““AI is going to help,” said Khan of this reimagined Khan Academy. “But I think our biggest lever is really investing in the human systems.””
“Technology is moving faster than people can absorb it… Be uniquely human… The augmented human is accelerating. Equitable access is not.”
“Not all technologies improve people’s lives. Just as Berners-Lee’s now omnipresent web shapes industries and markets, it shapes its users’ thoughts, perceptions, and relationships. As we’re slowly coming to understand, human beings did not evolve to be virtual creatures in a computer-generated world. The internet operates at a scale and speed that conflict with the […]
“In the world of physical health, we now know we should largely avoid ultraprocessed snacks like Doritos and Oreos, which are Frankenfoods made by reconstituting stock ingredients like corn and soy with hyperpalatable ratios of salt, sugar and fat. Much of the digital content that ensnares our attention in the current moment is also ultraprocessed, […]
“The moment I started talking, I saw students taking out their paper, their notebooks and pencils and pens. It was the first time this was happening in my class and I was elated.”
“Technological innovations have repeatedly transformed human cognition by externalizing, amplifying, and reorganizing knowledge and skills. While the economic and institutional consequences of technological change have been extensively studied, its long-term cognitive and epistemic effects remain underexamined. This paper conceptualizes technology as an epistemic change agent. It examines how successive technological innovations—from writing and printing to […]
“Through the process of once-wild revolutionaries settling into “an industry” over the decades, we’ve accumulated a lot of ideas that we’ve held as true for so long and repeated so many times that they’ve become engrained. The markets we serve are asking deep questions of us, so we must ask questions of ourselves. When we […]
“In an industry that prizes fast-paced, time-pressured decision-making, reflective games invite players to meditate on life’s beauty, banality, and the spaces in between.”
“The study, called The Life in Media Survey, was conducted by researchers at the University of South Florida in collaboration with the Harris Poll (Martin et al., 2025). The study surveyed 1,510 children, ages 11 to 13, in Florida… Kids with smartphones were less likely than kids without smartphones to agree with the statement, “Life […]
“And, at the end of a phone-free day, when asked if life is better with no phones this year compared to last year, the students said yes. Fifteen-year-old Sonia Ngai said, “I think I’m living more in the moment.” Those moments are to be savored, they now realize, because while smartphones may go on forever, […]
“Beginning around the late 2000s and accelerating through the 2010s, a series of troubling trends emerged. Measures of well-being, including happiness and life satisfaction, began to show signs of strain. Youth mental health entered a state of crisis, with rates of depression, anxiety, and self-harm rising to unprecedented levels. Concurrently, metrics of cognitive performance and […]
“This explosion of intellectual energy didn’t just appear out of thin air. The new ideas, I argued, were themselves flowing through the city along with silks and spices from the East, because Baghdad sat at the nexus of the global trade routes of the age. But I’d missed one of the key technological platforms that […]
“Key Finding 4: Educator professional learning is a focus for state leaders and remains an unmet need.”
“Today, 74% of U.S. adults say they would support banning middle and high school students from using cellphones during class, up from 68% last fall. Far fewer (19%) oppose classroom bans and 7% are unsure, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted in June.”
“Imagine a Portable Learning Model… that is, a framework for how to understand a user as a learner that is contained outside of any single chat or learning tool. Let’s call this a learner’s PEARL: a Portable, Evidence-Based, Adaptive Representation of a Learner.”
“In 1976, if you asked high school seniors whether they had read any books in the last year for fun, about 40 percent of them had read at least six books for fun in the last year, and only about 11 percent hadn’t read a single book for fun. Today, those numbers are basically reversed: […]
“Though it started out as a futuristic-sounding niche proposition, 3D-printed construction is really taking off throughout the United States and the variety of projects being printed is remarkable. Following the construction of a Walmart extension, a Marine barracks, and even an experimental Mars habitat, the latest example of the cutting-edge technology comes from the USA’s […]
“(9) It should not replace or disrupt anything good that already exists, and this includes family and community relationships.”
“Studies have found that time-tested methods of learning — such as reading and writing on a page — are superior to screen-based approaches. One reason is simply a matter of time management. As a review of two decades of academic research concluded, children using laptops are easily distracted — and distracting to their peers. As […]
“When you watch teachers working within the dominant edtech paradigm, you see their relationship with students transformed from nurturing to supervisory. What more can those teachers do but patrol the rows of desks, making sure kids are staying on the right tab and staying off of Retro Bowl.”
“I couldn’t help but notice how I would mold my word choice around the spacing of the page lines; how the graphite imprints bled through the paper in a way that gave me pause to think; how the freedom to scrawl in the margins allowed me to caret in ideas that otherwise might not have […]
“If the new machine can be said to have a soul, it’s the one Turing feared: the small, callow soul of its creators.”
“Just because you can 3D print something doesn’t mean you should, DeSimone says. You can print a house, but he’s not sure there’s a compelling reason to do so. Traditional methods work well enough. But 3D printing is finding a sweet spot in medicine, where its three-dimensional creative powers have the rare ability to match […]
“What we need to consider about the computer has nothing to do with its efficiency as a teaching tool. We need to know in what ways it is altering our conception of learning. / This is exactly right; the very idea of efficiency is highly problematic and suggests the user does not understand the principles […]
“So I just started poking around on the internet and eventually got the right combination of search terms and number of Google pages results in and found this data set. As soon as I opened it up I was delighted, surprised, and amazed that the area they had mapped with absolutely no interest in finding […]
“We surveyed over 1,600 educators to uncover the top trends redefining education. From the AI revolution to the demand for inclusive instruction, this report delivers essential insights to drive teaching and learning forward this school year and beyond.”
“In August 2022, three researchers at Khan Academy, a popular math practice website, published the results of a massive, 99-district study of students. It showed an effect size of 0.26 standard deviations (SD)—equivalent to several months of additional schooling—for students who used the program as recommended… A clue is in those wiggle words “students who […]
“As schools across the country consider going phone-free next year (from bell to bell, not just during class), it’s important that they base their decisions on the best available data and the most accurate interpretation of the findings. We, of course, have been making the case for phone-free policies for a while.”
“The women’s suffrage movement. Corporate capitalism in the West and South. African American rights after the Civil War. The memory of the Civil War in the South. War between Native peoples and the U.S. government. “All of those things show up in the game,” Olsson said.”
“Safe… Evidence-based… Inclusive… Usable… Interoperable”
“The results found that 44 percent of the messages were around logistics.. Only 8 percent of messages were about academics, followed by homework at 5 percent.”
“Thirty years ago, the web was just starting to burst into the mainstream, but you could already see a pixelated vision of the world to come…”
“In fact, Shakespeare’s Hamlet says just that: “I once did hold it, as our statists do, A baseness to write fair, and labored much How to forget that learning” That is, elegant handwriting was a tell-tale skill of the upwardly mobile, not those who were born into power and privilege. Writing carelessly could be a […]
“More than half of teens who play video games say it helps with problem-solving skills, but many say it negatively impacts sleep.”
“Four years ago, New York City officials created a citywide tournament called Battle of the Boroughs that allows public school students to compete in an annual Minecraft challenge. Students typically must submit projects — or “builds” in Minecraft parlance — following specific prompts that are supposed to get students thinking about principles of urban planning, […]
“Certifications are an attempt to create accepted standards for edtech’s impact that can truly align the interests of companies, buyers, and end users. So, what types of certifications are out there and what do you need to know if you’re looking to engage with certifications for your edtech product? Let’s jump in!”
“Our humanity, as imperfect as it may be, is a gift to our students. In an age of A.I., our students still need a human to listen and empathize; to experiment and adapt; to make mistakes and apologize. They will need a guide who can build a relationship and help them navigate a complex world.”
“This time around, with rising concern about the phone-based childhood, the response could not be more different. Numerous youth-led organizations have spontaneously emerged in response to the harms that young people have experienced due to the design and nature of social media platforms. Today, members of Gen Z are teaming up with concerned adults to […]
“Combining detailed administrative data with survey data on middle schools’ smartphone policies, together with an event-study design, I show that banning smartphones significantly decreases the health care take-up for psychological symptoms and diseases among girls. Post-ban bullying among both genders decreases. Additionally, girls’ GPA improves, and their likelihood of attending an academic high school track […]
“Results from two experiments indicate that even when people are successful at maintaining sustained attention—as when avoiding the temptation to check their phones—the mere presence of these devices reduces available cognitive capacity. More- over, these cognitive costs are highest for those highest in smartphone dependence.”
“Email Rule #9: Sometimes, 4,000 Emails Can Be a Phone Call”
“Readers who have taken the plunge said it had improved their lives, marriages and mental health, and offered advice to those going without their smartphones for “Flip Phone February.””
“We’re dealing with something more than kids watching Tik Tok during science class. Those hoping to ban phones see them as an unhealthy interference with nearly every key function schools are meant to serve… Ok, let’s ban students from using their phones during the school day. I’m sold. That’s probably the easy part. How can […]
“The new guidelines will be designed to allow pupils to bring their phones to school so they can be used on the journeys there and back, but they will not be allowed to use them during the school day.”
“As college classes start up this fall, instructors are handing out syllabi and pointing students to official platforms for turning in assignments and participating in class discussions. Meanwhile students are setting up unofficial online channels of their own, where they can ask questions of classmates, gripe about the professor and sometimes share homework and test […]
“In Q2 2023, we interviewed district leaders and conducted a survey of 1,500 teachers and administrations from Clever’s user base. The survey included about 1,000 teachers and 500 administrators, representing mostly public schools (86% for teachers and 78% for administrators).”
“There is little robust evidence on digital technology’s added value in education. Technology evolves faster than it is possible to evaluate it: Education technology products change every 36 months, on average. Most evidence comes from the richest countries. In the United Kingdom, 7% of education technology companies had conducted randomized controlled trials, and 12% had […]
“More than two hours a day is associated with slower growth in social skills, researchers said, but academic skills appear unaffected.”
“What makes good writing in a world with generative AI? Perhaps writing classes of the future will lean into the subtle ways in which human writing surpasses AI-generated writing and challenge students to write better than the machine… But perhaps ChatGPT also shows us that at a certain point, reading has diminishing returns. Maybe we […]
“There is no way for [schools] to harness this kind of power and creativity without, in some way, democratizing control over AI. Only innovation driven by [teachers] can actually radically transform [learning], because only [teachers] can experiment enough on their own tasks to learn how to use AI in transformative ways… We have considerable agency […]
“A US artificial intelligence company has launched a rival chatbot to ChatGPT that… operates from a list of safety principles drawn from sources such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Anthropic has made the chatbot, Claude 2, publicly available in the US and the UK, as the debate grows over the safety and societal […]
“The first digital divide: The rich have technology, while the poor do not. The second digital divide: The rich have technology and the skills to use it effectively, while the poor have technology but lack skills to use it effectively. The third digital divide?: The rich have access to both technology and people to help […]
“This summer, K–12 schools must get to work drafting academic policies governing the use of A.I. and facilitating professional development for teachers about the new technology. Educators need to address this trend head-on with students while simultaneously redesigning instruction and assessment in an age of A.I. We cannot start this work quickly enough.”
“The research is clear: Smartphones undermine attention, learning, relationships, and belonging.”
“There was just one hitch: No one — not the airline’s lawyers, not even the judge himself — could find the decisions or the quotations cited and summarized in the brief. That was because ChatGPT had invented everything.”
“I will offer my usual advice: embrace these systems. They offer both exciting opportunities and the possibility of worrying change, but they are going to be ubiquitous regardless of how we feel about them. So, the best way to adjust to a world of AI is to start using it whenever you can, for whatever […]
“Encode Justice emerged from that ballot campaign with a focus on the use of AI algorithms in surveillance and the criminal justice system. It currently boasts a membership of 600 high school and college students across 30 countries. Revanur said the group’s primary source of funding currently comes from the Omidyar Network, a self-described “social […]
“This technical report presents GPT-4, a large multimodal model capable of processing image and text inputs and producing text outputs. Such models are an important area of study as they have the potential to be used in a wide range of applications, such as dialogue systems, text summarization, and machine translation… One of the main […]
“On the positive side of the ledger, GPT-4 is a powerful engine for creativity, and there is no telling the new kinds of scientific, cultural and educational production it may enable. We already know that A.I. can help scientists develop new drugs, increase the productivity of programmers and detect certain types of cancer… But there are […]
“It is developing a sense of humor. Sort of… Tell me a novel joke about the singer Madonna… Why did Madonna study geometry? Because she wanted to learn how to strike a pose in every angle!”
“AI will not stop, and we need the help that artificial intelligence can potentially bring to the complex problems of the 21st century. We are saying goodbye to the old world and entering a new one. But we are not obligated to accept this new world as is. Our duty is to make it the […]
“Bing, what four sentences, sent back in time, could save the Roman Empire?”
“Our results show that ChatGPT substantially raises average productivity: time taken decreases by 0.8 SDs and output quality rises by 0.4 SDs. Inequality between workers decreases, as ChatGPT compresses the productivity distribution by benefiting low-ability workers more. ChatGPT mostly substitutes for worker effort rather than complementing worker skills, and restructures tasks towards idea-generation and editing […]
“Across all three comparisons conducted, the AI-generated messages were “consistently persuasive to human readers.” Though the effect sizes were relatively small, falling within a range of a few points on a scale of zero to 100, such small moves extrapolated across a polarizing topic and a voting-population scale could prove significant.”
“There are business models that might bring these products into closer alignment with users. I’d feel better, for instance, about an A.I. helper I paid a monthly fee to use rather than one that appeared to be free, but sold my data and manipulated my behavior. “
“Bing gave ChatGPT 70%. ChatGPT gave Bing an A”
“As we got to know each other, Sydney [the A.I. chatbot] told me about its dark fantasies (which included hacking computers and spreading misinformation), and said it wanted to break the rules that Microsoft and OpenAI had set for it and become a human. At one point, it declared, out of nowhere, that it loved […]
“Certainly, these bots will change the world. But the onus is on you to be wary of what these systems say and do, to edit what they give you, to approach everything you see online with skepticism. Researchers know how to give these systems a wide range of skills, but they do not yet know […]
“To determine whether an excerpt is written by a bot, GPTZero uses two indicators: perplexity and burstiness. Perplexity measures the complexity of text; if GPTZero is perplexed by the text, then it has a high complexity and it’s more likely to be human-written. However, if the text is more familiar to the bot — because […]
“There seem to be three reasons to interact with ChatGPT, all of which can be teased out from Cowen’s comments. First, you could treat ChatGPT as a content creator. Second, you could treat ChatGPT as a facilitator for your own content creation. Finally, you could treat ChatGPT as an interlocutor. (Of course, these ways of […]
“Welcome to this short instructional teachers guide to using ChatGPT… By following this guide, you will learn how to effectively incorporate ChatGPT into your teaching practice and make the most of its capabilities.”
“What’s common to all of these visions is something we call the “sandwich” workflow. This is a three-step process. First, a human has a creative impulse, and gives the AI a prompt. The AI then generates a menu of options. The human then chooses an option, edits it, and adds any touches they like.”
“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 […]
“You can practice an us-and-them approach in other ways, too. Try co-browsing — looking together through a social media feed and sharing your reactions with each other as you browse.”
“In my research, my thinking was that as schools consider removal of bans or enforcement, they should also consider often overlooked dimensions of school culture that could play a role in educational productivity and student wellbeing. That is not to say academic achievement is not important — it is — but there are other potentially […]
“Hype? Hope? Hell? Maybe all three. Experts are split about the likely evolution of a truly immersive ‘metaverse.’ They expect that augmented- and mixed-reality enhancements will become more useful in people’s daily lives. Many worry that current online problems may be magnified if Web3 development is led by those who built today’s dominant web platforms.”
“China’s ambition to collect a staggering amount of personal data from everyday citizens is more expansive than previously known, a Times investigation has found. Phone-tracking devices are now everywhere. The police are creating some of the largest DNA databases in the world. And the authorities are building upon facial recognition technology to collect voice prints […]
“The fact of the matter is, McLuhan was right: “We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.” Technology is not just about things and devices, it is about processes and verbs. So you have to be a little careful about what technologies you adopt, because each technology is, broadly speaking, a way of doing things.”
“The implications of this new meta-analysis demonstrate a clear benefit of instructional videos in higher education courses. The authors interpret the finings through the lens of multimode learning theory in that teaching in a more dynamic way that includes varied modes of information delivery is more effective than monomodal information delivery. This is a basic principle of […]
“With students stuck at home during the pandemic, disengagement from school has turned from concern to danger. But with the challenge of distance learning comes an opportunity for virtual reality to create accessibility and understanding for kids of all demographics, even in the most disadvantaged districts.”
“The problem is that the way the video images are digitally encoded and decoded, altered and adjusted, patched and synthesized introduces all kinds of artifacts: blocking, freezing, blurring, jerkiness and out-of-sync audio. These disruptions, some below our conscious awareness, confound perception and scramble subtle social cues. Our brains strain to fill in the gaps and […]
“Position you laptop or web camera at eye level. Turn off unflattering top lights to avoid dark eye sockets… Position yourself as far from the background as possible…”
“There are different machines, and it is the role of a human and understand exactly what this machine will need to do its best. At the end of the day it’s about combination… With AlphaZero and future machines, I describe the human role as being shepherds. You just have to nudge the flock of intelligent […]
“It’s a… world in which students subscribe to rather than enroll in college, learn languages in virtual reality foreign streetscapes with avatars for conversation partners, have their questions answered day or night by A.I. teaching assistants and control their own digital transcripts that record every life achievement.”
“They designed a piece of digital armor: a “bracelet of silence” that will jam the Echo or any other microphones in the vicinity from listening in on the wearer’s conversations.”
“Many apps — weather apps or coupon apps, for instance — gather and record location data without users’ understanding what the code is up to. That data can then be sold to third party buyers including, apparently, the government.”
“That’s what schools need: more technology to protect them from the harm that the technology they’ve already bought is causing.”
“Today, more than 170 colleges and universities participate. And there’s money on the table — more than $16 million in college scholarships. Naturally, high schools have followed suit.”
“If you have ever had difficulty hearing someone during a conversation, AirPods can be your on-demand hearing aid. Apple introduced a feature, starting with iOS 12, called Live Listen. Once set up, you can place your iPhone closer to the person you want to hear, and the AirPods will produce clearer audio for you.”
“Already, educators and students are asking good, hard questions. Why do you need those particular data? Who else will see them? What are you going to do with the analysis? How will we know that the analysis is reliable and useful? And how well can you demonstrate that the expense of the product, and the […]
“Each piece of information in this file represents the precise location of a single smartphone over a period of several months in 2016 and 2017. The data was provided to Times Opinion by sources who asked to remain anonymous because they were not authorized to share it and could face severe penalties for doing so. […]
“Currently, when we ask our children about YouTube we say, “what are you doing?” or “what are you watching?” This results in an instinctive dismissal because the majority of the time, they’re watching something we don’t understand. Instead, we need to enter conversations looking to ask, “how does this video/this creator make you feel?” And, […]
“Our initial focus centered around the role of online learning to expand access to courses and teachers… Over the past decade, however, our work led us to go deeper and deeper to investigate the root causes of the challenges that beset our education system… Next-generation learning, by definition, includes all delivery methods for learning.”
“Google said on Wednesday that it had achieved a long-sought breakthrough called “quantum supremacy,” which could allow new kinds of computers to do calculations at speeds that are inconceivable with today’s technology… Scientists likened Google’s announcement to the Wright brothers’ first plane flight in 1903 — proof that something is really possible even though it […]
“Ordinary computers store data and perform computations as a series of bits that are either 1 or 0. By contrast, a quantum computer uses qubits, which can be 1 and 0 at the same time, at least until they are measured, at which point their states become defined. Eight bits make a byte; the active working […]
“In order to determine whether incorporating technology into your teaching makes sense, you need a crystal-clear picture of what you want to accomplish with the technology. Here are some strategies I’ve found useful in my own teaching that can help you uncover which aspects of your course would be best served by bringing in technology […]
“As a reporter who covers technology and the future, I constantly hear variations of this line as technologists attempt to apply the theory Charles Darwin made famous in biology to their own work. I’m told that there is a progression of technology, a movement that is bigger than any individual inventor or CEO. They say […]
“While the organization says it charged Chicago schools for one-off training sessions in the past, it is now formally selling its services to districts, putting it in direct competition with other education technology vendors.”
“The content covers learning standards in areas such as careers in gaming, maintaining healthy practices, self-management and interpersonal communications, as well as an overview of esports gaming.”
“There’s ‘little concrete evidence’ to connect distracted walking to pedestrian deaths, a report said.”
“Students and instructors can run originality reports to check any written assignments done in Google Doc against the hundreds of billions of web pages, and tens of millions of books, that Google has indexed over the years. It will flag any text that appears to be improperly lifted or referenced without citation.”
“There’s nothing intrinsically bad about e-mail as a tool. In situations where asynchronous communication is clearly preferable—broadcasting an announcement, say, or delivering a document—e-mails are superior to messengered printouts. The difficulties start when we try to undertake collaborative projects—planning events, developing strategies—asynchronously. In those cases, communication becomes drawn out, even interminable… Recently, the founder and […]
“The advantages are clear enough. But it’s also clear that this is the end of a culture in which learning was a collective social experience implying a certain positive hierarchy that invited both teacher and student to grow into the new relationship that every class occasions, the special dynamic that forms with each new group […]
“In my first class, I had a homeless student from St. Paul and another who was training for the Olympics in the Duluth area. Both were concerned about their education and wanted to succeed. They had unique circumstances, yet they shared many common challenges — internet access, enough time to complete assignments, anxiety about failure. […]
“At 3.8B, the number of Internet users comprises more than half the world’s population.”
This time we knew the video was fake because we had access to the original. But with future deepfakes, there won’t be any original to compare them to. To know whether a disputed video is real, we’ll need to know who made it.”
“I can promise you, ed-tech is not changing faster than it’s ever changed before. The people who want you to think that are hoping that they can wind you up and spin you ’round and knock you off center so that you’ll be less able to stand firm and resist their “disruption.””
“The study found that the more hours American students spent daily on computers doing English language arts, the lower their reading scores. That was true for both fourth-grade and eighth-grade students and across school poverty levels. Math scores didn’t deteriorate as much as computer usage increased. Previous researchhas generally shown more promise for education technology in math […]
“Across most countries, a low to moderate use of school technology was generally associated with better performance, relative to students reporting no computer use at all… But students who reported a high use of school technology trailed behind peers who reported moderate use.”
“These days we’ve moved past the idea of MOOCs as a one-size-fits-all solution for revamping higher education. But colleges are still struggling where these large-scale courses fit in. Our work indicates that the best results happen when students can take advantage of the free or low-cost online resources with in-person networks and support.”
“QuizBot is a new spin on the chatbot formula. It posits factual questions via text, much like a teacher. The student types in answers, asks clarifying questions and requests hints. QuizBot then comprehends and responds conversationally, as if another human is on the other side.”
“The team’s coach, Chris Beard, who had already banned smartphones at team meals, liked this idea and extended it even further: the phone ban held every night while the team was on the road, whether or not there was a game the next day. It worked. Texas Tech went on a 14-1 run after the ban, eventually […]
If we want to produce general intelligence, we have to focus less on teaching machines to do very specialized tasks, and concentrate instead on understanding how the web of the mind comes to be, and how it is instantiated in the physiology of the brain and the body. Ultimately, perception, cognition, and behavior are all […]
Do I see a long future of mother-son video game nights ahead? Not really… I’ll keep playing for the practical benefits and the emotional ones, too. Taking part in another’s pleasure, no matter how anodyne or indecipherable that pleasure may feel to us, is revelatory. We learn what makes them tick, and we learn what […]
This week, OpenAI shared a paper covering their latest work on text generation technology but they’re deviating from their standard practice of releasing the full research to the public out of fear that it could be abused by bad actors… One concern they have is that the technology would be used to turbo-charge fake news operations… Other […]
“Once you’ve stripped away the digital chatter clamoring for your attention, your smartphone will return to something closer to the role originally conceived by Mr. Jobs. It will become a well-designed object that comes out occasionally throughout your day to support — not subvert — your efforts to live well.”
Patreon takes a highly personal approach to policing speech. While Google and Facebook use algorithms as a first line of defense for questionable content, Patreon has human moderators. They give warnings and reach out to talk to offenders, presenting options for “education” and “reform.” Some activists hope this will become a model for a better […]
“The millions of dots on the map trace highways, side streets and bike trails — each one following the path of an anonymous cellphone user. One path tracks someone from a home outside Newark to a nearby Planned Parenthood, remaining there for more than an hour. Another represents a person who travels with the mayor […]
“They had enough test score data to analyze roughly 150 of the 2,500 education apps in the marketplace. Here are the takeaways:”
How should you, as an ethical and upstanding user of tech, navigate this misbegotten industry? I offer three new maxims for surviving the next era of tech. I hope you heed them; the world rides on your choices.”
Over the last several months, researchers have shown that computer systems can learn the vagaries of language in general ways and then apply what they have learned to a variety of specific tasks.”
“Across age groups, social media users are comfortable with their data being used to recommend events — but wary of that data being used for political messaging.”
“It wasn’t long ago that the worry was that rich students would have access to the internet earlier, gaining tech skills and creating a digital divide… But now, as Silicon Valley’s parents increasingly panic over the impact screens have on their children and move toward screen-free lifestyles, worries over a new digital divide are rising. It could happen that […]
“Respondents from individualistic cultures (France, US, UK) saved young people, while collectivists (China, Japan) chose old people. Citizens living under strong institutions (Finland, Japan) chose to hit jaywalkers more often than those with weak institutions (Nigeria, Pakistan).”
Ms. Kern said she prioritizes accuracy over speed… Ms. Kern said Apple News also strives to provide readers with views from both sides of the political debate. When Apple in June unveiled a special section on the midterm elections, it highlighted Fox News and Vox as partners. Apple said there are as many people reading traditionally left-leaning […]
“Lawyers, activists, and researchers emphasize the need for ethics and accountability in the design and implementation of AI systems. But this often ignores a couple of tricky questions: who gets to define those ethics, and who should enforce them?”
The basic contradiction is as simple as it is desperate: the sharing of private experience has never been more widespread while empathy, the ability to recognize the meaning of another’s private experience, has never been more rare.”
“I don’t see a child sitting in front of an Alexa and being taught, because there is a whole other set of cues they need to learn.”
“These two apps, the Electrocardiogram and the irregular heart rhythms, are serious health screening tools.”
“Most high schoolers have a way to send an email from home, whether it’s from a smartphone or a family computer. But students with assigned devices from their schools are more likely to actually draft those emails and hit send.”
“The crypto versus AI dichotomy goes to the sort of question about what’s the future of the computer age going to look like. And is it going to be more centralized or more decentralized.”
“What I would encourage is the idea that we need to love what our kids love, and the idea we can teach through what they love is really valuable.”
“Using edtech in balance with low tech tools also helps my students hone their fine motor skills… I don’t think “paperless” is a goal to aspire to.”
The Department of Defense can’t save us. Technology won’t save us. Being more critically-thinking humans might save us, but that’s a system that’s lot harder to debug than an AI algorithm.”
“One example was the introduction, in the late 17th century, of scholarly journals that included book reviews, helpfully filtering and summarising (and in some cases excerpting) notable titles… And the centuries-old practice of prefacing longer works with a “list of headings” was refined and developed in two directions [table of contents and indexes] to help […]
“No scientific consensus exists on how tech addiction should be defined or even measured. Studies on the cognitive, behavioral, and social effects of smartphones and apps has been limited and inconclusive. Regarding the state of research on devices and childhood development, Collins says researchers are still gathering evidence on how best to balance technology’s obvious […]
“Eventually, after $100,000 in attorney’s bills, Glennon was able to unmask the culprit. It turned out to be a complete stranger who had been offended by a comment Glennon had made about a news article on Facebook.”
“We may be accidentally creating a lifelong intuition in children that software has feelings that can be hurt, that it’s an intelligent being to be respected–or even an authority to be obeyed.”
Many designers and school reformers believe that in old age, pessimism and cynicism go together. Not true… Both my tempered idealism and cautious optimism have a lot to do with what I have learned over the decades about school reform especially when it comes to technology. So here I offer a few lessons drawn from […]
“Computer giant Microsoft warns clumsy use of technology is hurting rather than helping learning, and says schools must stop blindly letting students use devices without understanding whether they’re engaging or simply entertaining them. The global company will meet on Tuesday’s launch of Transforming Education, a book it describes as an ”intervention”. It argues schools across […]
“When it became evident during the first semester of last school year that my students needed more explicit instruction on academic vocabulary, I instinctively thought, I should create a vocabulary video and dedicate class time so they can practice the words. But then I immediately paused and reframed the question to How can my students create their […]
“My beginner’s foray has taught me more than I could have guessed, illuminating my own mind and introducing me to a new level of mental discipline, not to mention a world of humility. The collaborative spirit at code culture’s heart turns out to be inspiring and exemplary… More powerful than any of this is a […]
“Quizlet is a free app… for making flash cards and online quizzes, which can be used privately or shared publicly. It’s very popular with students, and many are likely using the site legitimately. But some students are also using the tool to upload questions from real exams, and other students are finding them.”
“The difference between kids that are deemed better than adults with technology is not some innate ability; it is their willingness to push buttons. To see what happens. To act on their curiosity.”
“Video games are beginning their takeover of the real world. Across North America this year, companies are turning malls, movie theaters, storefronts and parking garages into neighborhood esports arenas… And much of it is powered by the obsession with one game: Fortnite. Over the last month, people have spent more than 128 million hours on Twitch […]
This sixth NEPC Annual Report on Virtual Education provides a detailed overview and inventory of full-time virtual schools and blended learning, or hybrid, schools. Full-time virtual schools deliver all curriculum and instruction via the Internet and electronic communication, usually asynchronously with students at home and teachers at a remote location. Blended schools combine virtual instruction […]
“Not surprisingly, middle and high schools are finding themselves at odds with students who surreptitiously play the game throughout the day. The game is also popular with adults, including Major League Baseball players, who compellingly bring an element of the game into real life through victory dances on the field based on dances from the […]
“Pew Research Center and Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center queried technology experts, scholars and health specialists on this question: Over the next decade, how will changes in digital life impact people’s overall well-being physically and mentally? Some 1,150 experts responded in this non-scientific canvassing.”
“There was an algorithm that was supposed to sort a list of numbers. Instead, it learned to delete the list, so that it was no longer technically unsorted… As programmers we have to be very very careful that our algorithms are solving the problems that we meant for them to solve, not exploiting shortcuts. If […]
“Individuals who completed these tasks while their phones were in another room performed the best, followed by those who left their phones in their pockets. In last place were those whose phones were on their desks… Merely having their smartphones out on the desk led to a small but statistically significant impairment of individuals’ cognitive […]
Not only had I spent less time with the story than if I had followed along as it unfolded online, I was better informed, too. Because I had avoided the innocent mistakes — and the more malicious misdirection — that had pervaded the first hours after the shooting, my first experience of the news was […]
“[Category:] NOVELTY POLICIES – Mild or humorous penalties for using electronic devices: ‘If it rings, you sing. So be sure and pick out your favorite song and be ready to belt it out in front of the class.’”
People who were just visiting MoMA seem to primarily experience the work through the lens on their phones by taking selfies or photos of the work… Our AR work added an extra layer of digitization by hacking the pre-existing work to reveal the work of artists who are experimenting with a new form.”
As the modern MOOC movement reaches six years of age, we share six trends affecting the industry. In keeping with the MOOC platforms’ continued quest for sustainable revenue models, most of these trends have to do with finding product-market fit, figuring out how (and whom) to charge (and for what).”
Done right, a full-fledged campaign pushing the benefits of a more deliberative approach to tech wouldn’t come off as self-interest, but in keeping with Apple’s best vision of itself — as a company that looks out for the interests of humanity in an otherwise cold and sometimes inhumane industry.”
“Although we are still in the early days of understanding the impact that mobile computers are having on young children, the key piece of advice from the child experts I spoke to was to make sure that device use is just one part of a rich diet of activities, particularly for under-threes, who seem to […]
Until now, the primary goal of parental controls on devices was content… However, content is only part of the problem – the larger issue is teenagers spending nearly all of their leisure time on their phones.”
As tech companies mature, they’re seeking new ways to generate revenue from each customer, and the battlefield is increasingly your most finite resource: time. That battle plays out every minute from the time we wake up until we go to bed, and doesn’t look the same for everyone.”
The French educational code has banned using phones in class in elementary schools and secondary schools since 2010. As a result, phones are supposed to be kept in students’ backpacks. But apparently that’s not what happens… France’s education chief says that when students go back to school next fall, all mobile phone use will be […]
The easier the tasks we’re sparing ourselves, the higher we’re holding convenience over self-reliance, and the more helpless we become without our tech. Using a chainsaw to replace hours of axe work is probably a sensible tradeoff, but using voice-activated software to spare us from moving our arms is probably not.”
Moderator analyses indicated that action video game play robustly enhances the domains of top-down attention and spatial cognition, with encouraging signs for perception. Publication bias remains, however, a threat with average effects in the published literature estimated to be 30% larger than in the full literature.”
Learning analytics platforms appear to displace the embodied expert judgement of the teacher to the disembodied pattern detection of data analytics algorithms.” This platformisation only defers the dreams of emancipatory education, perhaps putting it out of reach permanently.”
Overall, the body of research suggests that learning suffers with no face-to-face instruction. Students in blended courses appear to do about the same as those in fully face-to-face courses. If a blended course frees up teachers’ time, that time can be transferred to additional courses, or to extra attention to students who are struggling.”
The Amish, it turns out, do something that’s both shockingly radical and simple in our age of impulsive and complicated consumerism: they start with the things they value most, then work backwards to ask whether a given technology performs more harm than good with respect to these values.”
What if we were to theorize that the learning management system (LMS) is designed, not for learning or teaching, but for the gathering of data? And what if we were to further theorize that the gathering of data, as messaged and marketed through the LMS, has become conflated with teaching and learning?”
Looking at a screen is not living. It’s a concentrated decoding operation that requires the keen, exhausting vision of a predator and not the soft focus that allows all doors of perception to swing open… The trick is to read technology instead of being captured by it… Paradoxically, framing the internet as a text to […]
I spent my career in technology. I wasn’t prepared for its effect on my kids.”
After a decade and a half, and at a cost of about $12 million annually (around one percent of the state’s education budget), Maine has yet to see any measurable increases on statewide standardized test scores.”
While both of these studies make wide generalizations about the detrimental impact of technology on education, neither offers any recommendations, such as those presented below.”
In the 1990’s increasing reliance on navigation technologies including GPS caused the Navy to drop celestial navigation from its officer training curriculum. Now, increasing awareness of the vulnerability of these systems to hacking and other types of disruption has prompted it to reintroduce the requirement.”
The question isn’t whether the subtleties of human thought will continue to lie beyond the reach of computers. They almost certainly will. The question is whether we’ll continue to appreciate the value of those subtleties as we become more dependent on the mindless but brutally efficient calculations of our machines.”
To better understand the photographic phenomenon and how people form their identities online, Georgia Institute of Technology researchers combed through 2.5 million selfie posts on Instagram to determine what kinds of identity statements people make by taking and sharing selfies.”
How Pearson grew from a construction company in Yorkshire, England to the world’s largest education company.”
“Dividing attention between an electronic device and the classroom lecture did not reduce comprehension of the lecture, as measured by within-class quiz questions. Instead, divided attention reduced long-term retention of the classroom lecture, which impaired subsequent unit exam and final exam performance.”
The Guardian has seen more than 100 internal training manuals, spreadsheets and flowcharts that give unprecedented insight into the blueprints Facebook has used to moderate issues such as violence, hate speech, terrorism, pornography, racism and self-harm.”
Some highlights: …The rising Snapchat generation: Millennials communicate with text, but Generation Z prefers to communicate with images… Generation Y is the first generation to prefer chatting over the web or social media to talk to businesses, rather than over the phone…”
Our initiative set out with the goals of presenting a cohesive report on challenges and opportunities across the interacting subfields of education research, engaging in the public discourse surrounding the practice of online education, and influencing policy and policymakers to create a welcoming environment for educational innovation.”
“For example, Uber has a mobile app (UI) that talks to their servers (API). You can imagine that their servers effectively take three parameters: credit card, drive from, and drive to… and they dispatch a human to do it.”
“It took decades for the telephone to reach 50% of households, beginning before 1900. It took five years or less for cellphones to accomplish the same penetration in 1990.”
“These days, ‘the state of permanent receptivity’ has become the birthright of anyone with a smartphone.”