By: Christian Swails on January 23, 2025
Things are getting better. Life is progressing towards a state of goodness. Forgotten people, abandoned places, and broken systems are being shot through with renewal. Restoration is bursting forth and breaking through the ground. Humanity is good. The Divine is in everyone and everything, more and more inhabiting reality. There is an abundance…
By: Michael Hansen on January 23, 2025
During my first year at the Yale School of Management, I found an ad in the school mailroom looking for individuals to tutor math at a middle school in a neighboring town. The paid position was for one day a week for 10 weeks. I had two objectives in mind. The first was to dedicate…
By: David Weston on January 23, 2025
When I was a boy, my mother consistently told me to take smaller bites when I ate. She would repeat over and over again that I was taking too large of bites to really enjoy my meal. Through Meyer and Land’s book Threshold Concepts in Practice. Educational Futures-Re-thinking Theory and Practice, I constantly felt like…
By: Diane Tuttle on January 23, 2025
In class Dr. Clark made mention that Robot Souls was an easy book that wouldn’t be difficult to read. Those may not have been the exact words but that is how I heard this preamble. My experience of this book was anything but easy. Part computer science and part philosophy Robot Souls may read easily…
By: Jeremiah Gómez on January 23, 2025
Nestled between Tombstone Canyon and the San Pedro Valley is the Mule Pass Tunnel. History, lore, and confusion are all part of the story of the tunnel—this is the way to the Queen of the copper mines in the same territory where Wyatt Earp pursued vendettas, and a nearby marker erroneously claims this as the…
By: Mika Harry on January 23, 2025
I spent three years as a middle school math teacher. My students were in the “middle school,” which is between elementary and high school. Their brains were transitioning into adolescence, and it was an uncomfortable stage, to say the least. As you might imagine, they were often not very concerned with 8th-grade pre-algebra. Some of…
By: Betsy on January 23, 2025
The word threshold causes me to dream of pretty doors, gates, and entrances into new spaces, all of which, in my imagination, are places of transition into new ‘wide open spaces’ to use biblical language. My first PhD research in 2006-8, which I had to defer completing due to having my fourth child (and then…
By: Jess Bashioum on January 23, 2025
I reached a liminal space trying to understand what threshold concepts are. Overcoming Barriers to Student Understanding: Threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge and its companion book[i], feel like a whole lot of learning and knowledge about a whole lot of learning and knowledge (which I think may be what metacognition is about). In perfect timing,…
By: Kari on January 23, 2025
My usual “study partner,” ChatGPT, is not working today. Several times, I attempted, unsuccessfully, to open his application. I also did my typical African internet troubleshooting, such as rebooting my router, using a VPN, and restarting my computer. Perplexed, I did a quick Google search and discovered my newfound friend, ChatGPT, was experiencing a worldwide…
By: Darren Banek on January 23, 2025
There has not been a time that I can recall when I was unaware of Jesus, sin, and forgiveness. I was born to “bush missionary” parents in rural Alaska and am the youngest of three siblings. Though we moved from Alaska to Montana shortly after I was born, my earliest recollections are still of my…
By: Graham English on January 23, 2025
In Ex Machina, a programmer named Caleb is chosen to perform a Turing test on a robot to determine the capabilities and consciousness of a female robot. It becomes apparent that the robot is more self-aware and deceptive than anyone could have imagined. Nathan: Over the next few days you’re going to be the human…
By: Debbie Owen on January 23, 2025
In the quest to create artificial intelligence that mirrors human consciousness, we find ourselves grappling with an age-old question: What makes us truly human? Eve Poole, in Robot Souls, suggests that our so-called imperfections—our emotions, intuition (which she calls the Sixth Sense), mistakes, storytelling, uncertainty, free will, and search for meaning—are not flaws but essential…
By: Robert Radcliff on January 23, 2025
This week, I read two books edited by Ray Land and Jan Meyer on Threshold Concepts: Threshold Concepts in Practice and Overcoming Barriers to Student Learning: Threshold Concepts and Troublesome Knowledge. The article by Syed Mohamed et al. about soldiers, liminality, ambivalence, and hybridity stood out to me. I want to share a little of…
By: Elysse Burns on January 23, 2025
Does the soul make us unique? We often use the figurative saying, “You have no soul,” to describe someone we perceive as lacking humanity. The soul is a concept deeply embedded in our everyday language, reflected in expressions like “the eyes are the window to the soul,” “to bare one’s soul,” “to pour one’s heart…
By: Joff Williams on January 22, 2025
Around 10 years ago, I recognized the significance of the idea of shalom. Where I used to know a Hebrew synonym for “peace,” I now understand a core thread that ties together the Old and New Testament writings, is equally applicable throughout history, and addresses the common existential questions of life. Shalom as a threshold…
By: Shela Sullivan on January 21, 2025
Book Summary Robot Souls: Programming in Humanity by Eve Poole explores the intersection of artificial intelligence (AI) and human essence. Poole argues that for AI to reach its full potential, it must integrate the “messy” and “unquantifiable” aspects of humanity, such as emotions, intuition, and the capacity to make mistakes. The book is structured as…
By: Jennifer Eckert on January 21, 2025
In a podcast interview, author and academic Eve Poole talks about taking her children to the beach and watching them dig holes and build castles in the sand, which children have done for thousands of years. She hears their laughter as the water comes swooshing over their feet. She begins to lament that such an…
By: Jeff Styer on January 21, 2025
Reading Eve Poole’s book, Robot Souls, I could not help but think of an Introductory monologue by singer/song writer Rich Mullins to his song Higer Education and the Book of Love.[1] “What does it mean to be human? What does it mean to be human? I cannot help but suspect that at one time in…
By: Rich on January 20, 2025
Over the past 30 years, I have developed a specialty in tubular design. No, I’m not a surfer or valley girl asserting that my designs are cool. ‘Tubular’ is short for tubular goods, the pipes used to contain pressurized fluids in the upstream sector of the oil and gas industry. The industry has tens of…
By: Adam Cheney on January 20, 2025
At an Evangelical church I used to attend there was an eccentric older single woman. She always sat in the front row in the service and was always easy to spot. She would come into the worship center in a motorized wheelchair with her little lap dog in the front of the cart. The dog…
