Gary Ackerman @garyackerman@qoto.org

One of my favorite things to do is see the puzzled look when “data-driven” leaders celebrate a positive change, and I ask “might this just be regression to the mean?”

Have you ever noticed the “we need rules and procedures” crowd cannot stand when they are not the people who make the rules?

Yeah, it’s not “unfair” that I don’t take your wacky idea seriously, it’s called “practicing good judgement;” especially when you are dragging out ideas that have been throughly debunked years, decades, or centuries ago.

The number of folks who maintain “I didn’t do it” when using digital systems is alarming. Maybe “digital literacy” should include lessons about the level of tracking (and trackable data) common when using these systems.

“I spent all break making the terrific infographics for my courses. What do you mean alt text?”

#edtech tip of the day: Bold the text in your file before putting the mimeograph blank through your dot matrix printer to be sure all the characters show up.

Empirical evidence. This is what differentiates science from other types of knowledge.

Writing and content generation are different things. One creates something worth reading, the other fills pages.

The longer I work in education, the less confidence I have in the testing we use as a meaningful instrument for… well anything other than filling time and causing stress.

I saw a performance recently in which teachers were portrayed as uncaring. A colleague who knows my background asked, “wasn’t that unfair to teachers?” I responded, “No. It accurately reflected a significant part of the teacher population in with embarrassing accuracy.”

What if we ask folks to add to our culture, not fit into it?

I’m old enough to remember when we were advised to avoid Cliff Notes and other summaries. Now they are encouraged to have AI summarize books. Is any of this different from researchers using abstracts to get a sense of the article?

“Accepting assumptions” isn’t the same as “having faith.” Assumptions are to be challenged and changed; faith is not.

Access to information isn’t a problem. Curating it, analyzing it, interpreting it, evaluating it, applying it, creating with it are the tasks that should occupy learners’ time today.

Hey students… the existence of the notes doesn’t matter. The thinking you do when you read/ listen and summarize then write it down… that thinking is what matters. Don’t be fooled by the advice to “have AI take your notes.”

“The data are messy and complicated.” Yeah, it might not be easy to analyze, but that’s where the good stuff is lurking.

Shouldn’t all cognition that happens outside the brain & body be called artificial intelligence? I believe it should, and the history of these technologies give us a view if the future once the hype over generative AI is over.

You get to the end of the course you are teaching and students conclude it was a waste of time. How do you respond?

We do lots of things to structure tasks for learning. If you can’t fade those supports over time, then they failed. #education #teaching

Imagine if our learning outcomes were curiosity, creativity, critical thinking, and similar skills and habits.