments need to assist the efforts of families and local communities. Such provisions have been the basic premise for general educational theories for centuries, when education was often named Democratic and Comprehensive Bildung. At present, this premise needs re-conceptualization, because societies are moving dramatically towards opening up for interactions and relations with the widest possible area: the globe. Many societal challenges have effects across nations, calling for trans-national coordination, management and solutions,—for homogenized and standard based policy making. At the same time, inspiration from multiple sources produce conflicting visions and rival discourses about what the purposes of and the means for education should be.In this paper we analyze and discuss two contemporary, fundamentally dissimilar discourses on education and their theoretical and societal roots. Our main method is discourse analysis. We argue for inclusion of a global world-view in national education. We shall be critical, however, to the technocratic turn and the homogenization of education per se and argue for a Democratic Bildung perspective in education for world citizenship.