Gary Ackerman @garyackerman@qoto.org

Today in northeast USA… season’s first snow delays the opening of the college. Seed catalog for 2023 arrived yesterday.

“The course is free, but the certificate is not.”

This ploy seems to validate the suggestion that the “piece of paper” really does matter… of course today it’s snippet of code.

I was at a meeting yesterday where the presenter said half way through their colleague was taking notes so that we “can collect data from our discussions. Maybe your quotes will show up In later presentations.” Am I over sensitive or should they have informed us first?

Reading. Writing. Thinking. Doing math. Doing science. Etc.

None of these can be reduced to one type of activity.

Educators spend their days in rooms filled with young people. It can be a glorious existence, it can be a dreary existence. It is an existence dedicated to providing those young people with experiences that prepare them for an unknowable future.

Ingenious humans solve engineering problems very quickly.

If good teaching was known and reliable and amenable to engineering, it would have been done long ago.

As a high school student, I was thoroughly unimpressed with computers, but as an undergraduate using them to analyze data and prepare and present lesson plans, I recognized their importance as a tool for the scientist and science teacher I hoped to become.

Soon, my near-obsession with teaching science became a near-obsession with using computers to teach. One school year, a colleague and I spent hours setting up physics experiments in which data were collected via probes connected to personal computers. We spent a summer writing the first technology integration plan for the district, and rewriting our chemistry and physics curricula to use the computers we worked with during the school year.

Online and Face-to-Face Students

While individuals in each group do select their preferred classroom for recognized reasons (e.g. online learners’ preference for flexible attendance schedules), the best students in both settings are those who engage with the content, classmates, and the teacher. Learners who react to new and challenging ideas with reasons (excuses) why the ideas have no connection to their work or their life exist in both environments. While such students may earn credits for attending the course, there is little chance they will change anything they do as a result of the course. In my experience the proportion of students who are actively engaged and those who are actively opposed to new ideas are about the same in each group.

I was recently asked to contribute to a discussion about being an online student. One bit of advice I gave:

If you enroll in a distance learning graduate program, find additional professional activities to complete your resume and that allow you to apply what you are learning to authentic situations.

@AndrewWatsonTTB The Goldilocks Map is an intriguing title and the Amazon page for it looks interesting. I'm off to get a copy-- but not from Amazon :)

I work with community college faculty... have you heard reaction to your book from that population?

@AndrewWatsonTTB

I never thought of schools as combining variables, but that sure makes sense. The way educators handle variables is certainly not science-like.

We do know educators hate "reinventing the wheel," but what they fail to realize is that there are plenty of reasons why wheels may not be the best option.

Of course, the inverse is common too. Educators are prone to taking the precautionary principle to the extreme. "Until you prove it is better than what I am doing in my exact field, then I am not changing," it a common reaction to emerging practices based in learning science.

If one really wants to be "data-driven," they must adopt a science-like approach to their data. Few realize how science deals with data, however. I tell #education folks they cannot be data-driven without:

The supremacy of observation and logic.

Avoidance of truth. Rather than demonstrating an idea is true, scientists demonstrate an idea is a false.

Accounting for variables. In education, we assume our interventions are the only factors affecting what we are measuring. This is just one example of fields where relevant factors are ignored.

Verification of observations. If others do not observe the same thing, you are probably wrong.

Peer review is necessary to evaluate one's work and ensure that necessary data was collected and that it was properly and logically analyzed and that observation supports conclusions.

Once a new paradigm has become established, there are typically some individuals who continue to work according to the old paradigm, but those individuals find themselves increasingly marginalized.

We have not seen a new #eduction paradigm in generations.

Earlier this year, I released Technology in Schools: Its Not Like this in Business under CC-BY-NC.

"My purpose in writing this book is to give readers a view into the work of managing information technology in schools. IT professionals will notice differences (some nuanced and some significant) between the needs and expectations of IT users in business and IT in school."

You can find an .odt and .pdf versions on my web site:
https://hackscience.net/technology-in-schools/

Once you can differentiate red herrings from meaningful practices, you will be very successful… but you will anger leaders.