Gary Ackerman @garyackerman@qoto.org

Nearly half a billion small tech items thrown away https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-67082005

Microsoft in $29bn back taxes dispute in US https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-67085704

Listening to live radio. Reading books. Taking notes. These are all better when using “old” devices.

Someone needs to read this today: Your assumptions… they are all wrong.

Why are we so uncomfortable concluding both sides in a dispute are wrong?

I’ve heard recently of two leaders who lost valuable employees because of the leaders’ direct actions. They expressed surprise when the folks left, and both said both were “unfair” in their reasons for leaving. The lack of empathy by leaders seems to be more obvious since COVID.

I’ve worked in education for decades, I’ve heard “a lot of people are saying” as evidence for all of that time. It sounds particularly vapid now, and is a sure way to convince me to stop listening to you.

If you have a virtual meeting with one other person, grab a pen and paper to take notes. Looking at other screen even yo find your notes or to take notes isn’t a good look.

Can you be a leader if you are never seen?

Sorry, but I yearn for the days when we didn’t have to scroll down and down and down to find the relevant section of the web site.

I cooperate with my teammates to beat the team from the next town over, but we cooperate with that team to beat teams from the county, and with those to beat beat the state... and the trend continues. Eventually, we recognize that we are all share the same fate.

If you are only open to planned activities, the unpredictable teachable moments will be lost.

What happens in your classroom matters and students' emotional state when they interact determines what they learn and how they learn it.

Decisions made in one part of the school influence others; we know that healthy brains learn better, so decisions about school lunch and physical education matter.

No matter how much humans think about technologies and the potential effects they will have on humans, when deployed, there are outcomes that no one could have predicted.

Technologies are built one upon another so that any technology becomes a complex of others; while changing one technology in the complex influences the others and the whole, each retains an independent nature.

The construct and the instrument seem to have converged in education; “performance on the test” is the goal, but there is no agreement that the goal is worthy or measuring what it is designed to measure. This makes “data-driven decision-making” inherently unscientific.

All disputes in science are resolved by evidence and observation, and evidence and observation must follow the rules of logic.

Human knowledge is as much a social activity as it is a cognitive activity. We can understand and learn alone, but we are better at it when we do it together. Much better.

Too often teachers simply repeat their original explanation, only slower, in hopes that students will understand things that confuse them. By challenging themselves to understand the questions from their students' perspective, teachers become learners--they are smarter by their openness to interaction from those with less expertise.