Curriculum & Instruction

I worked in the Curriculum & Instruction department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from 1990 to 2000. I taught courses such as

• Computer Assisted Instruction,
• Classroom Science,
• Inquiry Teaching and Learning,
• Evaluation of Information Technologies,
• Ethical & Policy Issues in Information Technology,
• Discourses of Science,
• Technologies for Learning,
• Reader Response Criticism,
• Children’s Composition,
• Social Contexts and Functions of Writing,
• Epistemology and Education,
• Teacher Communities, and
• Discourse Across the Disciplines.

Stephen Andrew Bruce

The picture to the left is of Stephen with Emily and a small friend, Christopher.

Emily Claire Bruce

The picture shows her on the day of graduation from in May, 2003.

Quill

A suite of software tools designed to foster an environment for literacy in classrooms. The software, teacher’s guide, and workshops were used widely, including in village schools in Alaska, which I visited three times during the project. Andee Rubin and I wrote a book, Electronic Quills: A situated evaluation of using computers for writing in classrooms, which looks in detail at the stories of early users. 1982-84.

Susan Porter

Married in Aunt Polly’s backyard in Wellfleet, Massachusetts.

Science for the People

From a brochure produced by the Boston group (1975) “Science for the People means recognizing the political nature of science; it means access for all people to useful human knowledge; it means the organizing of women and men in science to struggle along with other communities aimed at fundamental social change.” 1976-1989.

Center for the Study of Reading

While at BBN, I helped write the proposal for the Center for the Study of Reading. It was established at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign by the National Institute of Education in response to the growing concern about the quality of reading instruction in American schools. The proposal became the basis for the book Theoretical issues in reading comprehension: Perspectives from cognitive psychology, linguistics, artificial intelligence, and education.

Bolt Beranek and Newman, Inc.

I worked at Bolt Beranek and Newman for 16 years on the Speech Understanding Research, Quill and other projects in the fields of artificial intelligence and education.

Assistant Professor, Rutgers

I was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey during 1971-74. I taught undergraduates in Livingston College as well as masters and doctoral students.

[Photos from Rutgers website; Delaware and Raritan canal photo also from canalphotos.org]

Dissertation: The logical structure underlying temporal references in natural language

The logical structure underlying temporal references in natural language, The University of Texas at Austin, Computer Sciences Department.

542
Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic
Volume XVII, Number 4, October 1976
NDJFAM

A LOGIC FOR UNKNOWN OUTCOMES
BERTRAM BRUCE

1 Introduction

In computer question answering and problem solving
programs many of the questions of modal and tense logics appear as
practical design problems. One problem of particular interest appears
when we allow events to have the truth value “unknown”, a natural value to
assign to some events which occur at other times than the present.
However, allowing a third value is not as simple as it seems. Suppose that
statements P and Q each have the truth value “unknown”. What values
should be assigned to {PΛQ)? If (PvQ) is necessary, it should have the
value “true”, otherwise it has the value “unknown”. The “modal”
composition of truth values cannot be achieved in a three (“true”,
“unknown”, “false”) valued truth functional logic. In fact, as shown by
Dugundji [l], no finite valued truth functional logic can be given the modal
interpretation. Consequently, semantic analysis of most modal systems
must be quasi-truth-functional or involve infinite matrices or both. For
example, Kripke [2] introduces the concept of a set of “possible worlds”
with a model which assigns to each well formed formula (wff) a set of truth
values, one for each world. If the set of worlds is infinite then each wff
will have an infinite sequence for its value. Furthermore, the composition
of truth values is not strictly truth-functional since it depends on the
“possibility” relation between worlds. Another example is the infinite
product logic, πC2, where C2 is the classical two-valued propositional
calculus [5]. In this logic wffs again have sequence for their values. These
sequences can be viewed as the value a wff takes over time [3] and thus
provide a link between modal logic and tense logic. A final example, out of
many others, is the probabilistic approach as discussed by Rescher [4], [5].
He shows that assigning a probability to each wff and applying certain
minimal features of a probability calculus yields a set of tautologies
equivalent to the theorems of S5. Here again the logic is infinite valued and
quasi-truth-functional in the compositions.

With a concern for computer applications such as question answering it
seems appropriate to discuss yet another approach, which appears to have
a simpler (though non-truth functional) decision procedure while requiring…