Doug Belshaw (dajbelshaw)'s Public Profile in the Diigo Community

Member since Jan 27, 2007, follows 57 people, 2 public groups, 1401 public bookmarks (1430 total).

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Neopragmatism Home Page on 2008-09-20
- Neopragmatists, particularly Rorty and Putnam, draw on the ideas of
  Classical Pragmatists such as Peirce, James, and Dewey. Putnam, in
  Words and Life (1994) enumerates which ideas in the Classical
  Pragmatist tradition newer pragmatists find most compelling. To
  paraphrase Putnam: (1) antiscepticism (the notion that doubt requires
  justification just as much as does belief; (2) fallibilism (the view
  that there are no metaphysical guarantee against the need to revise a
  belief; (3) antidualism about "facts" and "values"; and (4) that
  practice, properly construed, is primary in philosophy. (WL 152)
Pragmatism Cybrary on 2008-09-20
- Pragmatism asks
  its usual question. "Grant an idea or belief to be true," it says, "what
  concrete difference will its being true make in anyone's actual life? How will the truth
  be realized? What experiences will be different from those which would obtain if the
  belief were false? What, in short, is the truth's cash-value in experiential terms?"
  
  --Pragmatism (1907)
Pragmatism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia on 2008-09-20
- Pragmatism, in short, provides what might be termed an ecological account of knowledge: inquiry is construed as a means by which organisms can get a grip on their environment. 'Real' and 'true' are labels that have a function in inquiry and cannot be understood outside of that context.
- Unless we decide upon how we are going to use concepts like 'object', 'existence' etc., the question 'how many objects exist' does not really make any sense. But once we decide the use of these concepts, the answer to the above-mentioned question within that use or 'version', to put in Nelson Goodman's phrase, is no more a matter of 'convention'. (Maitra 2003 p. 40)
Pragmatism [Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy] on 2008-09-20
- Pragmatism is a philosophical movement that includes those who claim that an ideology or proposition is true if it works satisfactorily, that the meaning of a proposition is to be found in the practical consequences of accepting it, and that unpractical ideas are to be rejected.
- What makes these philosophers pragmatists? There is, alas, no simple answer to this question. For there is no pragmatist creed; that is, no neat list of articles or essential tenets endorsed by all pragmatists and only by pragmatists.
- 9 more annotations...
- - “What concrete practical difference would it make if my theory were true and its rival(s) false?” Where there is no such difference, there is no genuine (that is, non-verbal) disagreement, and hence no genuine problem.
  - Moreover, theories and models are to be judged primarily by their fruits and consequences, not by their origins or their relations to antecedent data or facts. The basic idea is presented metaphorically by James and Dewey, for whom scientific theories are instruments or tools for coping with reality.
  - What is essential is that theories pay their way in the long run—that they can be relied upon time and again to solve pressing problems and to clear up significant difficulties confronting inquirers. To the extent that a theory functions or “works” practically in this way, it makes sense to keep using it—though we must always allow for the possibility that it will eventually have to be replaced by some theory that works even better.
  - All beliefs and theories are best treated as working hypotheses which may need to be modified—refined, revised, or rejected—in light of future inquiry and experience.
  - Pragmatists have also inveighed against the Cartesian idea that philosophy should begin with bold global doubt—that is, a doubt capable of demolishing all our old beliefs.
  - This anti-Cartesian attitude is summed up by Otto Neurath’s celebrated metaphor of the conceptual scheme as raft: inquirers are mariners who must repair their raft plank by plank, adrift all the while on the open sea; for they can never disembark and scrutinize their craft in dry-dock from an external standpoint. In sum, we must begin in media res—in the middle of things—and confess that our starting-points are contingent and historically conditioned inheritances.
  - Pragmatists typically think, for instance, that Kant was right to say that the world must be interpreted with the aid of a scheme of basic categories; but, they add, he was dead wrong to suggest that this framework is somehow sacrosanct, immutable, or necessary. Our categories and theories are indeed our creations; they reflect our peculiar constitution and history, and are not simply read off from the world. But frameworks can change and be replaced. And just as there is more than one way to skin a cat, there is more than one sound way to conceptualize the world and its content. Which interpretative framework or vocabulary we should use—that of physics, say, or common sense—will depend on our purposes and interests in a given context.
  - Since the range of “facts” we can countenance or acknowledge is accordingly constrained by our body of previous acquired beliefs, no “fact” can be admitted into our minds unless it can be coherently assimilated or harmonized with beliefs we already hold.
  - According to a longstanding tradition running from Plato to the present-day, truth is a matter of correspondence or agreement with reality (or with the aforementioned “facts”). But this venerable view is vague and beset with problems, say pragmatists.
Virtual-Workspace on 2007-10-30
- in and out of school/college
Billy the Kid - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia on 2007-10-22
- Henry McCarty (November
  23, 1858^[1] – July 14, 1881),
  better known as Billy the Kid, but also known by the aliases William
  Antrim and William Harrison Bonney, was a famous 19th century American frontier
  outlaw and gunman who was a participant
  in the Lincoln
  County War. According to legend he killed 21 men, one for each year of his
  life.
Prime Minister's speeches - 2001 - Birmingham Chamber of Commerce on 2007-09-22
- In the Knowledge Economy, education is the key to competitiveness. It is fundamental to our economic performance - and not just an aspect of social policy, as it was too often seen in the 20th century. People change jobs more often. Skills are at a premium. There are fewer and fewer decent jobs for those without them.
Prime Minister's Speeches - 2001- Conference of School Leaders on 2007-09-22
- But in secondary as in primary, we also need to get the fundamentals right. And that can only come from a clear understanding of the requirements of secondary education in the 21st century.
  Those requirements can be simply stated. Every secondary age pupil must be competent in the basics of literacy, numeracy and ICT and experience a broad curriculum beyond. Every secondary school pupil, with this basic competence, must have their talents recognised and developed to the full, particularly after the age of 14, so that that they achieve good qualifications by the age of 16 and progress to further or higher education or formal work-related training. And every school should instill in its pupils a strong sense of independence and responsibility, to themselves and their wider community.
Speech to the United Nations in New York on 2007-09-22
- Education is not only the most economically efficient and socially beneficial investment we can make but also the cheapest and most cost effective.
Education and regeneration 18 November on 2007-09-22
- At the beginning of the 20th century the Tyne was building over 10% of the world's ships, 100,000 people were employed in mining. As late as the 1980s, nearly one-third of all the jobs were still in coal mining, ship building, chemicals and manufacturing. A young man entering the world of work just after the Second World War could get by perfectly well without a good education. And it was just as well, because the educational provision for many of our people was very poor. But the factory doors opened to welcome the young man, as the school door closed behind him. School was not just no preparation for work, it was often irrelevant to it.
- That is why as well as investing in traditional and further education, we are establishing skills academies in those sectors, and this is an important move because it is a joint venture between government and business. Already we have an impressive line-up of companies ready to take part. Business plans will be ready by Easter 2006, and the academies will be operational by autumn 2008. We aim to have 12 in place, and in the longer term one for each major sector of the economy. And the future challenge, I have no doubt, is to make vocational education every bit as attractive and fulfilling as traditional academic education.
- 4 more annotations...
- - So it all comes back to the basic and central importance of education. Education is the spark that can light a love of learning, and we know what learning means - horizons broadened, imaginations are fired, confidence and ambition take root. Success only comes through hard work, but how much easier it is to work hard if you can feel the strength of your own inner potential. That is what a good teacher and a thriving school does, they give a child that most precious asset in life - self-belief.
  - Comprehensive education was formed out of the injustice of rigid selection on grounds of ability through the 11-Plus, but with it came another injustice. Because there was insufficient focus on educational standards and on high attainment, there seeped into parts of the system a deadening uniformity. The goal was to make the system comprehensive, whereas in reality the goal should have been, through abandoning selection, to bring high quality education to all.
  - The Schools White Paper is quite simply about releasing that energy inside and outside the school system. In every other walk of life in the 21st century there is flexibility, diversity, an opening up for new ideas and innovation, a breaking down of the barriers between public, private and voluntary sectors. For public services to flourish as universal services, they need that same dynamism.
  - Education therefore is now the centre of economic policy making for the future

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EdTechRoundup

28 members, 251 items

teachers using ed tech meet online using flashmeet every sunday. the discussion is recorded and made into a podcast. the links are saved in delicious and here in diigo. every few weeks there is a special focus on a particular topic, e.g. blogging in the classroom, where some particular guests are inv
History Exchange

148 members, 294 items

A group for teachers and students of History to share the sites they find most helpful.