"Courage isn't just overcoming your fears, being determined in the way you do things, willpower. As I see it, courage, unless it's accompanied by the ability to be analytical, to undertake a careful study of the scenario and possess a good deal of stubbornness, then that just isn't courage. Courage requires respect, that is, a sense of civic consciousness, meaning the willingness to live in harmony with nature and people. Courage requires a sense of responsibility: to do and to answer for what you do. A community of people who refuse to be responsible is destined to failure. Courage requires friendship. It's easier to find the courage to face a project when your true friends are there with you. Courage requires goodness: being good means being fair. Wickedness is always unfair, and when coupled with courage, it's the most destructive combination possible in the life of an individual or a community. Courage requires math: knowing numbers is of fundamental importance. Numbers are absolutely the most accurate indicator of the state of things. Courage requires a balanced combination of honesty and cleverness. These two things must always coexist. Courage requires pride: in what you...
The main idea of this book is that to comprehend the instructional potential of simulation and to design effective simulation-based learning environments, one has to consider both what happens inside the computer and inside the students' minds. The framework adopted to do this is model-centered learning, in which simulation is seen as particularly effective when learning requires a restructuring of the individual mental models of the students, as in conceptual change. Mental models are by themeselves simulations, and thus simulation models can extend our biological capacity to carry out simulative reasoning. For this reason, recent approaches in cognitive science like embodied cognition and the extended mind hypothesis are also considered in the book.. A conceptual model called the “epistemic simulation cycle” is proposed as a blueprint for the comprehension of the cognitive activies involved in simulation-based learning and for instructional design.
Fin dall’antichità, la continuità dello sviluppo economico è stata interrotta da fasi di crisi. Ma con l’avvento dell’industrializzazione e dell’organizzazione capitalistica della produzione, tali fasi sono diventate più frequenti, e hanno cominciato a manifestarsi con una certa regolarità e con caratteristiche simili tra loro e diverse rispetto ai secoli precedenti. A partire dall’epoca moderna le crisi cominciano a rappresentare un momento di verità per la teoria economica: è in queste fasi cicliche che emergono tutte le difficoltà di funzionamento del capitalismo, cosicché l’interpretazione della crisi diventa parte integrante dell’analisi dei sistemi economici. Parallelamente, ogni rappresentazione teorica dei fenomeni si esprime attraverso un linguaggio che si evolve man mano che le crisi si succedono e ne descrive morfologia e peculiarità. Ecco perché l’analisi del linguaggio usato per descrivere le crisi diventa la chiave che rivela in che modo la crisi è compresa: tanto dagli economisti che dagli attori politici che ne adottano le conclusioni. Bolla, stagnazione, panico, depressione, ciclo, fluttuazione, recessione, terremoto economico, uragano...