At first I thought it was a teacher thing. I would ask how someone was doing and they would say, “I’m really busy.” This was often followed by a description of how little sleep they had gotten and how much grading they had done. Teachers weren’t whining. It wasn’t a “poor me” attitude. It was more of a sense of pride. As teachers, we often wear “busy” like a badge of honor, advertising to the world how out of control our careers have become.
Imagine if you grew up around people but never learned the language they spoke to each other. Wouldn’t it be absurd? Yet, technology powers almost everything in today’s world and most children have no idea about language it speaks. This rapid growth of technology requires a rapid pace of education to follow it, but it is pretty…
But the focus on code has left a potentially bigger opportunity largely unexplored. In the past, people were educated, and learned job skills, and that was enough for a lifetime. Now, with technology changing rapidly and new job areas emerging and transforming constantly, that’s no longer the case. We need to focus on making lightweight,…
Fans of Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy treasure the bit where a group of hyper-dimensional beings demand that a supercomputer tells them the secret to life, the universe and everything. The machine, which has been constructed specifically for this purpose, takes 7.5m years to compute the answer, which famously comes out as 42….
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…
There’s ongoing debate in the art world about whether or not the great Renaissance painters may have used optical aids to help them trace the timeless masterpieces which now hang in galleries all around the world. But while that might be a controversial accusation for a renowned art master, the idea of drawing over a…
In the real world, there’s no textbook or curriculum. There’s no way to practice. There’s no source of continuous feedback. There are no teachers — it’s just you and whoever you can convince to help you. So how do you learn something no one can teach you? How do you become a world-class expert on something few…
