This article by David Aldridge concerns the promise of knowledge "insertion." The promise can be elucidated as follows: knowledge could be inserted by a less time-consuming (and possibly in many senses less expensive) technological process than traditional learning, whereby, for example, some relatively swift procedure of implanting or…

One of the attributes necessary for Watson to be considered human is that it must be conscious. From Rachlin's (2012) point of view, that of teleological behaviorism, consciousness refers to the organization of behavioral complexity in which overt behavior is distributed widely over time. Consciousness is something that humans do, or achieve, in…

Humans can learn to organize many kinds of domains into categories, including real-world domains such as kinsfolk and synthetic domains such as sets of geometric figures that vary along several dimensions. Psychologists have studied many individual domains in detail, but there have been few attempts to characterize or explore the full space of…

Rachlin (2012) makes two general assertions: (a) "To be human is to behave as humans behave, and to function in society as humans function," and (b) "essential human attributes such as consciousness, the ability to love, to feel pain, to sense, to perceive, and to imagine may all be possessed by a computer'. Although Rachlin's article is an…

Recent work addressing the phenomenon of perceptual simulation offers new and exciting avenues of investigating how to model knowledge representation. From the perspective of language, the simulation approach has given rise to new impetus to work on models of language understanding (e.g., Zwaan, 2004, and references therein), and provides a way of…

The author advocates that humanities scholars should seek and study programming languages. He believes that, increasingly, an appreciation of how complex ideas can be imagined and expressed as a set of formal procedures--rules, models, algorithms--in the virtual space of a computer will be an essential element of a humanities education. Students…

In his 1979 "Human Development" article reprinted in this anniversary issue, James Wertsch presented an approach to genetic analysis of the shifting regulation of problem-solving behavior in early childhood. In my reflections on Wertsch's seminal contribution, I discuss ways that subsequent inquiry built upon ideas he elaborated in the…

Over the last five years, people have heard a great deal about something called the Knowledge Society. The term "knowledge" is appearing in places they would not have expected to see it a decade or so ago. The media is full of references to the knowledge economy and the knowledge revolution; business discussions now routinely talk about knowledge…

Argues for "post-structural Marxism" as the pedagogical practice of reading and rereading Marx in a critical manner. Briefly discusses the concept of the social in the post-modern condition before reviewing relations between post-structuralism and Marxism. Provides an account of Deleuze's Marxism, using it to analyze education as a form…

Provides author comments in response to the papers of Professors Lederman and Ohlsson in "Science and Education," Vol. 4, No. 4, 1995. These papers were in response to the paper "On the Nature of Scientific Thought" ("Science and Education," Vol. 4, No. 1). Includes 19 references. (DDR)

Presents an alternative perspective that conceives of graphing as observable practices employed to achieve specific goals rather than as knowledge represented in students' minds. Highlights the nature of graphs as semiotic objects, rhetorical devices, and conscription devices. Illustrates the plausibility and fruitfulness of the new perspective in…

Argues for the use of the archaeological metaphor as an apt one when examining the historical layers and foundational bases underlying much of the current thought and practice in science education. Suggests some sort of correspondence between archaeological and science education processes. (DDR)

A theory of acquired similarity and knowledge representation, latent semantic analysis (LSA), is presented to explain how people know as much as they do with the little information they get. LSA suggests that some domains of knowledge contain vast numbers of weak intercorrelations that amplify learning by inference. (SLD)

This comment attempts to identify different "semiotic perspectives" proposed by the authors of this special issue according to the problems they discuss. These problems can be distinguished as problems concerning the representation of mathematical knowledge, the definition and objectivity of meaning, epistemological questions of learning and…

This paper discusses bibliographic control of knowledge resources on the World Wide Web. The first section sets the context of the inquiry. The second section covers the following topics related to metadata: (1) definitions of metadata, including metadata as tags and as descriptors; (2) metadata on the Web, including general metadata systems,…