Cognitive biases are systematic ways in which people deviate from rationality in making judgements. Wikipedia maintains a list such biases and one example is survivorship bias, the tendency to focus on those things or people which succeed in an endeavor and discount the experiences of those which did not.
Simplifying teacher expertise is no big deal– heck, textbooks are an old tech version of that, saving us all from the trouble of coming up with our own materials. I actually have spent some time thinking about this, resulting in my decision a few years ago to stop using the grammar textbooks my school bought…
Claims about what improves or harms our health are ubiquitous. People need to be able to assess the reliability of these claims. We aimed to evaluate an intervention designed to teach primary school children to assess claims about the effects of treatments (ie, any action intended to maintain or improve health). Source: Effects of the Informed…
Learning to change your teaching practice in today’s digital-first world is a bit like learning a foreign language, to hear ed-tech vet Ann McMullan tell it. “You don’t speak it fluently on the first day. But you pick up one word, two words, three words, and the more you engage and the more you use…
It wasn’t Nineteen Eighty-Four that had the most to say about the America of the 1980s, but rather Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. “In Huxley’s vision,” Postman noted, “no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity, and history.” Instead: “People will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that…
Through these virtual escape rooms, librarians have been able to serve their communities, as well as those living far outside of them, by giving people something to do while stuck at home. These digital challenges have become a tool for teaching and homeschooling, librarians say, as well as a device for staff development and team…
There are two pretty basic problems with this line of thinking. First, the idea that you cannot create on a smartphone or tablet assumes both that the software on the new device doesn’t change and that the nature of the work won’t change. Neither are good assumptions. You begin by making the new tool fit the…
