I don’t often have time to listen to the radio during the afternoon, but today, I caught the last few minutes of “The start of social media’s legal reckoning” on 1A which I listened to on Vermont Public’s radio broadcast. I only caught the tail end of the commentary, but one of the guests made Read More
Author: Gary Ackerman
It Will All Be AI Until Education Changes
AI is here, it often does not accomplish what we want, but that is not stopping folks from deploying it. (I am writing this after spending an hour on several phone calls to the IRS trying to schedule an appointment to get a replacement form for my mother’s taxes. Each attempt got me caught in Read More
Characterizing Weak Leaders
190: Characterizing Weak Leaders The blogosphere is full of examples of bad leadership. We have all seen the lists of characteristics of those who are bad leaders and we have all experienced them. Some of my favorite examples do not make these lists. “Guess what I am thinking disguised as brainstorming” is one of my Read More
Elevating EdTech Professional Development: Training, Planning, and Design
I had AI create this post based on a chapter I wrote a few years ago. 188: Elevating EdTech Professional Development: Training, Planning, and Design If you have ever sat through a school professional development (PD) day focused on “technology integration,” you might be familiar with the following scenario: A room full of educators with Read More
Profile of Early Majority User
This post is the profile of an “early majority user” (Rogers, 2003). This was a school leader whose work aligned with the characteristics of one at that stage. Our project started with me talking with another curriculum coordinator at one of our regionalmeetings. He was talking about how they were supporting teachers. Teachers were sharing Read More
Google and Schools
I recently had a series of conversations with educators about Google. I was anable to point these folks to the specific artcile I read a few years ago in which scholars challenged some of the assumptions we made how Google uses student data. I promised a blog post pointing to it. Here it is! In Read More
IT Working Conditions in Schools
One of the biggest differences between working in schools and working in business and industry is the lack of a clear and unambiguous measure of success; in the vernacular, we can say, “schools lack a clear bottom line.” In education, they attempt to use test scores as a bottom line comparable to financial measures in business, but many educators find those to Read More
A Librarian and A Tech Guy Take a Stand
I once took a stand with a colleague against a program intended to encourage reading. I was responsible for managing the IT in the school along with my teaching duties and she was the school librarian. In this program, students read books, then took computer-based tests on the contents; students were expected to earn a specific number of points by passing tests each marking period. The librarian was frustrated by students asking for books Read More
AI Completeness
Today, we’re tackling a big question: What does it mean to be human in an increasingly computerized world? We’ll explore the concept of “AI-Complete” and its impact on society. The term “AI-Complete” refers to problems that are as hard as any problem that AI can solve. In other words, if you can solve an AI-Complete problem, you can theoretically solve Read More
Strategy and Execution
One of my LinkedIn connections liked a post recently. The post can be summarized as “community colleges don’t have a strategy problem; they have an execution problem.” The author details how many of the goals that have been integrated into community college plans in the last decade or so have not resulted in the expected Read More