Gary Ackerman @garyackerman@qoto.org

Nothing worse than IT people telling educators what IT they need.

“But students shouldn’t be taking my class on a phone” is like saying “but students shouldn’t walk to campus.”

“When science doesn’t conform to my ideas, I dismiss it,” is this one of the biggest changes in our thinking in the last decades, or is it just me?

Hey IT, if you immediately say, “oh, that can’t be done,” your clients/ customers either inside or outside your organization don’t believe you... and with good reason. They have often seen it done elsewhere.

“I enjoy it/ find it valuable” is not evidence.

Look at the things you are trying to accomplish (I know accomplish is a dubious concept but you know what I mean)... if anyone else responsible for any part (a boss, supervisor, hiring committee, advisor, parent, child, co-worker, committee, etc.) then remove it from your list.

Listening to a YouTube featuring a Stephen Jay Gould lecture on my walk, I appreciate the support of advertisers, but when your company interrupts the content every 2-3 minutes, I’m unlikely to become a customer.

Yeah, so when you are dealing with natural systems (viruses, brains, atmospheres) it is best to follow science.

A multi-literate brain? Hmmm... that’s an interesting concept to ponder.

Learned ignorance? No, I think "practiced" is the appropriate adjective.

“The power of some needs the folly of others.” Can’t argue with that.

One reason I don’t make recordings of presentation available is it takes so long to try to figure out how to closed caption the natural speech. It quicker to record an abbreviated version and closed captioning that.

Billionaires with bags of money they are willing to hand out to schools convince “educators” to try their quacky idea about schools & teaching, then they interpret *anything* that can be displayed on misleading graphs as “data that its working.”

Stephen Jay Gould asked, “What if variation was reality, and species cannot be reduced to its essence?” Yeah, he was spot-on.

One of the mistakes educators make is believing the conclusion that what we try to do can be reduced to a number. The value (economic, political, cultural) of an individual or population lies in its variation. We should cultivate that more than seeking standardized students.

Defining problems and defining solutions are not the same. Effective systems and leaders focus on framing and understanding problems not limiting them to available solutions. #leadership

If your answer to “why do we need this?” is “because you will need it next year,” you need to stop. Learning is about building connections. Build them with students every chance you get.

Regression to the mean does not make an interesting story, so we discount it, but it explains much.

It’s been distressing to see how little #education is about #learning.

“Mutually focused attention” seems the basis of all #teaching and #learning.