Decolonial options in education – interrupting coloniality and inviting alternative conversations

Conversations inviting change.

Why don’t doctors pursue lifelong learning in their communication skills, just as they do with their scientific and technical skills? Good medical communicators have fewer complaints in their careers. They cost their employers and insurers less in negligence claims. Doctors who communicate well are better at putting patients at their ease. They are more likely to be given the right information,...

Silence, Please! Interrupting In-Car Phone Conversations

Holding phone conversations while driving is dangerous not only because it occupies the hands, but also because it requires attention. Where driver and passenger can adapt their conversational behavior to the demands of the situation, and e.g. interrupt themselves when more attention is needed, an interlocutor on the phone cannot adjust as easily. We present a dialogue assistant which acts as ‘...

Time-Regularized Interrupting Options

High-level skills relieve planning algorithms from low-level details. But when the skills are poorly designed for the domain, the resulting plan may be severely suboptimal. Sutton et al. (1999) made an important step towards resolving this problem by introducing a rule that automatically improves a set of skills called options. This rule terminates an option early whenever switching to another ...

When Things Go Wrong: Interrupting Conversations

This paper presents a true-concurrent approach to formalising integration of Small-to-Medium Enterprises (SMEs) with Web services. Our approach formalises common notions in service-oriented computing such as conversations (interactions between clients and web services), multi-party conversations (interactions between multiple web services) and coordination protocols, which are central in a tran...

Decolonizing Post-Colonial Studies and Paradigms of Political-Economy: Transmodernity, Decolonial Thinking, and Global Coloniality