“As a country we have moved past the idea that the basics of a decent life should be hoarded by an aristocracy, a hereditary class with a monopoly on wealth, power and property. Allocating resources on the basis of merit is arguably a better system, or at least, less unjust. Still, it is far from perfect… If we think about cognitive ability testing as a form of lottery, in which the winners are those who possess a certain inherent capacity for processing and analyzing information, without reference to morally salient criteria like goodness, mercy, kindness or courage, we are embarking on a new kind of impoverishment.”
“What You Need to Know About Me is a new anthology (published by The Hawkins Project, co-founded by Dave Eggers) that highlights the experiences of young people (ages 11-24) who have immigrated from one country to another… Of our contributors, we want to know: How has the experience of migration impacted your life? What have been the gifts and challenges of such a life-changing move? But most of all: What do we need to know about you?”
“Framing excellence in these competitive terms doesn’t lead to improvements in performance. Indeed, a consistent body of social science research shows that competition tends to hold us back from doing our best. It creates an adversarial mentality that makes productive collaboration less likely, encourages gaming of the system and leads all concerned to focus not on meaningful improvement but on trying to outdo (and perhaps undermine) everyone else.”
“When a student holds the learning compass, he or she is exercising agency, the capacity to set a goal, reflect, and act responsibly to effect change, to act rather than be acted upon.”
“In light of the long evolution of free expression in the United States, we should be careful drawing conclusions based on a handful of sensationalist incidents on campus—incidents sometimes manufactured for their propaganda value. They shed no light on the current reality of university culture.”
“The piece sparked great interest in Bassano’s life and curiosity about women’s literary contributions in Shakespeare’s era, the challenges facing Shakespeare biographers, and feminist themes in the work. It also generated dissent, most notably the argument that the piece did not pay sufficient attention to the scholarly consensus that any case for anyone other than Shakespeare is conjectural.”
“At 3.8B, the number of Internet users comprises more than half the world’s population.”
This time we knew the video was fake because we had access to the original. But with future deepfakes, there won’t be any original to compare them to. To know whether a disputed video is real, we’ll need to know who made it.”
“I can promise you, ed-tech is not changing faster than it’s ever changed before. The people who want you to think that are hoping that they can wind you up and spin you ’round and knock you off center so that you’ll be less able to stand firm and resist their “disruption.””
“The study found that the more hours American students spent daily on computers doing English language arts, the lower their reading scores. That was true for both fourth-grade and eighth-grade students and across school poverty levels. Math scores didn’t deteriorate as much as computer usage increased. Previous researchhas generally shown more promise for education technology in math than in reading.”
“Across most countries, a low to moderate use of school technology was generally associated with better performance, relative to students reporting no computer use at all… But students who reported a high use of school technology trailed behind peers who reported moderate use.”
It began life as a shortcut for scribes and proved just as useful for early typesetters, eventually working its way into the English alphabet as the 27th letter. We collectively dropped it from the ABCs, and the decline of handwriting and manual typesetting made it less useful. But its flexibility and grace have kept it on our business cards and movie posters.”
“This same theory was put forward in 1930 by philosopher Bertrand Russell, who devoted a chapter of his book ‘The Conquest of Happiness’ to the potential value of boredom. Imagination and capacity to cope with boredom must be learnt as a child.”
Copyright
Every week I send out articles I encounter from around the web. Subject matter ranges from hard knowledge about teaching to research about creativity and cognitive science to stories from other industries that, by analogy, inform what we do as educators. This breadth helps us see our work in new ways.
Readers include teachers, school leaders, university overseers, conference organizers, think tank workers, startup founders, nonprofit leaders, and people who are simply interested in what’s happening in education. They say it helps them keep tabs on what matters most in the conversation surrounding schools, teaching, learning, and more.
– Peter Nilsson