Gary Ackerman @garyackerman@qoto.org

In the absence of technology, knowledge can only be shared as far as the human voice can travel. Transporting the knowledge a greater distance requires the human brain that contains the information be transported to the new location.

I’m an #edtech professional, but I don’t want edtech companies teaching teachers. #education #edutoot

The situation regarding IT management in many schools is well-captured by the hypothetical (and sarcastic) Putt’s Law. According to Archibald Putt, “Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand” (Putt, 2006, p. 7). Further, Putt articulated a corollary, “Every technical hierarchy, in time, develops a competence inversion” (p. 7). While these words are intended to be humorously cynical observations, they do describe the current state of IT management in schools:

• Technology professionals configure IT systems for students and teachers, but they are unfamiliar with emerging technology-rich pedagogy. In Putt’s terms, IT professionals are managing devices for purposes they do not understand.

• Educators complain about the IT systems in schools, but they don’t understand the complexity of managing IT systems, the potential conflicts and threats to the operation of enterprise IT, and general chaos that can result when enterprise networks are not tightly controlled. In Putt’s terms, educators seek to manage IT they do not understand.

• School leaders make budget and personnel decisions that impose unrealistic limits on IT professionals and they advocate for practices beyond the capacity of the available IT or are contrary to the professional tendencies of the teachers.

Reference

Putt, A. (2006). Putt’s law & the successful technocrat: How to win in the information age. Hoboken, N.J: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

If cause and effect could be reliably determined in teaching, then it would have been discovered long ago, and we would never hear “I taught it, but they didn’t learn it” and also the never-ending calls for education reform would be silent.

er 10, 2021 by Gary Ackerman
If instructors and school leaders seek to create schools in which practices and structures are aligned with the realities of human learning, then they must recognize certain characteristics of learners & learning.

First, the students who arrive in schools are experienced learners. Their experiences are affected by their culture, motivation, academic, and personal experiences. Any list of the relevant factors will be incomplete, and the nuances of how these have culminated in the individual entering your classroom cannot be known. Students are not blank slates, nor do they have exactly the prior knowledge you want them to have. Realize the students who entered may not be the students your wanted, but they are the students you have.

Second, learning comprises many different types of abilities and actions. While not every field requires al types of thinking and learning, every field depends on learning being able to demonstrate more than declarative knowledge. Statistical learning (based on pattens), observation (especially watching experts), perceptual learning (one’s ability to interpret as expertise develops), and design (iterative practical problem solving) are all examples of learning that teachers must facilitate. Your job as an instructor is to support all of them. I #edutoots

Did you ever notice students have their own interests and motivations, and that many are not as enamored with your curriculum as you are? I have... and those are the students we must work the hardest to engage with interesting problems and questions. #education #edutoots

Narcissists flock together… until they don’t. Invariably, they turn in each other. It was very entertaining to watch when it happened in k-12 faculty.

Charles Darwin wrote, “What a book a Devil’s Chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, and blundering low & horridly cruel works of nature.”

I frequent a media web site of interest. Recently, the publishers noted a “significant redesign” of the site. That redesign was the addition of advertising widgets.

Schools are perpetually beginning new practices, and none is ever allowed to have deep influences on pedagogy and student experiences. A colleague who is a known cynic commented on the horizontal reform we see in schools and observed, “It is probably best that none of these horizontal reforms ever gain traction. I have never seen any that is as effective as they claim.” #edutoots

Educational paradigms that focus on instruction and measure achievement with standardized tests are naïve and ignore the facts of human nature and the skills necessary for full participation in the emerging culture.
#edutoot

Teachers, faculties, schools, and the entire education system will be prepared for digital generations only when educators accept the challenge of reinventing (and continuing to reinvent) their practice. #edutoot

Compared to IT users in business, IT users in schools are much different. They bring different skills to the IT they use, they need more flexibility more often than business users, and their needs change over time. These characteristics arise from the facts that students have emerging literacies; it is not unusual for primary grade students to be only learning to read and the keyboard is new to them, so many computer interfaces and unput options (such as typing) may be very difficult for students to use. Even with clear curriculum guidelines, teacher and students may have different information and computing needs than they had previously or different from those of teachers and students in similar courses. School years are also periodic. Just when all the elementary school students are becoming familiar with the technology and they are becoming facile using it, the school year ends, and teachers (and IT professionals) must prepare for a new group of technology newcomers.

In 2017, a librarian and I were cleaning out a cabinet and found an old CD containing “Oregon Trail.” Even though the disk indicated it was for Windows 98, we tried installing it on a Windows 7 PC, and it worked. A middle school teacher heard our excitement and took the disk to use in his classes. “My students are so going to write journals of their trips, just like I did!” he explained.

When humans have important experiences, such as we have in school (either as a youngster or a parent), those will bias our beliefs about the experience for others. We assume everyone’s experience in school was like ours. (It was not—even for classmates.) We assume that everyone should learn what we learned and how we learned it. (This may be true, but it may not be true.) As a result, many adults pursue work in schools with the intent of replicating the structures and instruction they experienced, but that may not be what all students need.

The fact that “infodemic” is a thing is really distressing.

One thing I learned during 35 years in education: “facts” are the least useful thing in the curriculum.