Gary Ackerman @garyackerman@qoto.org
- On the web:
- https://hackscience.education/
Director of Teaching and Learning Innovation at a community college in New England
Retired k-12 science/ math/ technology teacher/ technology integration specialist/ coordinator
Joined Nov 2022
Educators abhor “reinventing the wheel;” they reason that someone somewhere has faced the same problem they face and that the other's solution can be transferred into their school. Unfortunately, solutions do not transfer as reliably as educators would hope.
“It pays to keep an open mind, but not so open your brains fall out.” - Carl Sagan
Achievement is a misguided goal for education. The really important skills and knowledge are never achieved with certainty. We develop skill and knowledge that is useful in many and diverse situations, but one's real success as a learner can only be estimated by understanding how well one performed a given task.
In the modern classroom, educators must be active learners. Learning about their students, their content, their practice, and themselves... or they become irrelevant.
"Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were, but without it we go nowhere.” - Carl Sagan
Humans are social and communicative creatures; and, for the recent history of the species, humans have used various technologies to facilitate communication and society-building.
Independent and autonomous learners. Few schools really wan them.
"We are the representatives of the cosmos; we are an example of what hydrogen atoms can do, given 15 billion years of cosmic evolution." - Carl Sagan
Other institutions have become flexible and responsive to emerging technology and social expectations; schools... not so much.
Open intellectual property is way better than textbooks if you want to expose your students to authentic curriculum.
It is not enough to be novel in your thinking. You must also be correct.
If disparate evidence and points of view are not part of your classroom, you are doing it wrong.
"The true delight is in the finding out rather than in the knowing." Isaac Asimov
I value top-down, standardized curriculum and test-dominated assessment as much as I value the equivalent form of leadership.
"Anomalous facts get incorporated into existing theories, often with a bit of forced stretching to be sure, but usually with decent fit because most worldviews contain considerable flexibility. "- Stephen Jay Gould
I do see lots of folks teaching themselves with YouTube, social media, manufacturers' web sites and channels.
- On the web:
- https://hackscience.education/
Director of Teaching and Learning Innovation at a community college in New England
Retired k-12 science/ math/ technology teacher/ technology integration specialist/ coordinator
Joined Nov 2022
