I believe that schools are becoming irrelevant in the lives of young people. Adults are trying to improve schools by looking towards their past; “what worked for me will work for them,” is their misguided reasoning. We (and this pronoun includes educators and all other adults who care about our children’s future) must reinvent our Read More
Author: Gary Ackerman
Education Needs More Cynics
Some have said that I am more than a skeptic with regard to educational reforms. “Cynic” has been used to describe me. In response to some proposals by school leaders, I have been quite accurately called a “tick-off cynic.” I continue to be cynical about much that is presented as education, especially by outsiders. I Read More
Another Explanation of Cognitive Load Theory
Cognitive load theory is an idea I have been integrating into my presentations and workshops for a few years. (It has been addressed in this blog previously.) This is a version I have been including this summer: While technology acceptance is a theory that can explain and predict the decision to use a technology, cognitive Read More
An Elevator Pitch on Integration as Learning
Eric Mauzer, a Harvard physics educator, is well-known for developing the concept of integration as an aspect of deeper learning. Mauzer found that after a long course in which students were taught information and solutions without context, the course had “taught them ‘next to nothing.’ After a semester of physics, they still held the same Read More
School: A Privileged Place
Have you ever had a a book on your “to read” list for a long (really long) time, and when you finally read it, you stop several times, close the book, then your eyes, and just think about the implications of what you read? I had such an experience in reading Jean Lave and Etienne Read More
Why I Can’t Say “All Lives Matter”
Social media allows people to have public arguments. We can observe them and judge the participants and the soundness of their arguments in anonymity. Such lurking on public argument between one who argued “black lives matter” and another countered “all lives matter” motivated me to finally figure out why the “all lives matter” argument has Read More
A Teacher Enters #edtech
In the time between when I left high school (in 1983) and I entered the classroom as a teacher (in 1988), computers entered schools in a serious way. Whereas my high school had a small computer room for students to use (I recall four computers in the room which was a converted storage room), my Read More
Business and Politics are Not Teaching and Learning
184: Business and Politics are Not Teaching and Learning Business and politics are human endeavors that are easily measured; the results of business and politics are generally objective and unequivocal. Business measures success by profits, if the profits are sufficient for the owner or shareholders, then the business is judged a success. In politics, success Read More
What John Seeley Brown Said About Learning
John Seeley Brown (2000) concluded that in the 21st century, the amount of information that humans access is overwhelming. Information is no longer the essential aspect of knowing. The sense we make of information is the essential aspect of knowing. Brown observed, “The forces that shape the background [of human knowledge] are the social forces, Read More
Mixing Up the Interactions
My colleagues at Massachusetts Community Colleges that use Moodle as their LMS have begun collaborating to offer workshops to faculty and staff at all of our campuses. We did not record the first virtual workshop, but I prepared this abbreviated version of the presentation I made on July 6, 2020.