Gary Ackerman @garyackerman@qoto.org

I’ve no interest in AI tools to help me write.

I write to understand the topic and clarify my thinking. That others consume the words, sentences, and paragraphs and find meaning in them too is a delightful side effect.

Retention.

I'm not sure this is a really useful concept in teaching.

Why don't we let our students know what the assessment will be like before we "test them?"

Mastery is a temporary state. Let's not make it the goal of #education.

Business and politics are human endeavors that are easily measured; the results of business and politics are generally objective and unequivocal. Profits sufficient for the owner or shareholders defines successful business. Capturing more votes makes one a political winner. (Yes, I know there are plenty of exceptions but let’s not get distracted.)

In both cases, the measure is clearly defined and quantifiable. In both cases, also, the term is relatively short; profits are reported quarterly, elections held every few years. Further, in each case, there is an element of competition; businesses gain greater profits or market share than other companies producing similar products or services, and elections have winners who take office and losers who remain in the citizenry.

Learning is a natural phenomena that is not clearly definable, it is difficult to quantify, and it is long-term in that the quality of the education may not be known until much later and the judgments of the quality can change over time. What is learned, how well it is learned, and how long it stays learned are all aspects of human nature that cannot be defined and quantified like profits and votes.

Today in northeast USA… season’s first snow delays the opening of the college. Seed catalog for 2023 arrived yesterday.

“The course is free, but the certificate is not.”

This ploy seems to validate the suggestion that the “piece of paper” really does matter… of course today it’s snippet of code.

I was at a meeting yesterday where the presenter said half way through their colleague was taking notes so that we “can collect data from our discussions. Maybe your quotes will show up In later presentations.” Am I over sensitive or should they have informed us first?

Reading. Writing. Thinking. Doing math. Doing science. Etc.

None of these can be reduced to one type of activity.

Educators spend their days in rooms filled with young people. It can be a glorious existence, it can be a dreary existence. It is an existence dedicated to providing those young people with experiences that prepare them for an unknowable future.

Ingenious humans solve engineering problems very quickly.

If good teaching was known and reliable and amenable to engineering, it would have been done long ago.

As a high school student, I was thoroughly unimpressed with computers, but as an undergraduate using them to analyze data and prepare and present lesson plans, I recognized their importance as a tool for the scientist and science teacher I hoped to become.

Soon, my near-obsession with teaching science became a near-obsession with using computers to teach. One school year, a colleague and I spent hours setting up physics experiments in which data were collected via probes connected to personal computers. We spent a summer writing the first technology integration plan for the district, and rewriting our chemistry and physics curricula to use the computers we worked with during the school year.

Online and Face-to-Face Students

While individuals in each group do select their preferred classroom for recognized reasons (e.g. online learners’ preference for flexible attendance schedules), the best students in both settings are those who engage with the content, classmates, and the teacher. Learners who react to new and challenging ideas with reasons (excuses) why the ideas have no connection to their work or their life exist in both environments. While such students may earn credits for attending the course, there is little chance they will change anything they do as a result of the course. In my experience the proportion of students who are actively engaged and those who are actively opposed to new ideas are about the same in each group.

I was recently asked to contribute to a discussion about being an online student. One bit of advice I gave:

If you enroll in a distance learning graduate program, find additional professional activities to complete your resume and that allow you to apply what you are learning to authentic situations.