The reflection of two seminars and one lecture in week 43

We had two topics to talk about in this week. First part was about how to research journals and papers and how to critically tell whether the one people choose is of high quality or not. Then, on Tuesday and Thursday, Leif Dahlberg gave out a wonderful lecture and seminar about propaedeutic knowledge on philosophy.

On researching journals and papers seminar, we talked about impact factor, which indicate the number of one article’s being cited in others. It is one kind of judgmental criteria about journals and papers’ value. After discussing the journals and papers our seminars group picked, we recommended journal “Computers & Education” and paper "Communication Processes in Participatory Websites" to other classmate. “Computers & Education” is a newly founded journal with high impact factor. It was based on introduction of new communication and information technology and then applied it in education area, which had directive meaning in later methods on education. The paper "Communication Processes in Participatory Websites" described how people excluded traps in producing old websites and used old website frame work to build new one. It is a new effective way of thinking reform Internet environment and attracted people a lot.

A lecture about how to define and know knowledge in philosophy is held on Tuesday. Following the time consequence, Leif Dahlberg gave us brief introduction about different philosophers’ knowledge epistemology. In Plato’ conception, perception is the world wider than knowledge and includes not only knowledge but also mental knowledge. The judgments on perception are not knowledge but lucky guess. The judgments with account are the most conception close to knowledge. Descartes created the thought “Cogito ergo sum” which means all things are depending on people’s perception. He also thought if many evident coherently are showed, the result can be gotten. Immanuel Kant also talked about knowledge, and he stated knowledge is recognized by synthetically analyzing causality between different factors. Then, analytic philosophy came up with a idea to put theory of knowledge into formulation. He thought S knows P equals that S believe P and think P is right and S justified P is right.

Basing on the theories concerned on lecture and questions in Theme one post, we had an inspirational discussion. About where sense data comes from, I realized it is not from sensation organs but from our brain. If there is no conception people can sense but not get sense data. Also I got a very useful inspiration on computer interaction area. Human has widely ranges of expression like propositions, questions, the performatives, believes and so on, but computer only has proposition. To enhance the computer interaction, the computer language should be expanded more than proposition.