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Jon Awbrey

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Papers by Jon Awbrey

Inquiry: Critical Thinking Across the Disciplines, 1995
We hope you will find these thoughts of ours both interesting and useful." These are words spoken...We hope you will find these thoughts of ours both interesting and useful." These are words spoken to express an intention, a bearing in the mind of a person toward an object which is yet to be achieved. The readiest moment of human life involves the interplay of signs, ideas, and objects-more explicitly, the interrelation of signifying expressions, states and dispositions of the mind or person, and objects or objectives either actual or potential. Our work designing instruments to enhance the play of inquiry has attuned us to the themes of interpretation and intentionality which every inquiry seems to involve. We hear what sounds like familiar strains reaching us from the hermeneutic quarter. The purpose of this essay is to trace to their sources a few of these potentially common themes, to draw out one line of their historical development, and to gather what consequences they inspire for educational practice and continued inquiry.
Organization, Jan 1, 2001
Today’s society looks to universities for solutions to broad-based issues that require cross-disc...Today’s society looks to universities for solutions to broad-based issues that require cross-disciplinary expertise. Yet, the organizational structure of our institutions remains locked in academic and administrative silos that have little genuine ability to communicate or to recognize the interdependence of knowledge. Why does the capacity to communicate between disciplines and units remain limited? How do formalizations of our experience create barriers? What kind of reflection would it take to subject our mental models of knowledge and learning to critical inquiry? This discussion highlights one of the most entrenched ‘group identity myths’ that underlie the structure of modern academic institutions, the ‘triviality of integration’ thesis.
Conceptual Barriers to Integrative Universities Gao Publos Ul UL itvalitly dit Yybbwouluil. The tension between the informal and the formal contexts, that is, the conflicting claims that these two directions exert on our attention, bears on our concept of the ‘modern’ university in the following ways. The world external to the university is a world of policies developed from human aspiration and values. The university is the world of formal- ization raised to its highest level, a world ruled by abstracted facts and detached theories. The latter has become a world in which the intellec- tual aims of inquiry are often dissociated from human and social good. Seemingly, but all too seemingly, we have kept these two worlds apart. The pretense that values and facts can be separated has led to a state in which our knowledge is not being fully brought to bear on the great human issues of our time. Recognizing the original integrity of values and facts and allowing more explicit overlap in our analytic pictures of them, permitting more permeable boundaries among the disciplines and between the university and the external community, could, we believe, lead to the building of better theories and better policies to address human issues (Scott and Awbrey, 1993). There is no reason to look for a sharp distinction here, but merely to recognize a dimension of gradually increasing levels of formalization as one passes from the neighborhood of the informal context, as an ideal type, to the vicinity of the formal context, as an imaginary pole.
emotional impressions, and motivational impulses. The connotative dimension of the sign relation embodies the possibility of multiple perspectives.
tion occurred? It turns out that some sign relations can be reconstructed from their dyadic projections but that others cannot. Those that cannot be reconstructed are called ‘irreducibly triadic’. As an example, imagine that one has a sign relation that looks like a hollow sphere and another sign relation that constitutes a solid sphere, both with the same radius and center. These two bodies have the same two-dimensional projections, so you cannot possibly tell them apart from this information alone. In such a situation, for instance, if it is important to tell the difference between ‘hollowness’ and ‘solidarity’, then one is well advised to keep a copy of the original sign relation in question. This possibility, the potential ‘irreducibility of triadics’ in general, serves as a paradigmatic counter- example to the ‘triviality of integration’ hypothesis. It means that there are forms of integral relationship among objects, signs, and ideas that can fail to be effectively conveyed or faithfully represented by overly reduc- tive forms of analysis. Conceptual Barriers to Integrative Universities
Inquiry: Critical Thinking Across the Disciplines, Jan 1, 1995
"We hope you will find these thoughts of ours both interesting and useful." These are words spoke..."We hope you will find these thoughts of ours both interesting and useful." These are words spoken to express an intention, a bearing in the mind of a person toward an object which is yet to be achieved. The readiest moment of human life involves the interplay of signs, ideas, and objects — more explicitly, the interrelation of signifying expressions, states and dispositions of the mind or person, and objects or objectives either actual or potential. Our work designing instruments to enhance the play of inquiry has attuned us to the themes of interpretation and intentionality which every inquiry seems to involve. We hear what sounds like familiar strains reaching us from the hermeneutic quarter. The purpose of this essay is to trace to their sources a few of these potentially common themes, to draw out one line of their historical development, and to gather what consequences they inspire for educational practice and continued inquiry.
More and more we hear the complaint that the gap between research and instruction is widening and...More and more we hear the complaint that the gap between research and instruction is widening and a vital sense of motivation is falling between the cracks. It is our vision that intelligent computing systems will become a partner in the reintegration of discovery and learning within the inquiry process. We will address certain issues that must be faced if computer media are to have the characteristics necessary to support this integration. The development of the computer to date has required a careful attention to the syntax and semantics of the rather limited symbol systems we have induced them to use. A capacity for communicating in multiple modalities with non-uniform communities of symbol users — for sharing in the discovery of a pluralistic universe — will demand a quantum leap in our understanding of the pragmatic dimensions of symbol use. In the future the capacity for inquiry must permeate the living architecture of the computer system. A computer program that begins to embody these ideas will be discussed.
If computer programs were smarter, they would, like people, recognize sequences of events, form m...If computer programs were smarter, they would, like people, recognize sequences of events, form models of their environment, and formulate rules based on experience. This paper describes the development of a program designed to address the difficult computational problems involved in integrating the inductive and deductive reasoning necessary to perform such tasks. "Theme One" is a prototype program composed of "Index", a learning algorithm for sequential data, and "Study", an algorithm for building logical models. The project goal is an interactive research tool that assists students and investigators in the exploration of qualitative data using artificial intelligence.

Talks by Jon Awbrey

Research paper thumbnail of Organizations of Learning or Learning Organizations : The Challenge of Creating Integrative Universities for the Next Century
Organizations of Learning or Learning Organizations : The Challenge of Creating Integrative Universities for the Next Century
Today, society is everywhere pressing for answers to the large, human problems it faces, such as ...Today, society is everywhere pressing for answers to the large, human problems it faces, such as poverty, hunger, and a sustainable environment. As part of this quest for solutions the university has come under scrutiny and duress to apply its knowledge more directly to the needs of the world it inhabits. Mary Walshok (1995) writes of the importance of "knowledge without boundaries". Donald Schön (1994) and Nicholas Maxwell (1984) implore us to focus on solutions to the large "civilizing problems" of life — to develop the wisdom that will lead to a "better and wiser world" (Maxwell, 1984, 3). Achieving such wisdom will call for an understanding of the interrelationships of knowledge that will allow problems to be reframed and solutions to coalesce in new ways. Beyond translating discoveries into action in the service of society, the university is also being asked to prepare the next generation of citizens with the skills and abilities that are needed to face the challenges of the new world in which they will live — skills such as the ability to construct meaning from knowledge, to recognize connections and interrelationships, to reach beyond what is known through experimentation and inquiry, and to achieve mutual goals through collaboration (Reich, 1991).
More and more we hear the complaint that the gap between research and instruction is widening and...More and more we hear the complaint that the gap between research and instruction is widening and a vital sense of motivation is falling between the cracks. It is our vision that intelligent computing systems will become a partner in the reintegration of discovery and learning within the inquiry process. We will address certain issues that must be faced if computer media are to have the characteristics necessary to support this integration. The development of the computer to date has required a careful attention to the syntax and semantics of the rather limited symbol systems we have induced them to use. A capacity for communicating in multiple modalities with non-uniform communities of symbol users — for sharing in the discovery of a pluralistic universe — will demand a quantum leap in our understanding of the pragmatic dimensions of symbol use. In the future the capacity for inquiry must permeate the living architecture of the computer system. A computer program that begins to embody these ideas will be discussed.

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