Federico Gobbo

This book advances the growing area of language policy and planning (LPP) by examining the epistemological and theoretical foundations that engendered and sustain the field, drawing on insights and approaches from anthropology, linguistics, economics, political science, and education to create an accessible and inter-disciplinary overview of LPP as a coherent discipline. Throughout the book, the authors address LPP from different perspectives, exploring the interface between planning in theory and its practical problems in implementation. This volume will be of interest to students and scholars with an interest in LPP in particular, and educational, social, and public policy more broadly.

In this paper we will present certain aspects of teaching Italian in the experimental language laboratory of the Montessori School of Milan. The laboratory consists of a series of meetings between teachers and researchers, featuring lessons conducted in class by researchers with the aim of creating a secret language together, and eventually its imaginary world. Furthermore, the teaching methodology will be set out in a consistent methodological and psychopedagogical framework as a support for learning Italian as a first and as well as second language. In particular, language productions will be analysed from a sociocultural perspective by considering secret languages as new cultural artefacts that help develop socio-relational competence, that is both self-regulating and metacognitive.

This paper argues that the assessment of sociolinguistic justice should pass through the promotion of linguistic ease, analysed through a number of sociolinguistic parameters already used for the repertoires of multilingual communities. Their consideration permits to tackle the complexity of globalising and localising forces, beyond the Westphalian model of nation-state. In particular, three axes of analysis should be taken into account: the formality of situations, the sense of belonging, and special domains, like school and writing.

Epistemic diversity is the ability or possibility of producing diverse and rich epistemic apparati to make sense of the world around us. In this paper we discuss whether, and to what extent, different conceptions of knowledge—notably as ‘justified true belief’ and as ‘distributed and embodied cognition’—hinder or foster epistemic diversity. We then link this discussion to the widespread move in science and philosophy towards monolingual disciplinary environments. We argue that English, despite all appearance, is no Lingua Franca, and we give reasons why epistemic diversity is also deeply hindered is monolingual contexts. Finally, we sketch a proposal for multilingual academia where epistemic diversity is thereby fostered.

This paper explores the problem of knowledge in computational informational organisms, i.e. organisms that include a computing machinery at the artifact side. Although information can be understood in many ways, from the second half of the past century information is getting more and more digitised, von Neumann machines becoming dominant. Computational information is a challenge for the act of measuring, as neither purely quantitative nor totally qualitative approaches satisfy the need to explain the interplay among the agents producing and managing computational information. In this paper, Floridi’s method of levels of abstraction is applied to the analysis of computational information, with a chief interest in the concepts of information measure, quantification and quality

From the advent of general purpose, Turing-complete machines, the relation between operators, programmers and users with computers can be observed as interconnected informational organisms (inforgs), henceforth analysed with the method of levels of abstraction (LoAs), risen within the philosophy of information (PI). In this paper, the epistemological levellism proposed by L. Floridi in the PI to deal with LoAs will be formalised in constructive terms using category theory, so that information itself is treated as structure-preserving functions instead of Cartesian products. The milestones in the history of modern computing are then analysed through constructive levellism to show how the growth of system complexity lead to more and more information hiding

This paper analyses the knowledge needed to understand a computer program within the Philosophy of Information. L. Floridi’s method of Levels ofion is applied to the rela- tion between an ideal programmer and a modern computer seen together as an informational organism. The results obtained by the mental experiment known as the Knowledge Game are applied to this relation, so to explain what a programmer should know in order to program a modern computer. In particular, this analysis will clearly show why non-conscious agents have no hopes to write significant programs. Two main objections are then presented and attacked by correspondent counterobjections.

Social constructivism is grounded on the construction of information with a focus on collaborative learning through social interactions. However, it tends to ignore the human mental architecture, pillar of cognitivism. A characteristic of cognitivism is that instructional designs built upon it are generally explicit, contrarily to constructivism. This position paper proposes a novel learning task that is aimed at combining both the approaches through the use of trigger questions in a collaborative activity executed after a traditional delivery of instructions. To evaluate this new task, a metric of efficiency based upon a measure of mental workload and a measure of performance is proposed. The former measure is taken from Ergonomics, and two well know subjective self-reporting mental workload assessment techniques are envisioned. The latter measure is taken from an objective quantitative assessment of the performance of learners employing concept maps.

This paper argues that the assessment of sociolinguistic justice should pass through the promotion of linguistic ease, analysed through a number of sociolinguistic parameters already used for the repertoires of multilingual communities. Their consideration permits to tackle the complexity of globalising and localising forces, beyond the Westphalian model of nation-state. In particular, three axes of analysis should be taken into account: the formality of situations, the sense of belonging, and special domains, like school and writing.