In his 2010 book Wisdom, Stephen Hall who is an award-winning writer about science and society, posed the question, “How do we make complex, complicated decisions and life choices, and what makes some of these choices so clearly wise that we all intuitively recognize them as a moment, however brief, of human wisdom?” (p. 6). Read More
I recently spent a day on -the-road as I traveled to visit two students who are seniors in high school and spending time off campus in internships. My first stop was at a family-owned automobile repair shop and towing company. The student plans to take over that business once he earns his college degree. My Read More
In my recent book Efficacious Technology Management, which I published under a Creative Commons license (you can find it here), I began a section with the paragraph: “Data” has been widely, but imprecisely, used in education for most of the 21st century. Data-driven educators make decisions based on information they have gathered about their students’ Read More
Stress has been a topic in the school leadership literature (at least the popular literature) as we begin to confront the increasing levels of stress in youngsters’ lives. I have encountered it in the conversation around “trauma-informed schools,” and in my professional reading of iGen and The Self-Driven Child. It is well the topic is Read More
Teachers know “proficiencies” are coming to dominate as the buzzword that is attracting the attention of educational leaders and policy makers. (Some might characterize this as a distraction of attention from important issues and needs, but I will proceed without comment on that speculation.) One of the disputes I have with how this is being Read More
I am in the middle of rereading Carl Bereiter’s 2002 book Education and Mind in the Knowledge Age. Among the intriguing ideas is the book is his confrontation of the “mind as a container” metaphor. Recent generations of educators have operated under the assumption that one’s brain is a container and that what we know Read More
Appropriate Proper Reasonable To avoid wasting instructional time preparing to use technology that may or may not be functioning, teachers are likely to avoid those devices that are malfunctioning (or even rumored to be malfunctioning) until they are assured they have been repaired. When a help ticket has been fixed, the technician closes it, then Read More
I am of the option, that effective educational technology must be appropriately, properly, and reasonably configured. I am also of the opinion that the individual who can make decisions in all three domains of educational technology is exceedingly rare. (Most who claim they can do it are mistaken.) Fundamentally, technology professionals and education professionals understand Read More
54: Cognitive Lod Theory This post complements this earlier one on The Lens of Cognitive Load Theory While technology acceptance is a theory that can explain and predict the decision to use a technology, cognitive load theory (Sweller, Ayres, & Kalyuga, 2011) (CLT) predicts and explains technology use once it has been adopted. CLT is Read More
In private conversations for several years, I have been promoting “Ackerman’s Theory of Control.” My informal theory can be summarized as “people (children included) need to control something in their lives… if they don’t feel in control, they will take control of something.” My theory emerged out of years of working with children, and finding Read More