Gary Ackerman @garyackerman@qoto.org

I never start "credential wars," but I always win them.

"My work is unbiased observation." Sorry. but excuse me while I ROTFL.

“People talk about human intelligence as the greatest adaptation in the history of the planet. It is an amazing and marvelous thing, but in evolutionary terms, it is as likely to do us in as to help us along.”― Stephen Jay Gould

There is a difference between skepticism and denialism.

I've had students tell me 15 years later, "your class prepared me for life." I have not idea if we had learning outcomes, standards. etc. identified before lessons. My guess is "no." I expect they don't care.

Your assumptions... if you never question them... then they are likely false.

We are in the "I am committed to diversity and inclusion, but I refuse to use a microphone" season.

“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,

Let's all commit to speaking publicly only on those things about which we truly have expertise. The problem is we think our expertise is far more broad than it really is.

The best teachers and leaders know when to just be quite.

Of the many challenges of being an effective technology-using teacher is that lacking the capacity to configure the technology upon which you rely.

Keep this in case you ever need a null set:
SELECT *
FROM teacher_PD
WHERE opinion="Useful"

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.