Thursday's Three Things—Open Tools, Bad Experiments, Right Doses
Three Things. On a Thursday.
Thursday’s Three Things looks a lot like the school year’s WDYN Wednesday—but it recognizes the pace of the summer months, taking a page from Ecocycle Planning. Not every source will be immediately applicable, and some might even trend towards general, philosophical considerations in the world of teaching and learning. But we’ve no doubt found them useful in some way, and as always, they’ve made us think. As legendary former Girl Scouts CEO Frances Hesselbein said, “You have to carry a big basket to bring something home.” Consider this our basket. What you choose to take is up to you.
We’ll continue this weekly series through mid-August, when we shift gears and ramp up for the start of the year. Onto this week's Thursday’s Three Things below!
Thursday’s Three Things
Press the Link on Pressing Prompts—We loved this resource recently, from a team of thinkers and doers at Duke University. Pressing Prompts is an “open collection of activities, resources, and pedagogical guidance for higher education instructors bringing AI ethics into their classrooms.” While oriented towards higher education, most of the materials are applicable for high schoolers. We particularly like the design of the site and the ways you can build and remix resources, questions, and activities, and to meet your specific needs. So too do we appreciate the ways the designers openly wrestle with using AI to build the tool itself and their emphasis on being able to “hold competing perspectives in tension,” along with our responsibility to inform students amidst their own journeys.
The Beautiful (Bad) Experiment—We are nerds at heart (but with a wide range of interests) which is why this paper caught our eye amidst the ongoing revelry of the FIFA World Cup. G.K. Skinner and G.H. Freeman pose the question, “Are soccer matches badly designed experiments?” They conclude that yes they are, due to the low shot incidents that take place during a game, thus allowing for random outcomes and unpredictability. “What does this have to do with teaching and learning?” you’re rightly wondering at this point. What if our classrooms are badly designed experiments as it relates to measuring learning? Do we design enough incidents to truly measure the things we intend? Might our scoreboard actually be lying to us? We don’t have the answers, but it’s worth thinking about this summer.
A CEO’s Syllabus—CEO of Box, Aaron Levie, had a provocative post on X this spring that’s resonating with us this summer, where he openly grapples with what colleges should be teaching to students. At its heart is a question about AI and proper dosage as it pertains to subject matter expertise. Levie lands on the idea that 75% of the learning should be discipline specific and 25% should be AI skills-related and applicable to the domain.1 While Levie’s intended audience is higher education, it’s a question our CTL team routinely ponders, specifically as we help teachers develop AI-infused courses this summer. We’re fairly firm in the belief that PK-12 is not a place to train workers, but we do want to help teachers expose students to new technologies and to support development (appropriately) at various points.
Your Weekly Moment of Zen
The Weekly Moment of Zen is often about finding adjacent inspiration. Is it also a rip off of the longstanding Daily Show segment of the same name? Absolutely. Everything is a remix. Think of it as a final stamp on each week’s post. Typically it’s not explicitly teaching and learning related, but if you squint hard enough we think you’ll see some parallels.
This week’s Moment of Zen comes via YouTube and the new Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood channel. With segments ranging from short clips to full-length episodes it offers a healthy dose of nostalgia, but also a wholesome contribution to the increasingly dark corners of the web. You’ll see lots of his ‘Nine Rules for Speaking to Children’ on display. You might even encounter King Friday XIII himself, which feels like a scheduling error—he's got the wrong day, we've got the wrong king.
Thus concludes this week’s Thursday’s Three Things—we’ll see you next week
He is open to different numbers. He’s really just wondering out loud.