Gary Ackerman @garyackerman@qoto.org

“Nature does not exist for our delectation, our moral instruction, or our pleasure. Therefore, nature will not always(or even preferentially) match our hopes.” -Stephen Jay Gould

If you can explain everything, you can explain nothing.

Most impediments to scientific understanding are conceptual, not factual lacks. Most difficult to dislodge are those biases that escape our scrutiny because they seem so obviously, even ineluctably, just. - Stephen Jay Gould

Learners with a deeper understanding of themselves will be better equipped to deal with rapid change that we are experiencing.

We need teaching and allows learners to adapts. Teaching that delivers facts is no longer sufficient .

Technology offers new possibilities, but demands on learners are accelerating.

A brief blog post on how social factors affect IT decisions :
https://hackscience.education/2025/03/05/social-influences-on-technology-decisions/

Purposeful, meaningful, challenging, engaging are four adjectives I see and hear applied to curriculum we should be designing. I don’t hear them applied by #students often enough. #highschool #HigherEducation #highered

“We live in a profoundly nonintellectual culture, made all the worse by a passive hedonism abetted by the spread of wealth and its dissipation into countless electronic devices that impart the latest in entertainment and supposed information....”. Gould had that correct!

We are bombarded with too much [information] in our inordinately complex world; if we cannot sort the trivial from the profound,we are lost in terminal overload. -Stephen Jay Gould

Stasis is the norm for complex systems; change, when provoked at all, is usually rapid and episodic. -Stephen Jay Gould

I’ve concluded leaders who recommend, “staying in your lane,” are not worth following.

When your protocols limit meaningful interaction, it is time to abandon them. #teaching #edchat #education

The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn. -- Alvin Toffler

OK, I get using protocols to facilitate interaction, but if you *always* use the same one, then I assume it is just part of your recipe, and you neither value interaction enough to do it yourself nor value the input of participants to attend to it rather that your protocol.

I’ve been observing a team that gets “most of the way there” when planning for student-centered learning... then someone brings up “assessing the standards” and it all falls apart. I’m convinced the two are incompatible, and schools must design, value, honor both. #education

The problem with clear objectives to start your lesson is they are abstract at a level that distracts students from the task. #teaching #education

“Confidence and error are a bad combination.” Few sentences ever written are more accurate. #LeadershipDevelopment #leadership #leader #Management #bias

Those who hold “peripheral information” (that not held by most in the group) can make the most valuable contributions to decisions. Often their knowledge is marginalized, so bad decisions result. #leaders #Management #Diversity

“A man is judged by the company he keeps.” If you find yourself shunned, it may be because of this lesson we have taught for generations.