Chip’s journey

The National Centre for Partnership and Performance (NCPP) and National College of Ireland are today hosting the Learning at Work Seminar: Practical Responses to the Future Skills Challenge.

Participants will discuss responses to the challenge posed in video case studies, as well as learn about:

• Organizing learning opportunities
• Public and private-sector workplace initiatives
• What motivates people to take up skills courses
• How to nurture a learning culture
• Blended learning

My slides are below:

In the second half of October, 2005, I was fortunate to travel to Sweden because of a Fulbright Senior Specialists award. I spent one week at Umeå University and a second at the University at Göteborg.

We spent a sabbatical year in Paris in 2004-05. This included a Fulbright Senior Specialist trip to Tampere, Finland, two trips to Germany, the Kaleidoscope conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Learning in Lausanne, and the ProLearn workshop on learning objects in Leuven.

While in Paris, I worked on the Libr@ries: Changing Information Space and Practice book with Cushla Kapitzke, who came from Brisbane, Australia to finish the editing. Read the rest of this entry »

I became a Professor in the Graduate School of Library & Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the Spring semester of 2000.

Sabbatical with major stays in Beijing, China and Brisbane, Australia and stops in Oklahoma, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, Texas, California, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Italy, and Wales along the way, 1996-1997. See the map.

See “Learning from China.”

I worked in the Curriculum & Instruction department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from 1990 to 2000. I taught courses such as

• Computer Assisted Instruction,
• Classroom Science,
• Inquiry Teaching and Learning,
• Evaluation of Information Technologies,
• Ethical & Policy Issues in Information Technology,
• Discourses of Science,
• Technologies for Learning,
• Reader Response Criticism,
• Children’s Composition,
• Social Contexts and Functions of Writing,
• Epistemology and Education,
• Teacher Communities, and
• Discourse Across the Disciplines.

While at BBN, I helped write the proposal for the Center for the Study of Reading. It was established at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign by the National Institute of Education in response to the growing concern about the quality of reading instruction in American schools. The proposal became the basis for the book Theoretical issues in reading comprehension: Perspectives from cognitive psychology, linguistics, artificial intelligence, and education.

I worked at Bolt Beranek and Newman for 16 years on Speech Understanding, Quill, the Center for the Study of Reading, and other projects in the fields of artificial intelligence and education.

I was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey during 1971-74. I taught undergraduates in Livingston College as well as masters and doctoral students.

[Photos from Rutgers website; Delaware and Raritan canal photo also from canalphotos.org]

The logical structure underlying temporal references in natural language, The University of Texas at Austin, Computer Sciences Department.

542
Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic
Volume XVII, Number 4, October 1976
NDJFAM

A LOGIC FOR UNKNOWN OUTCOMES

BERTRAM BRUCE

1 Introduction

In computer question answering and problem solving programs many of the questions of modal and tense logics appear as practical design problems. One problem of particular interest appears when we allow events to have the truth value “unknown”, a natural value to assign to some events which occur at other times than the present.

However, allowing a third value is not as simple as it seems. Suppose that statements P and Q each have the truth value “unknown”. What values should be assigned to {PΛQ)? If (PvQ) is necessary, it should have the value “true”, otherwise it has the value “unknown”. The “modal” composition of truth values cannot be achieved in a three (”true”, “unknown”, “false”) valued truth functional logic. In fact, as shown by Dugundji [l], no finite valued truth functional logic can be given the modal interpretation. Consequently, semantic analysis of most modal systems must be quasi-truth-functional or involve infinite matrices or both.

For example, Kripke [2] introduces the concept of a set of “possible worlds” with a model which assigns to each well formed formula (wff) a set of truth values, one for each world. If the set of worlds is infinite then each wff will have an infinite sequence for its value. Furthermore, the composition of truth values is not strictly truth-functional since it depends on the “possibility” relation between worlds. Another example is the infinite product logic, πC2, where C2 is the classical two-valued propositional calculus [5]. In this logic wffs again have sequence for their values. These sequences can be viewed as the value a wff takes over time [3] and thus provide a link between modal logic and tense logic. A final example, out of many others, is the probabilistic approach as discussed by Rescher [4], [5]. He shows that assigning a probability to each wff and applying certain minimal features of a probability calculus yields a set of tautologies equivalent to the theorems of S5. Here again the logic is infinite valued and quasi-truth-functional in the compositions.

With a concern for computer applications such as question answering it seems appropriate to discuss yet another approach, which appears to have a simpler (though non-truth functional) decision procedure while requiring…