Technology makes us stupid. I’ve written about this before. The availability of amazing tools that provide knowlege and organization allows us to stay on the ball without remembering anything. My car knows where I’m going and how to get there. My calendar will tell me what I’m doing this weekend. My phone knows how to contact everyone I care about, so I don’t need to … Continue reading Artificial Words
Last week, this image showed up as a memory online. I tweeted it at the beginning of 2012 with the caption “This might be our nextgen learning / tech planning process.” I remember drawing this. I recall a long conversation with my superintendent about it. Just the two of us, sitting at the table in his office. I wanted to redefine public education. He was … Continue reading The Grand Plan
The FBI is recommending that we stop using text messages. After last week’s reports that Chinese hackers have infiltrated at least eight American telecommunications companies, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency issued recommendations to telcoms to help them secure their infrastructures. For the rest of us, the FBI “warned iPhone and Android users to stop texting and to use an encrypted messaging platform instead.” According … Continue reading Sorta Secure
I was playing with Notebook LM a few weeks ago. This is an AI tool, developed by Google, that is supposed to help people interact with documents and resources. You can give it a bunch of content, and then summarize that content and ask questions about it. It has a cool feature that creates AI-generated audio overviews in a conversational, podcast-like format. So I fed … Continue reading What’s Next?
I don’t know where I learned about the purpose of government. I don’t think it was in high school. While my American History class did a deep dive into information literacy through the lens of primary sources, the motivations of those creating the sources, and the necessity of identifying and accounting for bias, we didn’t get into the big picture of why there’s a government … Continue reading Self-Evident
For the last decade or so, I’ve carried around a little notebook that I refer to as my “think book.” It’s a place to put notes and ideas and observations and connections that I may want to come back to later. This week, I transitioned from volume 9 of the book to volume 10. Whenever I do that, I read through the old book one … Continue reading Odds and Ends
We did some traveling this summer. Embracing the idea that life is an adventure, along with some questionable planning, we ended up in 10 airports on four continents over six weeks in June and July. Our travel spanned 17 time zones. We encountered five languages. I took about 6,000 photos. It was an embarrassingly fantastic summer. We talked to people in England and Indonesia and … Continue reading Common Goals
I handed my passport to the TSA agent. She told me to look at the camera, which I did. She handed the passport back and told me to have a nice day. The system matched my photo to the one on the passport, verified my identity, cross checked me against active flight reservations and no-fly lists, and approved me to fly. The whole thing took … Continue reading The Days of Miracle & Wonder
My first experience with the firehose was Usenet. In the pre-web Internet days, there was a global discussion board with thousands of topic-specific groups called newsgroups. You could subscribe to the newsgroups you were interested in, and see the messages posted to those groups. Using special software, called a newsreader, you could manage which groups you belonged to, and read, post, and respond to messages … Continue reading What Do I See?
Yesterday, 206 students walked across the stage, accepted their diplomas, shook hands with a bunch of people they didn’t know, and walked off into their futures. They’re an impressive group. Eight of them are National Merit finalists, putting them among the top 1% of American students. An additional 11 are commended scholars (top 4% nationally). Collectively, they took 136 advanced placement courses and 255 college … Continue reading Are They Ready?
I think I’m doing it wrong. Lately, I’ve been using both Google’s Gemini and ChatGPT for my generative AI needs. I recently posed this question to both: Gemini told me I would land in Los Angeles at 6:25 PM local time on July 30. ChatGPT told me I would land in Los Angeles at 6:25 AM on July 31. This is a real scenario, and … Continue reading Not So Fast
Twenty years ago, I was in the market for a new car. I wanted a mid-size sedan that was safe, reliable, and had good fuel economy. I gathered data from NHTSA and the EPA and combined it with reviews and reliability assessments from Edmunds, Car & Driver, and other resources. I had a lovely spreadsheet with all of the characteristics I cared about for every … Continue reading Shifting Bias
Taste of Tech 