Gary Ackerman @garyackerman@qoto.org

I heard a student on a panel of students who were talking to educators who said "don't flex on us" talking about the power dynamics in schools. All of the students were articulate and told the educators what they needed to hear, but that phrase captured it perfectly!

Whereas my high school had a small computer room for students to use (I recall four computers in the room), my first teaching job was in a school with multiple computer rooms.

"It is impossible to say how first the idea entered my brain, but, once conceived, it haunted me day and night." My favorite sentence to start fiction, but it needs to start curriculum too!

Multimodal distributions are usually interpreted as “we measured something other than what we claimed.” Think about that when you look at a bunch of "0s" and a bunch on "not 0s" in the gradebook and conclude "this students doesn't know the material."

When making decisions and modifying IT systems, school IT professionals (like those in every business) must adapt to users’ perceptions, especially of the ease of use and effectiveness of the systems.

Generative AI will come for some of our jobs. It seems the best strategy for those who seek to stay employed is to develop and refine the skills that cannot be easily done by AI. What exactly those are and how they can be used to stay employed we cannot really tell.

The designers have their concept of the problem they are solving, but once it gets into the hands of users, they determine which problems it will solve, how the solutions are realized, and what is done with it that the designer never imagined.

Every decision made and every action taken by IT professionals (regardless of their role) affects end users either directly (by providing troubleshooting, training, and other support) or indirectly (by installing and configuring systems and interfaces).

Tacit knowledge is necessary to frame a problem, to develop a strategy for solving it, and to predict and evaluate the outcomes of solution. These are too valuable to ignore in schooling.

Standards-based tests are supposed to measure the degree to which students know the materials defined in the curriculum.

Standardized tests measure an individual’s performance on a test compared to other test takers.

Self-testing, in which students reconstruct what they learned previously, improves learning.

“The scientist is not a person who gives the right answers, he's one who asks the right questions.”
― Claude Levi-Strauss

Can educators devise assessments that can predict how students will develop rather than what they did?

“I don't accept the currently fashionable assertion that any view is automatically as worthy of respect as any equal and opposite view."
― Douglas Adams

You ended my free trial. Why am I still getting emails?

Schools have always been places where information is consumed and created. For most of the history of schools, that information was created as physical artifacts (works written on paper, images drawn on paper, songs recorded on tapes, and similar creations).

“Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.”
― Charles Darwin

Modern digital devices represent extreme aeropagetica. Any of the billions who carry a smart phone can capture an image or video and publish it to a world-wide audience quickly (measured in seconds) and inexpensively (margin cost is near zero).

I've changed my mind. Keep phones away from students during classtime.

Are we getting to the point where jobs will be lost to technology and not replaced?