Gary Ackerman @garyackerman@qoto.org

Campbell's Law: "The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor" is particularly true in education.

"I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops." -Stephen Jay Gould

Schools, the institutions we have adopted for teaching, are a rather recent human invention, and may not be the best. Scholars have documented how teaching occurs in societies other than school and found some similarities; western schools have largely ignored that knowledge.

When using modern media, one cannot assume any editorial oversight. Hucksters, radicals, rascals, and idiots can all create content for the web and the content created by those groups appears in the same search engine results as those of professionals, experts, and authorities.

It may seem unnecessary to state it, but schools are places where children are present. Lots of children. Children who reflect the social, racial, ethnic, and other characteristics of the local population.

Nature proceeds as nature proceeds. When humans decide to impose their will on science, it does not turn out well.

Here is your regular reminder that audio books are reading too.

Technology introduces as many problems as it fixes.

Cybersecurity is to adults as game design is to teenagers.

Once words are divorced from their original meaning, they can mean whatever you like. Ideas in education are a perfect example.

Some people think cherry picking and data are the same thing.

“People of extraordinary genius do not make good politicians.” I’m starting to think they are correct.

“Rudeness is the weak man's imitation of strength.”― Eric Hoffer

Not all students arrive with the same motivation, goals, and experiences as the teacher did when they first entered the field.

Correlation, association, causation. Humans are not good at differentiating these.

The most successful forms of intelligence that humans have discovered appears to be the symbiosis (although the biology student in me recoils at the use of the term) of humans and computers.

Computers can easily do the things that are hard for humans, and the things easy for humans are hard for computers. This is sometimes called Moravec’s paradox.

Faculty often have a most favored pedagogy. it may not be anyone else's favorite, but that does not dissuade them from using it... over and over... and over.

The illiterate of the future will not be the person who cannot read. It will be the person who does not know how to learn.--Alvin Toffler

For educators, the penetration of computer networks into the classroom has been simultaneously a great advantage and a great distraction.