Here is the question that was put to 113,000 doctors, from border to border and coast to coast: ‘What cigarette do you smoke, doctor?’ Three of America’s leading independent research organizations did the asking. And the brand named most was Camel. Well, doctors like all of us smoke for pleasure. Camel’s rich, full flavor appeals to their taste. And Camel’s cool mildness registers with their … Continue reading Is it Time to Quit Smoking?
We’re not hungry. Over my career, I’ve often used the metaphor of feeding the hungry in my approach to technology use in the classroom. Some teachers and school leaders are eager and ready to try new things. We certainly want to support that. Others are struggling just to keep their heads above water. We need to support them, too, and perhaps through them a lifeline … Continue reading Appetites
Several years ago, we were upgrading our phone system at school. This work involved a much-needed voicemail upgrade, and I was holding up the process. The voicemail software was expensive. I don’t remember the exact cost, but I think it was around $30,000. We needed to sign off on the terms of service — basically click “I agree” to all the legal gobbledygook — so … Continue reading This Software is Provided As-Is
When I was in school, we weren’t allowed to use calculators. We did our calculations by hand. That included long division, and deriving square roots, and looking up logarithms and trig functions in computation tables. It wasn’t until my senior year of high school that my physics teacher said, “you know, you could just use a calculator and save yourself a lot of time.” By … Continue reading Don’t Criticize What You Can’t Understand
A few years ago, MSN fired all of their reporters and replaced them with artificial intelligence. “Reporters” might be the wrong word. MSN didn’t report their own news. They used other news sources, and curated their own news site based on the content that they gathered from other places. They found that this could be done just as easily by software as it can by … Continue reading Did I Really Write This?
I received an email from Santa. It was probably my sophomore year in college, though it might have been a year earlier or later. There was the address in the sender field: SANTA@NPOLE.COM. I don’t remember anything else about the message, but the sender was curious. I had never seen a spoofed email before. This was still years before we started using the word “spam” … Continue reading Bona Fide
It was 84 years ago this Halloween that Orson Welles’ adaptation of H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds was broadcast on CBS radio’s Mercury Theater on the Air. The radio drama was presented as a series of news reports from Grover’s Mill, New Jersey, describing a Martian invasion of Earth. Because of this presentation method, many listeners mistook the broadcast for actual news reports. … Continue reading War of the Worlds
“On the back of your notecard, please write one thing that I can do to make this class better for you.” “Don’t make it boring,” fourteen year old me wrote on the back of my card. This was the first day of my high school biology class. The teacher had never risen from his table at the front of the room, and had just spent … Continue reading Attention, Please
America has always been a country of contradiction. The European settlers came here to escape persecution, and immediately set up a society that did not tolerate ideas or values that differed from theirs. They proclaimed a country with liberty and justice for all, where all men are created equal. But that doesn’t include black men. Or first nations men. Or poor men. Or women. It’s … Continue reading Ain’t That America?
For the first six years of my career, I taught a middle school computer applications class. Nobody really cared what I taught. They didn’t say that, of course. But the administration knew that kids needed to learn about computers, and they didn’t really know exactly what that should look like, so they carved out some space and just let me do my thing. I never … Continue reading Information Illiterate
It was eight years ago now that I heard Richard Culatta speak at EduCon. At the time, he was the director of the Office of Educational Technology at the US Department of Education. Now, he’s the CEO of the International Society for Technology in Education. In his little talk in the cafeteria of the Science Leadership Academy all those years ago, Culatta talked about pencils. … Continue reading Pencil Sharpeners
I’ve been a little obsessed with Corwin’s Visible Learning MetaX since Matthew Mays shared it at a conference last month. I’ve been skeptical of Hattie’s work in the past, and to some extent, I still am. Recall that Hattie’s work centers around distilling all of the research around education, and analyzing meta-analyses to draw conclusions about what works in education. When you keep summarizing and … Continue reading What Should We Stop Doing?
Taste of Tech 