If you have read recent posts, you will know I have connected with a book written before I was born about the nature of science. In this final post, I continue to reflect on the fact that science depends on two types of knowledge, but that is often ignored in most descriptions of science. Nash Read More
Author: Gary Ackerman
A More Accurate View of Science
Science is a relatively recent human endeavor. I will state I am unequivocally a fan of science. I studied it seriously as an undergraduate student and investigated various methods of doing it as graduate student. I am ashamed that we have political leaders who bash science, the people who do it, and the lessons we Read More
Threshold of Impressionability
I’m always interested in the idea of becoming educated. What exactly happens when we have truly learned something? This idea is opposed by other things that we conflate with learning. Inert learning is the opposite of what is learning to me, and we are all familiar with this as we forget what was on the Read More
The (Troubling) Paradox of Imagination and Education
Imagination is the ability to create “things” when they don’t exist. We envy imagination amongst children, and imaginative play is an activity that early childhood educators confirm is healthy for young children. It so healthy for their cognitive development, they many promote their programs as encouraging it. As children get older, we are less concerned Read More
Reading versus Understanding
I recently rediscovered a story from my teaching career decades ago. It was recalled in a paper written in the after 1990s while working on my master’s degree. The course was “Reading and Writing in the Content Areas,” and I was describing a situation in my grade 7 math classroom. “Today in class, we started talking about triangles. I put on the Read More
Understanding Scareware: How Fear Becomes a Cybersecurity Weapon
a post for students in newtwork security class, I uploaded my notes about scareware to Co-pilot which wrote this post In the ever‑shifting landscape of cybersecurity threats, scareware stands out not because of its technical sophistication, but because of its psychological precision. Unlike stealthy malware that hides in the background, scareware bursts onto the screen Read More
Concepts of Operating Systems
a post for students in my community college course A modern computer is an incredibly complex system consisting of processors, memory, hard disks, network interfaces, and a myriad of other input/output devices. If every application programmer had to understand the intricate details of how all these hardware components work, no software would ever get written. Read More
Types of Operating Systems
a post for studentsin my operating system course at a community college A modern computer is a highly complex system consisting of processors, memory, disks, network interfaces, and a wide variety of input/output devices. If every application programmer had to understand the intricate, idiosyncratic details of how all these hardware components work, no software would Read More
School and Democracy
In 1989, I was preparing to participate in a science curriculum project; actually, I was invited to chair the committee, but the curriculum coordinator decided it would be very unpopular to have a first-year teacher assume that role. I did reflect on the work the committee was going to undertake, and this post contains a Read More
“The Scientific Method” Is Not Scientific
Recently, I have been looking through some writing I did in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Some of it is not noteworthy but some if it is. This post is drawn from a note I made in the spring of 1993. Science fair projects are a staple of science teaching (or at least it Read More