Gary Ackerman @garyackerman@qoto.org

Elevator Pitch: Reality of Curriculum https://hackscience.net/2024/05/26/elevator-pitch-reality-of-curriculum/

Poor technology selection can leave some important functions unmet, while introducing extraneous cognitive load for unimportant functions. Still leaders allow It folks to make decisions while ignoring user input.

How you decide is as important as what you decide.

Reinventing the wheel is not popular, but it is often necessary as your ground is different, your materials are different, and you need to accompliosh somehting different.

We need more "sandcastle problems" in the curriculum. Those things that we are never really done doing.

Every solution introduces more problems.

My first English prof when an undergraduate student warned us away from false elegance. Apparently the AI assistants who are there to help improve our writing had a different professor.

I wonder how many educators have left because staying meant they would be complicit in harmful systems.

We are at the "my project must have top priority because it needs to be done before I go on vacation" time of the year.

Google's new appointment schedule tools is great.... unless you want to efficiently add appointment slot to your calendar.

One who “looks up” answers to trivia-like questions, or who seeks “facts” or reminders of how to complete procedures is also not researching.

Both society and technology exert strong and active influences on how human brains develop. The humans who enter classrooms as students have, even in their short lives, experienced culture and technology that is much different than that experienced by their parents and teachers.

“the signs were clear that NCLB was just another educational reform initiative rich in rhetoric, but fundamentally bankrupt.” Yeah, those of us working in schools at the time knew this.

Extraneous cognitive load is that associated with poor design or with other noise in the setting. When you start looking for it, it is everywhere.

Basic operations of computers and managing classroom technology have both largely disappeared from professional development as technology has become more familiar and as technicians have been hired in schools. I think we need to bring it back.

What if the test is measuring the wrong thing? How would you know?

One reason I like science: The supremacy of observation. All disputes in science are resolved by evidence and observation, and evidence and observation must follow the rules of logic.

A new episode of my podcast dropped today:
https://bit.ly/4bS8qBI

"I am not apt to follow blindly the lead of other men"
— Charles Darwin

"Nothing is more dangerous than a dogmatic worldview - nothing more constraining, more blinding to innovation, more destructive of openness to novelty."
— Stephen Jay Gould