Innovation for Education

My photo of Connecticut Ave Sunday night We need better crap detection now . On Sunday afternoon, I walked to Little Red Fox, my favorite DC cafe, to get a sandwich. It's a weekend ritual for me. About thirty minutes after I left the place, police had the block barricaded and patrons in all the nearby restaurants were on lockdown. A nut with an assault rifle was threatening diners at Comet Ping Pong, a pizza place right next door to my lunch cafe. Today I found out that this incident, one I very nearly was a part of, made the New York Times: In Washington Pizzeria Attack, Fake News Brought Real Guns To me this is yet more evidence that we desperately need better "crap detection". This isn't something that has implications some day down the road. This is relevant right now. People with misguided ideas about how the world works, motivated by completely fictional news, are taking to the streets to act, sometimes aggressively in response to what they read. The wor...

I really enjoyed Howard Gardner's book The App Generation. I read it during breaks at work, stopping to highlight passages I thought were important, and I found myself highlighting quite a bit. Gardner's ideas about this young generation's unique characteristics, skills, challenges and habits really resonated with me. There is so much discussion right now about what the app world is doing to our attention, biases, habits, social interactions and relationships. This world is new, and we're just figuring it out. Some of what he described I could relate to; some I had observed in my own students and even in my peers. Some of this stuff mirrors what I'd read in other books on similar subjects. One great book in the same vein is comedian Aziz Ansari's book Modern Romance . If you haven't read this book yet, I can't recommend it enough. Not only is it filled with Ansari's lovable charm and hilarious wit, but he wrote it with sociologist Eric Klinenber...

I'd like to begin this week's reflection by saying that I think this is one of the most important books we've read so far. Howard Rheingold's text is a dense research-filled tome about the various personal, social, psychological and societal impacts of our use of the Internet. His goal is to lay out for us the ways we might become more effective users and participants in the net-saturated world. People used to say things like "get ready, because soon technology will be all around us." Well, I feel strongly that it's time to put adages like that behind us. That time is already here. I'm typing this reflection into a self-publishing platform called blogger, one of the earliest blog platforms that's still going strong at 17 years old -  an impressive pedigree for any Internet medium. If Blogger were one of my students, it would be old enough to take its driver's test. As I type this I'm using a Smartphone app called Grubhub to order Chinese ...