Gary Ackerman @garyackerman@qoto.org

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

When we design technology without a purpose in mind (which is more common in schools than they admit), it fails to meet any needs.

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

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

On #edtech Management
https://hackscience.education/2019/12/26/on-edtech-management/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon

We get caught up in "Did my students meet the expectation?" The more interesting questions are "What did they learn that I didn't expect?" "What do they know that was not captured?"

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 design of the physical spaces (lighting, windows, technology tools, air flow, temperature, access to water and rest rooms, arrangement of desks) in classrooms affects learing in ways we often do not recognize.

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.

While we cannot attribute a purpose to any naturally occurring phenomenon, humans with our social and pattern-finding brains do look at our history and find we evolved “for” social interaction. We are good at it.

On #edtech Changes
https://hackscience.education/2019/12/23/on-edtech-changes/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon

“I taught it, but they didn’t learn it.” Those teachers annoy me.

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

We become teachers because we are good at something. We care about our field, have studied it with purpose, and are prepared to share our expertise with others.

The best teachers approach new students, new curriculum, new strategies, and new colleagues as a and opportunity to more deeply explore ahat they know about teaching learning.

Students who engage with the course content, their classmates, and their instructors in a reflective and active manner will gain the most from the course. This observation is as accurate for online learners as it is for traditional learners.

"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

#edtech Access isn’t Sufficient
https://hackscience.education/2019/12/20/edtech-access-isnt-sufficient/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon

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.

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.