Gary Ackerman @garyackerman@qoto.org

Schools are political organizations. Both the outsiders making decisions that affect it and the insiders who make decisions inside it.

It may seem unnecessary to state it, but schools are places where children are present. Lots of children. Seriously, they are everywhere. They reflect the social, economic, racial, ethnic, religious, and other characteristics of the local population. They affect every decision made in schools. Whether those decisions are in the best interest of those children is questionable in many cases.

Conditioning is the theory underlying many external motivations including grades and awards. Despite its wide use, researchers have found it does not explain academic learning very well.

If you depend on test results to decide if your students have learned, you are doing it wrong.

Adults ruin most everything.

In the real world, no IT systems are designed without a task in mind.

Gotta say, "I'm digging the podcast AI generated based on my PDF file of chapters ans articles I have written." Episode 27 of my podcast is an example:
https://buff.ly/3BRewG0

“All intelligence is collective.”
Yeah, that’s probably not wrong.

"Men will commit atrocities as long as they believe absurdities.” -Voltaire

Do not assume your recollections of your education are accurate and do not assume your interpretation of the importance of your education is accurate.

“Doing technical work is just one strategy among others.” Especially in education, one is tempted to articulate a single preferred method of teaching the curriculum. Designers recognize the many solutions in the instructional space and explore them in specific situations.

Students come to you from different places and they are going different places; do not assume the path you took is the one your students are taking.

"Students should be active architects of their won learning." That sure sounds like something I would have written, but AI generated it after processing a chapter I wrote.

One of the most distressing realizations one makes when they become a teacher is that the best plans one makes for the classroom are just guesses.

Technology-based teaching can be unpredictable as they are driven by students’ interests and rely on diverse source of information, and the products of students’ learning emerge as the projects progress.

“I have approximate answers, possible beliefs and different degrees of certainty about different things, but I'm not absolutely sure about anything.”
― Richard Feynman

Give me an interesting and relevant problem and dig into it.
Give me a learning outcome and I'll ignore it.

Curiosity. AI can't do that.

I say we call it what it is. Drivel.

My entire adult life has been spent observing pseudoscience. The last few years of misinformation are all so familiar.