By: Alex Mwaura on January 24, 2025
I don’t know where my passion for serving the most vulnerable emanated from. Perhaps it’s because I was at some point in life equally vulnerable and living on the edge but experienced how kind-heartedness can positively affect human lives. Or maybe God just planted a seed in my heart to care and support the less…
By: Glyn Barrett on January 24, 2025
I have a Shorkie (pictured). His name is Milo. He is two and is a cross between a Shitzu and a Yorkshire terrier (Yorkie). He follows me everywhere, and I love him. In our weekly doctoral Zoom calls, you will see him sleeping in my reading chair behind me. If you have a dog, you…
By: Ivan Ostrovsky on January 23, 2025
I still remember when my family moved from Minsk, Belarus, to Moscow, Russia. It was a huge change for us: a new country, city, and school. I was set to go into third grade. My parents sent me to one of the top schools in Moscow, not because I was a particularly smart kid, but…
By: Linda Mendez on January 23, 2025
It was the second quarter of my first year; I sat in Dr. Wonil Kim’s Old Testament class and thought the earth would open up and swallow him up for the heresy he was teaching. I could not sit through the 2-hour class that day; I felt that merely sitting there would make me an…
By: Chad Warren on January 23, 2025
In Marvel’s Age of Ultron, Tony Stark’s well-meaning attempt to create an artificial intelligence protector goes catastrophically wrong when Ultron, his creation, turns against humanity. Ultron concludes humanity is Earth’s greatest threat. When he declares, “They are doomed,” it becomes clear that the AI villain’s cold logic sees humanity’s flaws—its contradictions, irrationality, and uncertainty—as its…
By: Julie O'Hara on January 23, 2025
While taking a brief scroll break this morning, the first thing in my feed was a fluffy piece on @ridethenews about a company called Realbotix that touts its life-like AI robots as a possible cure for the epidemic of loneliness. According to the company’s website, “Created to be social, our robots and AI are…
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…
