“The analytics revolution, which began with the movement known as Moneyball, led to a series of offensive and defensive adjustments that were, let’s say, catastrophically successful… the quantitative revolution in culture is a living creature that consumes data and spits out homogeneity… It sacrifices diversity for the sake of familiarity. It solves finite games at the expense of infinite games… In a world that will only become more influenced by mathematical intelligence, can we ruin culture through our attempts to perfect it?”
““The essays that students turn in are about to get a lot better,” Ethan Mollick, associate professor of management at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, tweeted recently. “I just tried Moonbeam and it produced an outline & credible undergraduate essay with just the prompt ‘Legitimation and startups.’ And that is without human intervention, which would help.” In fact, Mollick misspelled the title as “legimation,” and the system corrected the error in the essay.”
“Every night read one short story, one poem, one essay. Do that for a thousand nights and you’ll be stuffed full of ideas.”
“Combating fake news with facts doesn't work because humans are wired for emotion. It's time for more creative tactics.”
“The garden of forking paths cannot continue to fork forever, if we are to find meaning there. Multiverses speak to the part of us that wants every option to be open, that wants the journey to go on and on. Of course, no journey really does—and at the end of many multiversal stories the tangle of time lines resolves into one, or a traveller finally arrives at the right version of history and decides to stay. Such endings seem to invite us to return to our one life, on our one planet, with some added spark of hope or curiosity or resolve. They speak to the part of us that wants, like Evelyn and Lyra and so many versions of Spider-Man, to go home.”
“Rigor doesn’t mean that the outcome of the assignment – the grade, the praise, the punishment – should make life difficult. It means that the task itself should make life difficult. “
“Digital storytelling in the classroom is an invitation to students to utilize their intimate knowledge of television, podcasting, and social media formats to explore curricular content. That is part of the attraction for students – tapping into their practically organic knowledge of these genres of storytelling… In the end, if we are to properly prepare our students for life after secondary school, we need to set them up to succeed digitally, to communicate meaningfully inside the digital landscape of stories, and to contribute responsibly to these new libraries of digital stories.”
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