Gary Ackerman @garyackerman@qoto.org

Google's new appointment schedule tools is great.... unless you want to efficiently add appointment slot to your calendar.

One who “looks up” answers to trivia-like questions, or who seeks “facts” or reminders of how to complete procedures is also not researching.

Both society and technology exert strong and active influences on how human brains develop. The humans who enter classrooms as students have, even in their short lives, experienced culture and technology that is much different than that experienced by their parents and teachers.

“the signs were clear that NCLB was just another educational reform initiative rich in rhetoric, but fundamentally bankrupt.” Yeah, those of us working in schools at the time knew this.

Extraneous cognitive load is that associated with poor design or with other noise in the setting. When you start looking for it, it is everywhere.

Basic operations of computers and managing classroom technology have both largely disappeared from professional development as technology has become more familiar and as technicians have been hired in schools. I think we need to bring it back.

What if the test is measuring the wrong thing? How would you know?

One reason I like science: The supremacy of observation. All disputes in science are resolved by evidence and observation, and evidence and observation must follow the rules of logic.

A new episode of my podcast dropped today:
https://bit.ly/4bS8qBI

"I am not apt to follow blindly the lead of other men"
— Charles Darwin

"Nothing is more dangerous than a dogmatic worldview - nothing more constraining, more blinding to innovation, more destructive of openness to novelty."
— Stephen Jay Gould

"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."
— Carl Sagan

If the curriculum is “too easy” or “too hard,” students pay little attention and make little progress.

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.

"For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring."
— Carl Sagan

Here is your regular reminder: If you think the answer is simple, then you misunderstand the problem.

Is it all organizations that hire for expertise then ignore the expertise they have internally or is it only education?

Science challenges conventional wisdom, but that does not mean it believes conspiracy theories.

Science is a way of thinking.

I saw a news story about the community where I had my first teaching job. I paid attention wondering if I'd see any one who may have been my student, thinking they might be parents of students. Afterwards I did the math and realized my first students would have grandchildren who are school aged.