Gary Ackerman @garyackerman@qoto.org

Exhibit #1 that AI isn't that insightful: “Technology is like a good cup of coffee: it keeps you awake, makes you jittery, and sometimes spills all over your desk!" is a quote it wrote for me.

Brains are not only cognitive tools... they integrate all sorts of signals from bodies. How is that replicated in AI?

Todd Rose begins his 2015 book The End of Average with the story of fighter pilots in the 1940’s who were unable to control their planes because the cockpits were designed for the “average” body. Once cockpits were designed to adjust to the actual bodies of pilots, they found pilots more able to control them. Average really is meaningless.

I met another "old time" school IT person today and we reminisced about the TLC days and the hardware that showed up in our schools. We both transitioned from the classroom to the wiring closet at that time... but I kept going back to the classroom whenever I could.

We are at that time of the year when faculty ask year-round staff "how was your break?"

When looking carefully at problems in education, we discover they cannot be isolated; and solutions may resolve symptoms but not causes. After considerable effort and expense to implement solutions, the original problem may remain, or the solution may have caused other problems.

In the domain of information technology, all problems are solvable. We all know what IT systems are supposed to do, and we get frustrated when they do not. IT professionals know the function of each component; they adopt systematic troubleshooting steps and most problems can be isolated and resolved in minutes or a few hours.

When framing a problem, we define what we believe its cause to be along with and what conditions will indicate the problem has been solved.

"There is no learning without having to pose a question."-Richard Feynman

It is through the work of rethinking about our knowledge to make it understood by others that we come to understand it.

The student who says “I know what I mean, I just can't say it” is about to experience a breakthrough and transition from having a sense of an idea to understanding it in language which is a social construction.

“The forces that shape the background [of human knowledge] are the social forces, always at work, within which and against which individuals configure their identity. These create not only grounds for reception, but grounds for interpretation, judgment, and understanding.” - John Seeley Brown

The solitary human devising a solution to a survival or other cognitive problem appears to be a rare person.

Once conceptualized, intelligence has captured educators' attention in a singular way. The profession has (unsuccessfully ) sought more reliable and valid methods of measuring intelligence with increased objectivity.

Discussions for Deeper Processing
https://hackscience.education/2020/04/11/discussions-for-deeper-processing/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon

The concepts central to school (smart, intelligent, thinking, numeracy, literacy, even memory and learning) are neither well-understood nor well-defined.

Are math students supposed to be able to quickly and correctly apply algorithms to "evaluate" equations? Should they be able to pass tests? Should they be able to explain what they did to solve a problem and why they did it? Should they be able to use math to solve "word problems?" Should they be able to create their own mathematical solutions? Should they be able to solve problems even if we are not studying them?

Epistemology is deeply important to educators in the modern world, especially if they are going to be sufficiently flexible to evaluate recipes prompted by a range of folks, to adopt and adapt those that are useful, to discard them when they are no longer useful.

Personal incredulity isn’t evidence.

Can We Agree We are Wrong?
https://hackscience.education/2020/04/06/can-we-agree-we-are-wrong/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon