If textbooks allowed for controversy, they could show students which claims rest on strong evidence, which on softer ground. As they challenged students to make their own decisions as to what probably happened, they would also be introducing students to the various methods and forms of evidence—oral history, written records, cultural similarities, linguistic changes, human genetics, pottery, archaeological dating, plant migrations—that researchers use to derive knowledge about the distant past. Unfortunately, textbooks seem locked into a rhetoric of certainty.

Source: Loewen, James W.. Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong (p. 41). The New Press. Kindle Edition.

I updated “Created Serendipity: Chance Favors the Connected Mind” with selections from “Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest”.

Rather than connecting with people who are like them only in ascribed characteristics — things we mostly acquire from birth, like family, race, and social class (though this one can change throughout one’s life)—many people have the opportunity to seek connections with others who share similar interests and motivations. Of course, place, race, family, gender, and social class continue to play a very important role in structuring human relationships—but the scope and the scale of their power and their role as a social mechanism have shifted and changed as modernity advanced.(Page 10)

Opportunities to find and make such connections with people based on common interests and viewpoints are thoroughly intertwined with the online architectures of interaction and visibility and the design of online platforms. These factors—the affordances of digital spaces—shape who can find and see whom, and under what conditions; not all platforms create identical environments and opportunities for connection. Rather, online platforms have architectures just as our cities, roads, and buildings do, and those architectures affect how we navigate them. (Explored in depth in later chapters.) If you cannot find people, you cannot form a community with them.

Source: Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest (p. 10-11). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition.

Via: 💬 Online Disinhibition Effect | Read Write Collect

I started to ask a simple question of experts who provide and organize legal defense for condemned prisoners: How many people on death row are disabled? The answer came back unanimously: pretty much all of them.

The status quo is shifting: Just last week, the state of Washington abolished the death penalty after a compelling statistical analysis demonstrated that juries were four times more likely to condemn black defendants than white defendants. Eventually, either wholesale abolition or at least expanded exemptions will come to the remaining death penalty states, including Texas, but likely not in time for Kwame Rockwell.

Source: Kwame Rockwell Will Be the Next Disabled Person Executed by America – Pacific Standard

I think there’s a lot to say about machine learning and the push for “personalization” in education. And the historian in me cannot help but add that folks have trying to “personalize” education using machines for about a century now. The folks building these machines have, for a very long time, believed that collecting the student data generated while using the machines will help them improve their “programmed instruction” – this decades before Mark Zuckerberg was born.

I think we can talk about the labor issues – how this continues to shift expertise and decision making in the classroom, for starters, but also how students’ data and students’ work is being utilized for commercial purposes. I think we can talk about privacy and security issues – how sloppily we know that these companies, and unfortunately our schools as well, handle student and teacher information.

Source: Machine Teaching, Machine Learning, and the History of the Future of Public Education

Masking the real history of high school in America also helps the DeVoses of the world obscure legitimate problems the education system has always faced—problems that have been deliberately created and maintained. Funding inequality and racial segregation are rarely the focus of these sorts of stories about an ever-unchanging educational system. The dominant narrative instead tends to point to teachers or curricula, or even bells and early start times, as the reason schools are “broken” and that students aren’t being adequately prepared for the future.

Source: The History of the Future of High School – VICE

> I have often argued to students, only in part to be perverse, that one cannot understand the history of education in the United States during the twentieth century unless one realizes that Edward L. Thorndike won and John Dewey lost.

(I am assuming, I suppose, that you know who these two figures are: Edward L. Thorndike was an educational psychology professor at Columbia University who developed his theory of learning based on his research on animal behavior – perhaps you’ve heard of this idea of his idea, the “learning curve,” the time it took for animals to escape his puzzle box after multiple tries. And John Dewey was a philosopher whose work at the University of Chicago Lab School was deeply connected with that of other social reformers in Chicago – Jane Addams and Hull House, for example. Dewey was committed to educational inquiry as part of democratic practices of community; Thorndike’s work, on the other hand, happened largely in the lab but helped to stimulate the growing science and business of surveying and measuring and testing students in the early twentieth century. And this is shorthand for Condliffe Lagemann’s shorthand, I realize, but you can think of this victory in part as the triumph of multiple choice testing over project-based inquiry.)

Thorndike won, and Dewey lost. I don’t think you can understand the history of education technology without realizing this either. And I’d propose an addendum to this too: you cannot understand the history of education technology in the United States during the twentieth century – and on into the twenty-first – unless you realize that Seymour Papert lost and B. F. Skinner won.

Source: B. F. Skinner: The Most Important Theorist of the 21st Century