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Quiz: Did A 4th Grader Write This, Or The New Chatbot?
New York Times
-
12/26/22
“Most of us have never seen anything like it outside of science fiction. To better understand what ChatGPT can do, we decided to see if people could tell the difference between the bot’s writing and a child’s. We used real essay prompts from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (the standardized test from the Department of Education, known as the nation’s report card). We asked the bot to produce essays based on those prompts — sometimes with a little coaching, and always telling it to write like a student of the appropriate age. We put what it wrote side by side with sample answers written by real children. We asked some experts on children’s writing to take our variation on the Turing test, live on a call with us. They were a fourth-grade teacher; a professional writing tutor; a Stanford education professor; and Judy Blume, the beloved children’s author. None of them could tell every time whether a child or a bot wrote the essay. See how you do.”
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Teen Perceptions Of Social Media
Pew Research
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11/16/22
“Majorities of teens credit social media with strengthening their friendships and providing support while also noting the emotionally charged side of these platforms”
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“Behind Their Screens” - Project Zero’s Book On Teens And Tech
Kirkus Reviews
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8/16/22
“However, they also believe that disconnecting is not an option. “For many teens, technologies are a non-negotiable for friendship preservation,” write the authors. “There’s no way to opt out without major social repercussions. They wish adults would acknowledge this reality.””
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YouTube And TikTok Catapult To Top Of Teen Social Media Use
Pew Research
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8/10/22
“YouTube tops the 2022 teen online landscape among the platforms covered in the Center’s new survey, as it is used by 95% of teens. TikTok is next on the list of platforms that were asked about in this survey (67%), followed by Instagram and Snapchat, which are both used by about six-in-ten teens… This study also explores the frequency with which teens are on each of the top five online platforms: YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat and Facebook. Fully 35% of teens say they are using at least one of them “almost constantly.””
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McLuhan Was Right. The Medium Really Is The Message
New York Times
-
8/7/22
“McLuhan’s view is that mediums matter more than content; it’s the common rules that govern all creation and consumption across a medium that change people and society. Oral culture teaches us to think one way, written culture another. Television turned everything into entertainment, and social media taught us to think with the crowd.”
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Meet The Writers Using A.I. To Help Them Write Their Novels
The Verge
-
7/20/22
“She’s a little embarrassed to say she’s become reliant on it. Not that she couldn’t write without it, but she thinks her writing wouldn’t be as rich, and she would certainly be more burnt out. “There’s something different about working with the AI and editing those words, and then coming up with my own and then editing it, that’s much easier. It’s less emotionally taxing. It’s less tiresome; it’s less fatiguing. I need to pay attention much less closely. I don’t get as deeply into the writing as I did before, and yet, I found a balance where I still feel very connected to the story, and I still feel it’s wholly mine.””
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26 Astonishing Poems Written By A.I.
New Yorker
-
6/21/22
“Dan pressed a button, and in less than a second the computer produced a poem in the style of Philip Larkin that was so much like a Philip Larkin poem, we thought it was a poem by Philip Larkin. We Googled the first line, expecting it to be an existing Philip Larkin poem, but we couldn’t find it on the Internet. It was an original work, composed by the A.I. in less time than it takes a man to sneeze.”
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8 Characteristics Of Effective Online Education
McKinsey
-
10/18/21
“To better understand what these institutions are doing well, we surveyed academic research as well as the reported practices of more than 30 institutions, including both regulated degree-granting universities and nonregulated lifelong education providers… We found that, to engage most effectively with students, the leading online higher education institutions focus on eight dimensions of the learning experience. We have organized these into three overarching principles: create a seamless journey for students, adopt an engaging approach to teaching, and build a caring network (exhibit). In this article, we talk about these principles in the context of programs that are fully online, but they may be just as effective within hybrid programs in which students complete some courses online and some in person.”
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GPA Correlates With Where Students Put Their Phones While Studying
Character Lab
-
10/1/21
“The trick I like best is also the one most commonly recommended by undergraduates in the classes I’m teaching this year—what scientists call situation modification. It involves intentionally changing your physical surroundings to make it easier to resist temptation. Consider, for example, this data collected from thousands of high school students on Character Lab Research Network. The farther students reported keeping their phones when trying to study, the higher their report card grades.”
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Google Jamboard: Excellent For Online Collaboration And Whiteboard
History Tech
-
1/28/21
“Originally created by Google to work with an interactive whiteboard (trust me, your school probably can’t afford the actual hardware), Jamboard software also works on laptops, Chromebooks, and mobile devices. Making it perfect as both a face to face and a remote instructional and learning tool… How might you use it? Here are five ways that Jamboard can save your bacon.”
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“A Racial Slur, A Viral Video, And A Reckoning”
New York Times
-
12/26/20
“In one sense, the public shaming… underscores the power of social media to hold people of all ages accountable, with consequences at times including harassment and both online and real-world “cancellation.” But the story behind the backlash also reveals a more complex portrait of behavior that for generations had gone unchecked in schools in one of the nation’s wealthiest counties.”
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2020 Is The Second “Year Of The MOOC”
EdSurge
-
12/23/20
“Of all the learners that ever registered on a MOOC platform, one third did so in 2020... Data collected by Class Central show that pre-pandemic, technology-related subjects were the most popular: the ten most-followed courses were all career-focused. Post-pandemic, interest in soft skills and general topics increased. The most popular course during the pandemic turned out to be Yale University’s The Science of Well-Being, with over 2.5 million enrollments in 2020.”
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How To Teach When Only Half Your Class Is In The Room
Cult of Pedagogy
-
9/29/20
“Before, a teacher only had to worry about meeting students where they were academically, socially, and emotionally. Now you literally have to figure out a way to meet them where they are… What I’d like to do in this post is curate some of the ways teachers have solved the problem of teaching students who are literally all over the place.”
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How To Prevent Cheating In Virtual Classrooms: Make Work Meaningful
EdWeek
-
8/30/20
“In other words, instead of changing the assessment context or altering the severity of consequences, teachers simply take away students' reasons for cheating. Why cheat on an assessment if that hurts your chances of getting the individualized assistance you need to do well? Some teachers go so far as to make every assessment formative until students get it, and only then do they consider results for summative purposes related to accountability and grading.”
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Sal Khan On What Makes Good Online Learning
New York Times
-
8/13/20
“To ensure that kids keep progressing on both the academic and social-emotional fronts, it’s critical that educators provide live teacher-led video conference sessions. These need to optimize both academic coverage and social interaction. A baseline would be two or three 30-to-45 minute sessions in each of the core academic subjects each week… These sessions need to drive conversations between students and teachers and among the students themselves. Teachers should do cold calling to ensure students are on their toes and to pull them out of their screens. Teachers need to constantly ask students to work on questions together and share their thinking. Ideally, virtual breakout sessions will allow students to debate and help each other.”
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Screen Time Expert Calls Mea Culpa, Revises Recommendations Post Pandemic
New York Times
-
7/30/20
“Before the pandemic, I was a parenting expert… I told worried parents about the nine signs of tech overuse, like ditching sleep for screens. I advised them to write a “family media contract” and trust, but verify, their tweens’ doings online… Now, like Socrates, I know better. I know that I know nothing… I have never, ever, spent this much time with my children, or anyone’s children, as I have over the past four months during shelter-in-place orders. Nor have I contemplated working full time, while my husband also works full time, without sufficient child care… I want to take this moment to apologize to anyone who faced similar constraints before the pandemic and felt judged or shamed by my, or anyone’s, implication that they weren’t good parents because they weren’t successfully enforcing a “healthy balance” with screens, either for themselves or their children… But on reflection, some of the ideas and principles I used to intone so confidently have actually shown their mettle in new ways in this new world. I offer them to you now, humbly. I speak softly and do not carry a mic.”
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“Numb” - High Schooler Makes Extraordinary Short Film About Online School And Isolation
YouTube/Liv McNeil
-
6/17/20
“This is a mini film, Numb by me. I did this for a school project but I'm really happy with how it came out, so I'm posting it here.”
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“Relationships Are The Foundation Of Online Learning Design.”
Global Online Academy
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5/19/20
“When we started, we only had our intuition and the spirit of our founding schools to make relationships central to our pedagogy. Now, many years of student survey data have helped us refine that approach and design intentionally for relationships. We survey our students twice per semester. Our surveys have evolved as our program has, but we’ve always rooted student surveys in two critical questions about relationships: How connected do you feel to the teacher in this class? How well do people in your class understand you as a person?”
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A King’s Academy Teacher’s Guide To Transitioning From Onsite To Online Learning
King's Academy
-
4/5/20
“This guide was compiled by teachers at King’s Academy for the purpose of supporting our transition from onsite to online learning. King’s Academy has a wealth of teachers with experience in online teaching and learning — in online college consortia, with Global Online Academy, for education technology companies, and more. These teachers convened for a series of meetings to distill principles and practices that would be useful for teachers when transitioning in-person classes to an online setting.”
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“100 Worst Ed-Tech Debacles Of The Decade” (2010-2019)
Hack Education
-
12/31/19
“For the past ten years, I have written a lengthy year-end series, documenting some of the dominant narratives and trends in education technology. I think it is worthwhile, as the decade draws to a close, to review those stories and to see how much (or how little) things have changed.”
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Dan Meyer: How Tech Can Help Math Instruction
EdSurge
-
12/23/19
“Computers are great at storing, delivering and rewinding explanations, but that isn’t what math education needs. Math education needs visualizations that provoke students wonder mathematically. It needs a creative palette that enables students to express their mathematical ideas more fully. It needs to connect ideas and people together so that students and teachers can learn from each other’s mathematical creativity. Here’s happy news for math edtech entrepreneurs in the next decade. Computers are great at the right tasks too: visualization, creation, and connection. Let’s put them to work.”
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Still Trying To Figure Out What “ESports” Are? Here’s A Simple History
Quartz
-
9/11/19
“In 2018, 141 US colleges and universities offered varsity esports programs, 75 more than in 2017.”
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Understanding Linguistic Communities On The Internet. Fascinating.
Baffler
-
7/17/19
“By using informal writing to convey the regular dramas of human life, they also started reshaping informal writing into something that could deeply convey the full range of human emotions… This leads to miscommunication, of course, between generations of Internet People… How we talk online is determined by our linguistic community, which in turn is largely determined by where we were when we first encountered social media.”
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Virtual Reality Is Not Just A Techno Gimmick
Hechinger Report
-
7/4/19
“Unlike textbooks or video, virtual reality fully immerses users in a dynamic virtual world – and the headset device can be as simple as a mobile phone inserted into an inexpensive Google Cardboard viewer. Now, teachers around the world are using virtual reality to overcome barriers of physical distance and give their students a first-person view of the changes scientists are observing in remote areas. Many say these VR experiences are sparking new interest in global environmental issues.”
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“Why You Need A Network Of Low-Stakes, Casual Friendships”
New York Times
-
5/6/19
"The more weak ties a person has (neighbors, a barista at the neighborhood coffee shop or fellow members in a spin class), the happier they feel. Maintaining this network of acquaintances also contributes to one’s sense of belonging to a community, researchers found.”
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On Integrating Student Data, From Enrollment To Graduation
EdSurge
-
4/24/19
“Colleges and universities are increasingly turning to CRMs to track the life cycle of their engagement with students—from initial marketing outreach to financial aid, applications, enrollment, course registration, retention, alumni and donor relationships.”
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Sal Khan: Technological Literacy Is Necessary To Equalize Our World
USA Today
-
4/11/19
"Free mass public education empowered nearly everyone with the historically scarce skills of reading and numeracy. But in an economy defined by artificial intelligence and robotics, people will need much more than literacy and numeracy.”
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“I Moved A Drone With My Mind. Soon Your Students Will Too.”
Brookings
-
3/8/19
"Take a deep breath and try again,” said the young man, encouraging me in true Yoda fashion. “UP, UP, UP,” I thought, fixing my mind on the drove. And, amazingly, up it went. Hovering here and there and lurching around a bit, but most certainly skyward. After 30 seconds of amazing drone control, I’d had enough. I stopped repeating “up” but the drone kept flying. “Close your eyes” said the young man. I did and the drone immediately fell to the table. Afterward, one thing struck me. The future belongs not just to those who can write algorithms but to those who can control their thoughts.”
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"Tech Is Splitting the U.S. Work Force in Two” - An Excellent Read
New York Times
-
2/4/19
“A small group of well-educated professionals enjoys rising wages, while most workers toil in low-wage jobs with few chances to advance.”
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NPR Starts A Student Podcast Challenge - Deadline March 15
NPR
-
11/15/18
“We're inviting students around the country to create a podcast, then — with the help of a teacher — compete for a chance to win our grand prize and have your work appear on NPR.”
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Atul Gawande On How Technology Is Changing Doctors’ Work
New Yorker
-
11/12/18
“The story of modern medicine is the story of our human struggle with complexity. Technology will, without question, continually increase our ability to make diagnoses, to peer more deeply inside the body and the brain, to offer more treatments. It will help us document it all—but not necessarily to make sense of it all. Technology inevitably produces more noise and new uncertainties… We ultimately need systems that make the right care simpler for both patients and professionals, not more complicated. And they must do so in ways that strengthen our human connections, instead of weakening them.”
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A Critique Of The NYT’s Recent Pieces On Tech And Parenting
Columbia Journalism Review
-
11/5/18
“And here’s something that could have been especially relevant to these Times stories: there’s existing research on parental attitudes and successful parenting strategies regarding digital media. You can help your kids learn via digital media, experts say, and use it constructively. You can help manage and moderate their use.”
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A Really Good Summary Of The Research Regarding Note-Taking
Cult of Pedagogy
-
9/9/18
"So I’ve combed through about three decades’ worth of research, and I’m going to tell you what it says about best practices in note-taking. Although this is not an exhaustive summary, it hits on some of the most frequently debated questions on the subject.”
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7 Themes After Reviewing 25 Years Of Education Technology
EdTechie
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9/5/18
“Cycles of interest – there are some ideas that keep recurring in ed tech: the intelligent tutor, personalised learning, the end of universities. Audrey Watters refers to zombie ideas, which just won’t die. Partly this is a result of the aforementioned historical amnesia, and partly it is a result of techno-optimism (“This time it really will work”).”
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Turkle: Presence Matters. Machines Cannot Provide Artificial Intimacy.
New York Times
-
8/11/18
“Years ago I spoke with a 16-year-old girl who was considering the idea of having a computer companion in the future, and she described the upside to me. It’s not that the robot she’d imagined, a vastly more sophisticated Siri, was so inspiring. It’s that she’d already found people to be so disappointing. And now, for the first time, she explained me, people have options. Back then I thought her comments seemed prescient. Now I find them timely.”
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What Real-Life Live Streaming Tells Us About Isolated Teenage Boys
New Yorker
-
7/9/18
“I was going through a tough time, and watching his streams gave me an outlet outside of reality where I could just smile and not think about my problems.”
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SNHU Issues Digital Diplomas On Blockchain
Campus Technology
-
6/11/18
"Because Blockcert credentials can be linked to any blockchain… they can be read and verified anywhere in the world without the need to check with the original issuer.”
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AI Won’t Ever Learn Like People: A Deep Dive Into Early Childhood
Guardian
-
4/3/18
“These findings are clear: if you start on the decoding before you have an underlying understanding of story, experience, sensation and emotion, then you become a worse reader. And you like it less. Treat kids like robots during early learning and you put them off for life.”
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"12 Things Everyone Should Understand About Tech”
Medium
-
3/14/18
“If we understand that most in tech mean well, but lack the historic or cultural context to ensure that their impact is as good as their intentions, we can ensure that they get the knowledge they need to prevent harm before it happens.”
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Facebook Asks, Answers: “Is Spending Time On Social Media Bad For Us?”
Facebook
-
12/15/17
"In general, when people spend a lot of time passively consuming information — reading but not interacting with people — they report feeling worse afterward… On the other hand, actively interacting with people — especially sharing messages, posts and comments with close friends and reminiscing about past interactions — is linked to improvements in well-being… Simply broadcasting status updates wasn’t enough; people had to interact one-on-one with others in their network.”
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Have We Passed Peak Digital? Heading To A Healthier Balance?
New York Times
-
11/18/17
“Independent bookstores have been steadily expanding for several years. Vinyl records have witnessed a decade-long boom in popularity (more than 200,000 newly pressed records are sold each week in the United States), while sales of instant-film cameras, paper notebooks, board games and Broadway tickets are all growing again… We do not face a simple choice of digital or analog. That is the false logic of the binary code that computers are programmed with, which ignores the complexity of life in the real world. Instead, we are faced with a decision of how to strike the right balance between the two.”
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Nicholas Carr Reports On How Smartphones Impair Cognition
Rough Type
-
11/10/17
"A 2015 Journal of Experimental Psychology study found that when people’s phones beep or buzz while they’re in the middle of a challenging task, their focus wavers, and their work gets sloppier — whether they check the phone or not. Another 2015 study, appearing in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, showed that when people hear their phone ring but are unable to answer it, their blood pressure spikes, their pulse quickens, and their problem-solving skills decline.”
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Questioning Innovation and Change, And Who Defines the Narrative
Educause
-
10/23/17
"We are certainly obsessed with "innovation" — there's this rather nebulously defined yet insistent demand that we all somehow do more of it and sooner… We should question this myth of the speed of technological change and adoption (and by "myth" I don't mean "lie"; I mean "story that is unassailably true") if it's going to work us into a frenzy of bad decision-making… We have time — when it comes to technological change — to be thoughtful.
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Deep Data & Narrative About The Surge In Adolescent Anxiety
New York Times
-
10/11/17
"The more she looked for explanations, the more she kept returning to two seemingly unrelated trend lines — depression in teenagers and smartphone adoption. (There is significantly more data about depression than anxiety.) Since 2011, the trend lines increased at essentially the same rate. In her recent book “iGen,” and in an article in The Atlantic, Twenge highlights a number of studies exploring the connection between social media and unhappiness. “The use of social media and smartphones look culpable for the increase in teen mental-health issues,” she told me. “It’s enough for an arrest — and as we get more data, it might be enough for a conviction.””
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Silicon Valley Insiders Describe How Tech Hijacks Your Attention
Guardian
-
10/6/17
"Designers, programmers and tech entrepreneurs from across the world gathered at a conference centre on the shore of the San Francisco Bay. They had each paid up to $1,700 to learn how to manipulate people into habitual use of their products, on a course curated by conference organiser Nir Eyal… [Attendees] might have been surprised when Eyal walked on stage to announce that this year’s keynote speech was about “something a little different”. He wanted to address the growing concern that technological manipulation was somehow harmful or immoral.”
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A Good Discussion About Personalized Learning & Tech In Schools
EdSurge
-
9/12/17
"And so, one of the benefits of having a teacher who has a more global view of the subject is that they can push you and direct you in ways that keep your brain in the red zone. That's one aspect I think where teachers are super valuable. I'm not sure it's even possible for students to provoke themselves in the ways that teachers can provoke those students.”
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Stunning Data On The Effects Of The Smart Phone On Kids
Atlantic
-
9/1/17
"The Monitoring the Future survey, funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse and designed to be nationally representative, has asked 12th-graders more than 1,000 questions every year since 1975 and queried eighth- and 10th-graders since 1991. The survey asks teens how happy they are and also how much of their leisure time they spend on various activities, including nonscreen activities such as in-person social interaction and exercise, and, in recent years, screen activities such as using social media, texting, and browsing the web.”
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Recommendations For Making Good Ed Tech Decisions: Big Survey
The 74 Million
-
7/10/17
"For EdTech decision-makers: 1) Beware of living in an echo-chamber: talk to people outside of higher education. 2) Make sure decisions are being led by clearly identifiable pedagogical needs rather than simply by what technology is out there. 3) Involve stakeholders, including faculty, staff, and students early in the decision-making process to build buy-in and avoid bumpy rollouts. This may include using creative ways of understanding faculty challenges.”
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Designer Of “Oregon Trail” Describes The Origin Of The Game
Medium
-
6/28/17
"I felt that the best way to build an innovative but successful design was to start with an ambitious set of new ideas, and then to gradually build and test these ideas through successive refinement — first by creating a simple prototype, and then by building up the real product one aspect at a time. At each step of the process we should evaluate where we are, compared to where we want to be, and then prioritize what to do next. Some of our cherished ideas would have to be shed along the way, but by constantly prioritizing and improving, we would achieve a successful result in the end.”
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"Before the Internet”: Delightful Nostalgia [Humor, Kind Of]
New Yorker
-
6/26/17
"Before the Internet, you’d have yawning summer afternoons when you’d flop down on one couch, then flop down on another, then decide to craft a fake F.B.I. card. You’d get some paper from your dad’s office, copy the F.B.I. logo and your signature, laminate it with Scotch tape, put it in your wallet, take it out of your wallet, look at it, then put it back in your wallet with a secretive smile.”
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Extraordinary: “A Sociology Of The Smartphone”
Longreads
-
6/13/17
"Equipped with these devices, we’re both here and somewhere else at the same time, joined to everything at once yet never fully anywhere at all. The individual networked in this way is no longer the autonomous subject enshrined in liberal theory, not precisely. Our very selfhood is smeared out across a global mesh of nodes and links; all the aspects of our personality we think of as constituting who we are—our tastes, preferences, capabilities, desires—we owe to the fact of our connection with that mesh, and the selves and distant resources to which it binds us. How could this do anything but engender a new kind of subjectivity?”
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Harvard Rescinds At Least Ten Acceptances For Obscene Memes
Crimson
-
6/4/17
"The description for the official Facebook group for the Class of 2021, set up and maintained by the Admissions Office, disclaims all administrative responsibility for “unofficial groups” and warns members their admissions offers can be rescinded under specific circumstances. “As a reminder, Harvard College reserves the right to withdraw an offer of admission under various conditions including if an admitted student engages in behavior that brings into question his or her honesty, maturity, or moral character,” the description reads.”
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We Can No Longer Singletask, And We Are Interrupting Ourselves
Nautilus
-
5/25/17
"In fact, of the approximately 86 daily changes in an employee’s work activity, the workers themselves generated 65 of them internally, with the vast majority involving “checking in” with no obvious external alert or notification. Even without the “You’ve Got Mail” notification, these workers checked their email anyway and continued to check other sources of electronic communication and information without being externally directed to do so.”
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On The Growth Of Code-Free Computer Science Principles Courses
New York Times
-
4/4/17
"Just as children are drilled on the scientific method — turn observations into a hypothesis, design a control group, do an experiment to test your theory — the basics of working with computers is being cast as a teachable blueprint.”
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Audrey Watters And The History Of “The Future Of Education”
Hack Education
-
4/3/17
"We must be more critical about the stories we tell and we’re told about the future of education. Indeed, we need to look at histories of the future and ask why certain people have wanted the future to take a certain shape, why certain technologies (and their stories) have been so compelling.”
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Use Lego Kits To Create Research Lab Equipment
Stanford
-
3/21/17
"Stanford bioengineers have shown how an off-the shelf kit can be modified to create robotic systems capable of transferring precise amounts of fluids between flasks, test tubes and experimental dishes. By combining the Lego Mindstorms robotics kit with a cheap and easy-to-find plastic syringe, the researchers created a set of liquid-handling robots that approach the performance of the far more costly automation systems found at universities and biotech labs.”
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"Are Teenagers Replacing Drugs With Smartphones?”
New York Times
-
3/13/17
"The trend has been building for a decade, with no clear understanding as to why. Some experts theorize that falling cigarette-smoking rates are cutting into a key gateway to drugs, or that antidrug education campaigns, long a largely failed enterprise, have finally taken hold. But researchers are starting to ponder an intriguing question: Are teenagers using drugs less in part because they are constantly stimulated and entertained by their computers and phones?”
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Re-understanding Pedagogy In An Age Of Digital Distraction
Chronicle of Higher Education
-
3/13/17
"When I walked out of class after discovering Kate’s surreptitious phone scanning, the questions I asked myself were about her, or about my ability to control her behavior: Why can’t she focus in class? How can I keep students away from their distracting devices in class? But when I reconsidered the experience through the lens provided by Gazzaley and Rosen, a new set of questions began to emerge: What goal had I established for Kate’s learning that day? How had I created an environment that supported her ability to achieve that goal? And perhaps most important — assuming that the class had a learning goal that mattered for her — did she know about it?”
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Micro-Masters Programs Grow To 16 Universities
EdX
-
2/28/17
"With MicroMasters programs, we are helping to bridge the knowledge gap between higher education and the workplace by offering content and credentials in the most in-demand fields and skills needed for success in today’s rapidly-evolving and tech-driven world. These credit-eligible, career-relevant programs are free to try, and can help advance careers and offer a pathway to an accelerated Master’s program. Top employers, including industry-leading companies like IBM, PWC, Hootsuite, Bloomberg, Fidelity and more, recognize MicroMasters programs for real-time, real-world relevancy.”
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Why Many Artists And Creative Companies Are Going Analog
New York Review of Books
-
2/9/17
"Creativity and innovation are driven by imagination, and imagination withers when it is standardized, which is exactly what digital technology requires—codifying everything into 1s and 0s, within the accepted limits of software… Like all respectable commentators, Sax takes pains to assure us that he’s not a Luddite; the correct and responsible deity is Balance, blandest of goddesses. And it is at least possible that digital technology is reaching a high-water mark and might before long begin to recede to a more manageable level, possible that after our initial intoxication we can come down from our binge and learn to handle this new drink responsibly.”
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The Age Of Algorithms: A Thorough List Of Pros And Cons
Pew Internet
-
2/8/17
"To illuminate current attitudes about the potential impacts of algorithms in the next decade, Pew Research Center and Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center conducted a large-scale canvassing of technology experts, scholars, corporate practitioners and government leaders. Some 1,302 responded to this question about what will happen in the next decade: Will the net overall effect of algorithms be positive for individuals and society or negative for individuals and society?”
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Meditation On Reclaiming One’s Attention From Mobile Technology
BackChannel
-
1/13/17
"There is a qualitative and quantitative difference between a day that begins with a little exercise, a book, meditation, a good meal, a thoughtful walk, and the start of a day that begins with a smartphone in bed.”
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Danah Boyd: Media Literacy Alone Isn’t The Solution
Points
-
1/5/17
"In the United States, we’re moving towards tribalism, and we’re undoing the social fabric of our country through polarization, distrust, and self-segregation… We cannot fall back on standard educational approaches because the societal context has shifted. We also cannot simply assume that information intermediaries can fix the problem for us, whether they be traditional news media or social media. We need to get creative and build the social infrastructure necessary for people to meaningfully and substantively engage across existing structural lines.
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What Does “Personalization” Really Mean, Anyway?
Hack Education
-
12/19/16
"Many of the discussions about “personalized learning” insist that technology is necessary for “personalization,” often invoking stereotypes of whole class instruction and denying the myriad of ways that teachers have long tailored what they do in the classroom to the individual students in it. Teachers look for interpersonal cues; they walk around the classroom and check on students’ progress; they adjust their lessons and their assignments in both subtle and conspicuous ways. In other words, “personalization” need not rely on technology or on data-mining; it does, however, demand that teachers attend to students’ needs and to students’ interests.”
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The Story Of How A.I. Is Coming To Dominate Technology
New York Times
-
12/14/16
“It’s an uncommon story in many ways, not least of all because it defies many of the Silicon Valley stereotypes we’ve grown accustomed to. It does not feature people who think that everything will be unrecognizably different tomorrow or the next day because of some restless tinkerer in his garage. It is neither a story about people who think technology will solve all our problems nor one about people who think technology is ineluctably bound to create apocalyptic new ones. It is not about disruption, at least not in the way that word tends to be used. It is, in fact, three overlapping stories that converge in Google Translate’s successful metamorphosis to A.I. — a technical story, an institutional story and a story about the evolution of ideas.”
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Embrace Technology’s Opportunity; Resist Its Diminishment Of Humanity
Guardian
-
12/3/16
"Most of our communication technologies began as substitutes for an impossible activity. We couldn’t always see one another face to face, so the telephone made it possible to keep in touch at a distance… Online communication originated as a substitute for telephonic communication, which was considered, for whatever reasons, too burdensome or inconvenient. And then texting, which facilitated yet faster and more mobile messaging. These inventions were not created to be improvements on face-to-face communication, but a declension of acceptable, if diminished, substitutes for it. But then a funny thing happened: we began to prefer the diminished substitutes.”
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Audrey Watters: 2016 As A Year Of Tragedy And Wishful Thinking
Hack Education
-
12/1/16
"Perhaps it’s time to ask why – why this is the ritual and the story that education continues to turn to? …Why are we in this fog of educational make-believe? Why are we so wrapped up in the magical thinking and wishful thinking of education technology? What do we hope the practices of ed-tech will deliver, will relieve? What are we hoping to preserve? What are we hoping to absolve? What might we be afraid to admit has died? Why is wishful thinking, in and through and with education technology, a balm for so many of us? At what point should we just let go…"
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Analytics Literacy: You Can’t Apply Data If You Don’t Really Understand It.
e-Literate
-
11/19/16
"Right now, the educational technology market is blithely barreling down the road of developing sexy, sophisticated algorithms… But “sophisticated” also means “complex.” If we, as a culture, lack the basic literacy to have clear intuitions about what “a 70% chance” means, then how likely is it that we won’t have shocks that cause us to distrust our learning analytics because we didn’t understand their assumptions and limitations?”
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Sherry Turkle Pinpoints The Challenge Of Email/Tech In Education
EdSurge
-
10/13/16
"My students don't want to come to office hours anymore. They would prefer to send me an email and have me send them an email back because they have a fantasy that they can send me a perfect email… and that I will send them their exact perfect answer back. This does a few things. I think it reveals the way in which we try to turn conversations into transactions in digital culture … What I'm arguing in the book is that it's not the presence of a laptop in a class that needs to be looked at and needs to be perhaps critiqued, but really the kind of digital culture that we're creating where we're not valuing conversation enough and not valuing relationships enough, and we tend to look at each other as apps in a more transactional way…
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Meditation on Technology, Spirituality, And the Modern Attention Span
New York Magazine
-
9/18/16
"Since the invention of the printing press, every new revolution in information technology has prompted apocalyptic fears. From the panic that easy access to the vernacular English Bible would destroy Christian orthodoxy all the way to the revulsion, in the 1950s, at the barbaric young medium of television, cultural critics have moaned and wailed at every turn. Each shift represented a further fracturing of attention… And yet society has always managed to adapt and adjust, without obvious damage, and with some more-than-obvious progress. So it’s perhaps too easy to view this new era of mass distraction as something newly dystopian. But it sure does represent a huge leap from even the very recent past. The data bewilder.”
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2016 Horizon Report For K-12 Education
New Media Consortium
-
9/13/16
"What is on the five-year horizon for K-12 schools worldwide? Which trends and technologies will drive educational change? What are the challenges that we consider solvable or difficult to overcome, and how can we strategize effective solutions? These questions and similar inquiries regarding technology adoption and transforming teaching and learning steered the collaborative research and discussions of a body of 59 experts to produce the …. Horizon Report: 2016 K-12 Edition.”
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Nicholas Carr Returns. This Time It’s Technology, Not Just The Internet
Aeon
-
8/26/16
"What I want from technology is not a new world. What I want from technology are tools for exploring and enjoying the world that is – the world that comes to us thick with ‘things counter, original, spare, strange’, as Gerard Manley Hopkins once described it. We might all live in Silicon Valley now, but we can still act and think as exiles. We can still aspire to be what Seamus Heaney, in his poem ‘Exposure’, called inner émigrés.”
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George Siemens: Tech Should Make Us Better People, Not Prey On Us
EdSurge
-
8/11/16
"“Our technology is our ideology,” Siemens says. He’s worried that, rather than advancing our human potential, many edtech companies and universities are perpetuating the status quo. While machine learning and automation are obviating the need for learners to memorize content and develop routine skills, current edtech solutions still focus on helping learners develop these capabilities, he says. Instead, they should drive students to hone their uniquely human traits.”
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Taking Tests On Different Devices Can Influence Results
EdWeek
-
7/20/16
"Some test questions are likely harder to answer on tablets than on laptop and desktop computers, presenting states and districts with a new challenge as they move to widespread online assessments. Analyses by test providers and other organizations have pointed to evidence of small but significant "device effects" for tests administered in some grades and subjects and on certain types of assessment items.”
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What Is Adaptive Learning? EdSurge Goes Deep On The Question
EdSurge
-
5/10/16
"“Adaptive learning” is a popular edtech buzzword, used by curriculum and learning management systems alike. Enthusiasts promise this technology has the ability to make educational experiences more personal, efficient and scalable. Yet, there’s a big problem. There’s very little clarity around what this technology does, doesn’t do and how it actually works.”
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Online TA Turns Out To Be A Computer… Welcome, Our AI Overlords
Wall Street Journal
-
5/6/16
"Last year, a team of Georgia Tech researchers began creating Ms. Watson by poring through nearly 40,000 postings on a discussion forum known as “Piazza” and training her to answer related questions based on prior responses. By late March, she began posting responses live.”
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Does Smartphone Use Affect Critical Thinking? The Research Begins…
Daniel Willingham
-
4/25/16
"Researchers at University of Waterloo conducted three studies examining the association between self-reported smartphone use and performance on questions like the ball-and-bat problem. They separated respondents into low- medium- and high-smartphone usage groups. They found no difference between the low and medium groups, but the high usage group was less accurate on the analytic problems.”
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Hello, Future: Univ. of Florida Students Race Mind-Controlled Drones.
Associated Press
-
4/22/16
“The competition — billed as the world's first drone race involving a brain-controlled interface — involved 16 pilots using willpower to drive drones through a 10-yard dash over an indoor basketball court at the University of Florida this past weekend.”
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Meditation On How Technology Changes Adolescence (via N. Dakota)
BackChannel
-
4/19/16
"Huddled into icy plains of North Dakota, Napoleon is essentially the same place it was 25 years ago. And by most accounts, 50 and 75 years ago. The demographics and economics are static. Most of my high school classmates have taken over their family farms, tilling and planting the land of their parents’ parents’ parents. The same people drive the same block of Main Street to the same three-lane grocery store owned by the same family. The same houses have fresh coats of paint, but the grain elevator still towers over all else… Napoleon would be trapped in the amber of time, in a big glass case, if not for one thing: Access to information.”
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New To Minecraft? This Is Your In Depth Introduction
New York Times
-
4/14/16
"Minecraft is thus an almost perfect game for our current educational moment, in which policy makers are eager to increase kids’ interest in the “STEM” disciplines — science, technology, engineering and math. Schools and governments have spent millions on “let’s get kids coding” initiatives, yet it may well be that Minecraft’s impact will be greater. This is particularly striking given that the game was not designed with any educational purpose in mind.”
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Justin Reich On Connected Learning: The 21st Century Harkness
EdWeek
-
4/6/16
"In connected courses, we solve the coordination problem with a different approach: we give everyone their own spaces online to produce learning materials--blogs, Twitter feeds, websites, web domains, etc.--and then we use technology to make a copy of everything that students do and aggregate those copies. Students own their own means of production, and the purpose of technology is to aggregate what students choose to share.”
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What Happens When History Is Recorded Digitally?
Washington Post
-
3/25/16
"We’re now in the midst of the most far-reaching shift in media ever, as we rush to replace all manner of physical media with digital alternatives. The benefits are compelling. We’ve gained instant access to a seemingly infinite store of information. But there are losses, too. “Digital memory is ubiquitous yet unimaginably fragile,” Rumsey reports, “limitless in scope yet inherently unstable.” All media are subject to decay, of course. Clay cracks, paper crumbles. What’s different now is that our cultural memory is embedded in a complex and ever-shifting system of technologies. Any change in the system can render the record unreadable.”
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Alfie Kohn Asks The Right Questions About Tech In Education
EdSurge
-
3/16/16
"We can’t answer the question “Is tech useful in schools?” until we’ve grappled with a deeper question: “What kinds of learning should be taking place in those schools?” If we favor an approach by which students actively construct meaning, an interactive process that involves a deep understanding of ideas and emerges from the interests and questions of the learners themselves, well, then we’d be open to the kinds of technology that truly support this kind of inquiry. Show me something that helps kids create, design, produce, construct—and I’m on board.”
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“Screenagers” - A Documentary About Kids And Screens
New York Post
-
3/12/16
"I learned that you spend on average 6.5 hours a day looking at screens. As a doctor, I decided I needed to learn the impact of all this screen time on kids. And as a mom, I needed to know what to do.”
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Lessons From Teaching Entrepreneurship At Stanford
Steve Blank
-
3/11/16
"We designed our class to do something different. We wanted the teams to tell the story of their journey, sharing with us their “Lessons Learned from our Customers”. They needed to show what they learned and how they learned it after speaking to 100+customers, using the language of class… The focus of their presentations is on how they gathered evidence and how it impacted the understanding of their business models.”
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On The Sudden State Of Digital Dependency
New York Review of Books
-
2/25/16
"Our transformation into device people has happened with unprecedented suddenness. The first touchscreen-operated iPhones went on sale in June 2007, followed by the first Android-powered phones the following year. Smartphones went from 10 percent to 40 percent market penetration faster than any other consumer technology in history. In the United States, adoption hit 50 percent only three years ago. Yet today, not carrying a smartphone indicates eccentricity, social marginalization, or old age.”
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A Literary (Not Social Science) Look At The Effect Of Mobile Tech
Times Literary Supplement
-
12/23/15
"While I like FaceTime and Skype, I prefer the faceless phone for important, emotional discussions, and Scott showed me why I feel that phone calls are more intimate. A phone silence, he observes, ‘is a thick rope tying two speakers together in the private void of their suspended conversation. This binding may be unpleasant and to be avoided, but it isn’t as estranging as its visual counterpart . . . silence can’t cross the membrane of the computer screen as it can uncoil down phone lines’.”
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5-Part Conversation Between Riverdale and AltSchool
Medium
-
12/5/15
"It seems that schools are expected to position themselves as either traditional — “chalk and talk,” uniforms, a belief in canonical knowledge, a culture of discipline and compliance, or progressive — liberal, with more of a constructivist approach to teaching and learning, and a focus on the development of the individual building off his or her strengths rather than trying to mold children into a certain ideal mix of intellectual and personal capacities. More and more, I find this binary both idiotic and not very helpful.”
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How Can Technology Solutions Help Those Who Need Them Most?
EdTechResearcher
-
12/4/15
"In most of the research on this topic, affluent students use technology for more creative purposes with more adult supervision, while less affluent students use technology for repetitive drill and practice without the same level of guidance… It doesn’t have to be this way.”
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Coding Is Compulsory In The UK. Is This The Right Approach?
Guardian
-
12/3/15
"Last year, Britain became the first G7 country to introduce compulsory computer science on the school curriculum for all children aged five to 16. By the age of seven, all children will now be expected to be capable of writing and debugging a simple program… Coding lessons in school will not turn every child into a programmer. But the idea behind the new government initiatives is that new generations of children will not have to struggle through bootcamps in midlife, because those with an aptitude for coding will have discovered it at an early stage. And those who are less talented, it is thought, will at least gain an understanding of the digital world in which they now live.”
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Five Skills Underlying Tech/CompSci Education For Kids
Forbes
-
10/31/15
“I think about [my kids’] digital futures in precisely the same way that I believe all schools should think about educating our children: equip young people with technological agency; make sure they know how to apply their critical thinking, entrepreneurial, creative, and social skills by wielding digital tools. To do so, all kids will need an introduction to coding—not so that they are able to code, but rather so that they are capable of truly grasping these five fundamentals…”
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Results From Pew’s Teens, Technology, And Romance Focus Groups
Pew Internet
-
10/11/15
“Many teens in our focus groups described flirting with a crush by liking their photos or posting a comment on their social media profile. These interactions have their own unwritten – but widely understood – rules. Everything from one’s choice of emoji to the spelling of the word “hey” can carry a deeper meaning.”
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The Best Research/Editorial Yet On How Phones Have Changed Us
New York Times
-
9/27/15
"Studies of conversation both in the laboratory and in natural settings show that when two people are talking, the mere presence of a phone on a table between them or in the periphery of their vision changes both what they talk about and the degree of connection they feel. People keep the conversation on topics where they won’t mind being interrupted. They don’t feel as invested in each other. Even a silent phone disconnects us… We face a significant choice. It is not about giving up our phones but about using them with greater intention. Conversation is there for us to reclaim. For the failing connections of our digital world, it is the talking cure.”
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Universities Are Spinning Internal Tech Into Commercial Products
e-Literate
-
9/18/15
"Are these efforts paving the way for universities who know their own business to create profitable ed tech and services offerings based on unique insights into how schools really work, or are they vehicles for star-struck administrators seeing glory and easy revenues? Or both? Only time will tell, but I would expect to see more announcements of a similar nature over the next year or two.”
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OECD Report On Whether Tech Helps Learning. (Yikes.)
Hack Education
-
9/17/15
"Even where computers are used in the classroom, their impact on student performance is mixed at best. Students who use computers moderately at school tend to have somewhat better learning outcomes than students who use computers rarely. But students who use computers very frequently at school do a lot worse in most learning outcomes, even after accounting for social background and student demographics.”
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Technophile Rejects Today’s Ed Tech, But Still Has Hope
ELearnSpace
-
9/9/15
“Both Udacity and Knewton require the human, the learner, to become a technology, to become a component within their well-architected software system. Sit and click. Sit and click. So much of learning involves decision making, developing meta-cognitive skills, exploring, finding passion, taking peripheral paths. Automation treats the person as an object to which things are done. There is no reason to think, no reason to go through the valuable confusion process of learning, no need to be a human. Simply consume. Simply consume. Click and be knowledgeable.”
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World Economic Forum Surveys Tipping Points In Global Tech
World Economic Forum
-
9/1/15
"The World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council… aims to help the broader society navigate the transition to the future digital and hyperconnected world by explaining the societal impacts generated by major technology trends and the new business models in plain language, and through engaging, accessible media. This report is the first of its kind – one aimed at trying to capture some of the deep shifts occurring in society as a result of software and services, and to encourage everyone to think about the impact of these changes on our society and how to prepare for the changes ahead.
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The Importance Of Keeping A Critical Lens With Edtech
Hack Education
-
8/15/15
“Why are schools now buying new hardware and software? Try again if your answer is “because the tech is so good.” A technocentric response points our attention to the technology itself – new tools, data, devices, apps, broadband, the cloud – as though these are context-free. Computer criticism, as outlined by Papert, demands we look more closely instead at policies, profits, politics, practices, power.”
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Blended Learning 2.0: After the Honeymoon
EdSurge
-
8/3/15
"These schools are moving out of the “getting-the-technology-to-work” phase and beginning to think deeply about the best ways to support student achievement. They are running their own internal evaluations of edtech effectiveness, training teachers on emerging best practices, exploring better ways to put data in the hands of teachers and students, and consolidating all their learnings to iterate on existing school designs or create new ones.”
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3D Printing Reaches “Tipping Point” In Industry
Harvard Business Review
-
7/21/15
"Surveys indicate that more than 30 percent of the top 300 largest global brands are now using or evaluating 3D printing (often with printing technology in-house) whether for prototyping and other innovation projects or in actual production of what they sell. Over 200 universities and colleges already offer 3D coursework in their curricula – covering aspects of not only 3D printing but also 3D scanning and design.”
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"Why Technology Alone Won’t Fix Schools”
Atlantic
-
6/3/15
“Technology’s primary effect is to amplify human forces, so in education, technologies amplify whatever pedagogical capacity is already there… And what about computers outside of school? What happens when children are left to learn on their own with digital gadgets, as so many tech advocates insist we should do? Here technology amplifies the children’s propensities.”
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The New York Times Uses Great Math Pedagogy
Dy/dan
-
6/1/15
“The Times webpage can progressively disclose the answer graph, putting up a wall until you commit to a sketch… This isn’t just great digital pedagogy, it’s great pedagogy.”
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SNHU’s Paul LeBlanc On Competency-Based Learning (and More)
Chronicle of Higher Education
-
5/27/15
“The credit hour is very good at telling us how long people have sat, not so good at telling us what they've actually learned. And in that model, time is pretty fixed… What they learn is variable… You flip that in a competency-based model. What happens is that learning becomes fixed and non-negotiable, and time becomes the variable.”
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Researcher Goes To Japan, Finds Chalkboards, Is Shocked
Larry Cuban
-
4/26/15
"The focus in Japanese education is not on how many innovations they rush to implement or how many new gadgets students get to use. Instead, educators focus on collecting evidence of effectiveness and leveraging technology resources (whether it’s a chalkboard or a smartboard) with purpose and intentionality to enhance and facilitate teaching and learning opportunities. As stated in a recent Japanese publication from the Future Schools Project, ‘Traditional education will be valued while those parts of it that should be extended, broadened, or deepened will evolve significantly.’”
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“Distraction Is A Kind Of Obesity Of The Mind”
Guardian
-
4/12/15
"We need a kind of “attentional commons”: a regulation of noise and distraction in public space, and government intervention in areas like gambling, where some people are being manipulated beyond their reasonable ability to cope. More importantly, though, Crawford advocates skilled practices as a way of engaging with the world in a more satisfying way. He gives the examples of a cook, an ice-hockey player and a motorbike racer as people whose roles force them to deal with material reality. No representation can replicate the feel of the puck on ice or gravel under your tyres at high speed. Each relies on good judgment of a complicated subject and the ability to manage the presence of others in the same space.”
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Understanding Loneliness In A Digital Age
Guardian
-
4/1/15
"Hidden behind a computer screen, the lonely person has control. They can search for company without the danger of being revealed or found wanting. They can reach out or they can hide; they can lurk and they can show themselves, safe from the humiliation of face-to-face rejection… But now a problem arises, for the contact this produces is not the same thing as intimacy. Curating a perfected self might win followers or Facebook friends, but it will not necessarily cure loneliness, since the cure for loneliness is not being looked at, but being seen and accepted as a whole person – ugly, unhappy and awkward, as well as radiant and selfie-ready.”
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John Seely Brown’s Essay On Digital Age Entrepreneurial Learning
John Seely Brown
-
3/22/15
"This does not mean how to become an entrepreneur. The entrepreneurial learner is constantly looking for new ways, new resources, new peers and potential mentors to learn new things.”
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Attention, Technology, and Fear Of Missing Out
Pacific Standard
-
1/29/15
"Reading a book is like carrying on a prolonged conversation with one individual writer, but the temptation on the other side of the screen is an ongoing conversation with everyone at once, as if all of your friends were hanging out in the same room in which you’re trying to peacefully read the latest dense Great American Novel.”
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We Are Disrupted. (It’s True.) But Humanism Is Not Obsolete.
New York Times
-
1/7/15
"Soon all the collections in all the libraries and all the archives in the world will be available to everyone with a screen. Who would not welcome such a vast enfranchisement? But universal accessibility is not the end of the story, it is the beginning. The humanistic methods that were practiced before digitalization will be even more urgent after digitalization, because we will need help in navigating the unprecedented welter… Patterns that are revealed by searches will not identify their own causes and reasons. The new order will not relieve us of the old burdens, and the old pleasures, of erudition and interpretation.”
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Ed-Tech Enthusiasts Re-Examine What Works
Hack Education
-
12/29/14
“My rules have crumbled, as has my interest – or hell, even belief – in ed-tech startups. Despite the mythology of “disruptive innovation,” the most innovative initiatives in education technology aren’t coming from startups. They aren’t incubated in Silicon Valley. They don’t emerge from the tech industry. In fact, many of the ed-tech startup ideas that are developed there are at best laughable, at worst horrifying.”
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Astronaut On Space Station Needs A Wrench, So He Prints One
IFL Science
-
12/19/14
“‘The socket wrench we just manufactured is the first object we designed on the ground and sent digitally to space, on the fly,’ he adds. It’s a lot faster to send data wirelessly on demand than to wait for a physical object to arrive via rockets, which can take months or even years.“
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Teachers Are Among The Biggest Consumers of MOOCs
MIT Technology Review
-
12/15/14
“Indeed, for all the focus on the role of MOOCs in higher education, they might have a significant role to play in high schools and below. Teachers are already a big audience (a study of 11 MOOCs offered by MIT last spring found that nearly 28 percent of enrollees were former or active teachers).”
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What Technology Will and Won’t Do To Schools
NAIS
-
9/18/14
“As educators, we increasingly recognize that our institutions are not immune to the technological forces that have influenced almost every other industry that serves us... we are more likely to think that technology means the end of our schools and all the characteristics of them that we hold dear. This will likely not be the case.”
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3 Lessons Learned from the History of Ed Tech
EdWeek
-
9/14/14
“Second, when innovative practices do emerge, they are much more likely to emerge in places serving affluent students. Low income students are much more likely to experience technology as a tool for drill and remediation, and wealthier students are more likely to experience technology as a tool for creation and innovation.”
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How Young Americans Use the Library Today
Pew Research
-
9/10/14
“This report pulls together several years of research into the role of libraries in the lives of Americans and their communities with a special focus on Millennials, a key stakeholder group affecting the future of communities, libraries, book publishers and media makers of all kinds, as well as the tone of the broader culture.”
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3 Factors For Using Tech Successfully in Schools
Stanford
-
9/10/14
“‘When given access to appropriate technology used in thoughtful ways, all students—regardless of their respective backgrounds—can make substantial gains in learning and technological readiness,’ said Darling-Hammond.”
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Professor Bans Emails... And Receives Better Reviews from Students
Inside Higher Ed
-
8/27/14
“You should only use email as a tool to set up a one-on-one meeting with me if office hours conflict with your schedule. Use the subject line ‘Meeting request.’ Emails sent for any other reason will not be considered or acknowledged. I strongly encourage you to ask questions about the syllabus and assignments during class time... Our conversations should take place in person or over the phone rather than via email, thus allowing us to get to know each other better and fostering a more collegial learning atmosphere.”
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Study Identifies Six Stressors for Teens Regarding Digital Life
Harvard
-
8/1/14
“Researchers sorted the stresses into two groups: Type 1 stressors include experiences such as receiving a barrage of personal attacks, being impersonated, or being outed, shamed, or humiliated publicly. Type 2 stressors involve a controlling boyfriend, girlfriend, or friend constantly breaking into one’s social-media accounts to read digital communications with others; feeling smothered by the quantity of digital communications from friends; and feeling pressure to reveal private information.”
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San Jose Students Petition and Crowdfund for CompSci Classes
San Jose Mercury News
-
7/21/14
“Students aren't waiting for the system to catch up. At Walnut Creek's Northgate, students not only petitioned for a coding class, but also formed a science-technology-math-engineering club, then built a pipeline of future coders by engaging elementary and special education classes in fun projects.”
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Should Students Have Laptops in Class?
Slate
-
6/15/14
“Students who lack the self-discipline (or handwriting ability) to look away from the screen and take paper notes will not learn as much, or as well, in college. But that’s their responsibility. What’s going to happen when (if) all these laptop-policed students get jobs?”
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A Fresh Take on the Gates Foundation Survey of 3,000 Teachers
Forbes
-
4/22/14
"While I think their report suffers from a misguided faith in the power of revolution, rejuvenation, disruption and innovation, there are still quite a few important take aways. Here are the five findings that are most interesting to me..."
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The Emotional Consequences of Parents Using Smartphones
NPR
-
4/21/14
“Steiner-Adair interviewed 1,000 children between the ages of 4 and 18, asking them about their parents' use of mobile devices. The language that came up over and over and over again, she says, was "sad, mad, angry and lonely."”
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Research Finds Screen-Reading Diminishes Comprehension
Washington Post
-
4/6/14
"With so much information, hyperlinked text, videos alongside words and interactivity everywhere, our brains form shortcuts to deal with it all — scanning, searching for key words, scrolling up and down quickly. This is nonlinear reading, and it has been documented in academic studies. Some researchers believe that for many people, this style of reading is beginning to invade when dealing with other mediums as well."
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Does the EdTech Push Really Help Teach English?
New York Times
-
3/3/14
“Being able to poke at words on screen and have them spin out videos for us could be compelling in the short term.... but I’m not sure it’s intellectually fruitful.”
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Should We Build our Curricula Around What Computers Can’t Do?
New York Times
-
2/3/14
“The role of the human is not to be dispassionate, depersonalized or neutral. It is precisely the emotive traits that are rewarded: the voracious lust for understanding, the enthusiasm for work, the ability to grasp the gist, the empathetic sensitivity to what will attract and linger in the mind.”
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Smart (and Dumb) Tech: Calculators That Makes You Guess, et al.
Brilliant Blog
-
1/27/14
“You use [the QAMA calculator] just like a regular calculator, plugging in the numbers of the problem you want to solve - but QAMA won’t give you the answer until you provide an accurate estimate of what that answer will be.”
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How Do You Increase Productivity and Lower Stress? Stop Emailing.
New York Times
-
1/19/14
“Ms Mark’s research has found that people who stopped using email at work felt less stress and were more focused and productive.”
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How Do You Increase Productivity and Lower Stress? Stop Emailing.
New York Times
-
1/19/14
“Ms Mark’s research has found that people who stopped using email at work felt less stress and were more focused and productive.”
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Evolution of Education Will Come From Blending Old and New
Chronicle of Higher Education
-
1/13/14
“High-impact practices like service learning, research with faculty members, and capstone projects that are a cornerstone of residential learning and have been shown to improve student learning, none of those practices are incorporated into MOOCs right now. To transform higher education for the next generation, we need to better blend game-changing innovations with one another, and with traditional methods.”
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Three Roles Teachers Must Play in the Coming Years
WBUR
-
1/9/14
“In the Khan Academy era, content expertise can be outsourced to machines, but moral leadership cannot.”
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EdX and MIT’s Bold New Vision for the Future of College
Inside Higher Ed
-
11/25/13
“Agarwal said he expects MIT will move away from the traditional four-year-on-campus experience.”
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MIT Makes 3D Touchscreens. Hello, Tool of the Future!
Fast Company
-
11/12/13
“Whatever it ends up looking like, the UI of the future won’t be made of just pixels.”