• The Role of Questions in Teaching, Thinking and Learning

  "One of the reasons that instructors tend to overemphasize "coverage" over "engaged thinking" is that they assume that answers can be taught separate from questions. Indeed, so buried are questions in established instruction that the fact that all assertions ? all statements that this or that is so ? are implicit answers to questions is virtually never recognized." (CriticalThinking.org)

  tags: pedagogy, criticalthinking, grue

• Neuroscience Advances Force New Thinking on Ethics

  "The ethical dilemmas of tomorrow are expected to yield themselves to models of investigation used to study more traditional ethical issues such as confidentiality, boundary violations, and informed consent." Mark Moran. Psychiatr News April 18, 2008. Volume 43, Number 8, page 18.

  tags: neuroethics, morality, grue, neuroscience

• TV, Cognitive Surplus, and Wikipedia

  "Following on themes from his book, Here Comes Everybody, he tells a story that goes like this: We gained lots of free time (a "cognitive surplus") in the 40s and 50s because of shorter workweeks. We squandered the surplus by watching TV sitcoms and the like. Now we're finally waking up from this "collective bender" and putting our energies into better things, like editing Wikipedia. ... I have a number of problems with this story." (Question Technology)

  tags: media, trends, grue, technology

• Fairness activates brain reward circuitry.

  According to research..."Compared with unfair offers of equal monetary value, fair offers led to higher happiness ratings and activation in several reward regions of the brain. Furthermore, the tendency to accept unfair proposals was associated with increased activity in right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, a region involved in emotion regulation, and with decreased activity in the anterior insula, which has been implicated in negative affect." (Bownds' Mindblog)

  tags: fairness, morality, moral-psychology, brains, neuroscience, grue, neuroethics

• The Biological Basis of Morality

  "Do we invent our moral absolutes in order to make society workable? Or are these enduring principles expressed to us by some transcendent or Godlike authority? Efforts to resolve this conundrum have perplexed, sometimes inflamed, our best minds for centuries, but the natural sciences are telling us more and more about the choices we make and our reasons for making them" (Edward O. Wilson, The Atlantic Online, 1998)

  tags: morality, evolution, grue

• The Evolution of Altruism

  "Despite the overwhelming success Darwin?s theory has had in explaining a wide variety of natural phenomena, great debate continues over the theory?s application in explaining the evolution of an aspect of animal behavior known as altruism." (Eric Strong)

  tags: altruism, morality, evolution, grue

TrackBack