Gary Ackerman @garyackerman@qoto.org

“We need to teach our children what science is and how it works.” -Niles Eldridge

Just because you say it and believe it, I am under no obligation to assume it’s true.

Conspiracies are sometimes the explanation, but randomness explains many more events.

Curiosity works far better than learning outcomes.

While we might be able to calculate the percent of points students earn on an assignment, it is difficult to conclude that we know confidently that a student who scores 90% really knows 1% more of the total than the student who scored 89%.

Paraphrasing Jaron Lanier: Technology begins with human hands, but human speech plans what the hands will do.

Perhaps the most ridiculous myth that we (and this is a collective we that comprises educators, curriculum experts, employers, politicians, and book authors) believe is that we know what our students will need to know in the future.

When I was an undergraduate student, I believed one could be taught how to teach.

Learning is promoted when learners are engaged in solving real-world problems. Even if the "outcomes" are not defined prior.

“Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.”
― Voltaire

Criticism of your methods and results and interpretations of results. If you can't handle these, then please do not call yourself data-driven.

Field trips, well-stocked libraries, and time to read and explore unfamiliar topics are all strategies for enhancing and extending our students' foundational knowledge.

The "gold standard" of science may be randomized double-blind experiments, but just because ethics preclude you from doing it do not mean what you are doing is not science. Of course, jut because you are does not mean you are doing science.

"Goodhart's Law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure" is particularly true in education.

In political processes, participants are not bound to evidence and reason in the same manner as scientists and scholars; so, any decision can be justified. Keep that in mind when you hear folks talk about their "data."

Even those educators who claim to be unaffected by psychology or learning theory (in my experience a large majority of teachers eschew theory), their teaching is grounded in someone’s concepts of psychology and how human brains function.

Who knew AI could write tweets about technology as Charles Darwin?

“It is not the strongest computer that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.”

AI does bring "the hard problem" into focus, but I am increasingly convinced it isn't conscious.

Campbell's Law: "The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor" is particularly true in education.

"I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops." -Stephen Jay Gould