Four Anxieties and a Reassurance: Hare and McLaughlin on being open-minded

In suppport of the idea that education should encourage open-mindedness, Hare and McLaughlin have argued that being open-minded about an issue, in a philosophically well-supported sense of 'open-mindedness', need not prevent one from holding a firm belief on that issue. In this paper I examine the lack of cohesion in this sense of 'open-mindedness', explain why I continue to be anxious about the tensions between open-mindedness and holding firm beliefs and present three further reasons for having reservations about Hare and McLaughlin's proposals.     

Continuing Education in a Late-modern or Global Society: Towards a theoretical framework for comparative analysis

Continuing education, those forms of education that occur after initial education, is exposed to the global market forces in a twofold manner which is foreign to traditional education: firstly, it has to relate to the changing structures and demands of the workforce in the global market and, secondly, it is a marketable commodity in itself. This means that there are no simple systems of continuing education that can be compared between nations or even between occupational categories. This paper, therefore, endeavours to provide a taxonomy which might underlie comparative theorising about continuing education.     

Sport as a Valued Human Practice: a basis for the consideration of some moral issues in sport

ABSTRACT It is argued that sport, like science or medicine, is a valued human practice and is characterised as much by the moral manner in which its participants conduct themselves as by the pursuit of its own skills, standards and excellences. Virtues, such as justice, honesty and courage, are not only necessary to pursue its goals but to protect it from being corrupted by external interests. After explicating the practice view of sport in contrast to the sociological view, the nature of competition in sport is discussed before examining two related issues: winning at all costs and the taking of performance-enhancing drugs. The importance of practices to education and the good life is also outlined.     

Interactivity and multimedia interfaces

Multimedia technology offers instructional designers an unprecedented opportunity to create richly interactive learning environments. With greater design freedom comes complexity. The standard answer to the problems of too much choice, disorientation, and complex navigation is thought to lie in the way we design the interactivity in a system. Unfortunately, the theory of interactivity is at an early stage of development. After critiquing the decision cycle model of interaction – the received theory in human computer interaction – I present arguments and observational data to show that humans have several ways of interacting with their environments which resist accommodation in the decision cycle model. These additional ways of interacting include: preparing the environment, maintaining the environment, and reshaping the cognitive congeniality of the environment. Understanding how these actions simplify the computational complexity of our mental processes is the first step in designing the right sort of resources and scaffolding necessary for tractable learner controlled learning environments.     

Moral Values and the Teacher: beyond the paternal and the permissive

ABSTRACT Teachers are regularly blamed–especially in times of moral panic–for failing to set a good example and teach proper moral standards to their pupils. As well as familiar issues about moral values and the legitimacy of different modes of moral pedagogy this also raises the question of the degree of connection between a teacher's private and personal values, attitudes and behaviour and his or her professional conduct and responsibilities. Two common responses to these problems–paternalism and liberalism–are here criticised and an alternative perspective on the moral role of the teacher is sought, drawing on communitarian insights into the nature of moral and other values and their function in human affairs.     

Educational videotape: a medium full of promise and riddled with pitfalls

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