I was at a technology and education conference, earlier this week. But as I reflected on my learning from the conference, I came to the conclusion that it didn’t seem like a technology conference.
Instead, it was a mindset conference. It was an innovation conference. It was a conference about the power of connectivity. It was a conference that encouraged people to shift the way they think.
It was amazing!
One presenter at the conference, the keynote, George Couros, went so far as to discourage participants from applying the “tech” label to themselves. What?! He was talking to a room full of the “tech” people!
Technology isn’t something new, personal computers have been around for almost 40 years now. It is all in the mind and how you’re going to use technology to extend learning.
Math trauma manifests as anxiety or dread, a debilitating fear of being wrong. This fear limits access to life paths for many people, including school and career choices. While math trauma has multiple sources, there are some that parents and teachers have power to influence directly: outdated ideas of what it means to be good at math. These…
On the cramped urban campus of Boston Latin School, high-school students grow an acre’s worth of vegetables in an old shipping container that’s been transformed into a computer-controlled hydroponic farm. Using a wall-mounted keyboard or a mobile app, the student farmers can monitor their crops, tweak the climate, make it rain and schedule every ultraviolet…
Researchers Feng Liu, Yong Shi, and Ying Liu set out to test and rank the intelligence quotient (IQ) of various natural and artificial intelligent systems, including humans, Google, Bing, Baidu, and Siri. Based on the tests conducted, Google’s AI has an IQ of 47.28. That ranks just below a six-year child with an IQ of…
Turing Tumble is a new type of game where players (ages 8+) build mechanical computers powered by marbles to solve logic puzzles. It’s fun, addicting, easy-to-learn, and while you’re playing, you discover how computers work. I’m all about teaching kids to code. When I was a professor at the University of Minnesota, I saw how valuable…
Another former Facebook executive has spoken out about the harm the social network is doing to civil society around the world. Chamath Palihapitiya, who joined Facebook in 2007 and became its vice president for user growth, said he feels “tremendous guilt” about the company he helped make. “I think we have created tools that are…
By making so much information so accessible, social media has drastically changed the way we consume information and form opinions in the modern era. The danger, however, is that social media creates an “echo chamber” that filters the information people receive so that it largely supports their existing opinions. A recent study published in PNAS examines this…
