The Tech 'Regrets' Industry
Silicon Valley has lost some of its shine in recent months, what with the “fake news” and the bots and the hacks and the hate speech. All the promises about the democratization of infor...
Open Society
'I Can Change'
But I can change, I can change, I can change, I can changeI can change, I can change, I can change If it helps you fall in love (in love) – LCD SoundsystemIn a speech at the Council of the Gr...
Got Dough? How Billionaires Rule Our Schools
Hundreds of private philanthropies together spend almost $4 billion a year to transform K–12 education, with the Gates, Broad, and Walton foundations leading the way.
Rethinking Being a "Picky Eater"
Why am I such a “picky eater”? Well, if you could experience my autistic senses for a few hours, I bet you’d be more understanding.
Trust Kids!
Trust Kids! Solidarity begins at home: a primer on freedom and equality in families and households.
Trust Kids! weaves together essays, interviews, poems, and artwork from scholars, activists, and artists about our relationships with children in all are
Comparative efficacy and acceptability of 21 antidepressant drugs for the acute treatment of adults with major depressive disorder: a systematic review and network meta-analysis - PubMed
National Institute for Health Research Oxford Health Biomedical Research Centre and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science.
The serotonin theory of depression: a systematic umbrella review of the evidence
Molecular Psychiatry - The serotonin theory of depression: a systematic umbrella review of the evidence
Price the bodymind problem vlbk4h
Denied
A decade ago, the Texas Education Agency arbitrarily decided what percentage of students should get special education services. Today, tens of thousands of disabled children are paying the price.
The History of Ed-Tech: What Went Wrong?
Beth Holland, a doctoral student at JHU and “EdTech Researcher” at Education Week, sent an email asking some questions about the history of ed-tech. The gist of these: how did ed-tech g...
The Pigeons of Ed-Tech
“Edward L. Thorndike won and John Dewey lost.”– Ellen Condliffe Lagemann
“Edward L. Thorndike won and John Dewey lost.”– Ellen Condliffe Lagemann
Skinner was hardly the first to use animals in psychological experiments that sought to understand how the learning process works. Several decades earlier, for his dissertation research, Edward Thorndike had built a “puzzle box” in which an animal had to push a lever in order to open a door and escape (again, often rewarded with food for successfully completing the “puzzle”). Thorndike measured how quickly animals figured out how to get out of the box after being placed in it again and again and again – their “learning curve.”
We have in the puzzle box and in the Skinner Box the origins of education technology – some of the very earliest “teaching machines” – just as we have in the work of Thorndike and Skinner, the foundations of educational psychology and, as Lagemann has argued, of many of our educational practices still today. (In addition to developing the puzzle box, Thorndike also developed prototypes for what we know now as the multiple choice test.)
Learning, according to Skinner and Thorndike, is about behavior – about reinforcing those behaviors (knowledge, answers) that educators deem “correct.”
Education technology has roots in war as well – in Thorndike’s development of standardized testing for World War I recruits, in the Department of Defense’s development of SCORM and in its use of computer-based training simulations. Simon Ramo, “the father of the intercontinental ballistic missile,” is also the oldest person to ever receive a patent – yes, in education technology – “for any person, business, or entity seeking information to ensure that information being presented is useful by being understood.”
The pigeon. The object of technological experimentation, manipulation, and control, weaponized.
The pigeon. The child. The object of ed-tech.
The pigeon. The history of the future of education technology.
Replacing control with ecologies of care
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In our society the fiction of homo economicus manifests itself in the beliefs associated with the language of behaviourism, which exists in multiple dialects, and which has come to permeate and pollute many disciplines in the social sciences:
Leaders, authorities, managers, superiors, social power gradients
Leadership, demands, commands
Management, measurement, control
Incentives, aversives, punishments
Business, tasks, busyness
Standards, norms, benchmarks, unwritten rules
Conformance, compliance, obedience
Some level of standardisation and conformance is useful for collaboration at human scale (i.e. small/local scale), but the more the purpose of conformance relates to maintaining social power gradients, the greater damage in terms of loss of diversity and locally relevant knowledge.
The sections below are extracts from articles that discuss the effects of behaviourist pseudoscience in parenting, education, in the workplace, in economics, and in science. The featured interview with Alfie Kohn offers an excellent introduction to behaviourism.
Create open source communities instead of walled gardens of intellectual property rights – to create a global knowledge commons and to maximise collective intelligence
S10803 021 05221 3
Translanguaging as a humanizing pedagogy
Elif Shafak writes about the need to ‘tell different stories to humanize the other’; let’s tell different stories that humanize our multilingual learners as we ‘create radically human-centered classrooms’.
The beauty of collaboration at human scale
Timeless patterns of human limitations Jorn Bettin, 2021, published by S23M. Through the lenses of evolutionary biology and cultural evolution, small groups of 20 to 100 people are the primary orga…
The Wall of Awful™ - ADHD Essentials
The Multimodal Treatment of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder Study (MTA):Questions and Answers
Multimodal Treatment of ADHD Study (MTA) | Youth and Family Research Program | University of Pittsburgh
Principal Investigator: Brooke Molina, PhD Funding Source: National Institute of Mental Health, National Institute on Drug Abuse, Department of Education, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention
The Multimodal Treatment of ADHD Study (MTA):Questions and Answers – ADD Resource Center
How to Deal with Madness? | Jorge Silva on Patreon
Official Post from Jorge Silva
Corporate mindfulness is bullsh*t: Zen or no Zen, you're working harder and being paid less
Mindfulness matters, but make no mistake: Corporations are co-opting the idea to disguise the ways they kill us
thespectrum.pdf
Discouraged by peer excellence public copy
Autism + ADHD = Irrepressible Genius + Depression & Anxiety.
I nearly died in 2014. My brain ate itself. I now know this to be the result of a massive Autistic burnout at the age of 44, having flogged myself to be the best “Norm” I could, I had n…
Resources
These are resources for: autistic maskers of any gender newly diagnosed autistic people/questioning if autistic neurotypicals and non-autistics parents of autistic people For Parents New to Autism:…
Collaborate on complex problems, but only intermittently
When solving problems, both groups in which members never interacted and groups whose members constantly interacted provided expected results. The surprising outcome came from groups whose members collaborated intermittently.
Perhaps the most interesting result was that when their interactions were intermittent, the higher performers were able to get even better by learning from the low performers. When high and low performers interacted constantly, the low performers tended to simply copy high performers’ solutions and were in turn generally ignored by the high performers. But when their interactions were intermittent, the low performers’ ideas helped the high performers achieve even better solutions.
What makes us different, makes all the difference in the world.
Randimals Our friends and allies at Randimals have a saying, What makes us different, makes all the difference in the world.Randimals We agree. Table of Contents🦔 Spiky Profiles🏔 Learning Terroir🏗 …
The neurodiversity movements needs its shoes off, and fists up.
I have to respond with a resounding and vehement NO. I do not believe in even attempting to appease the impossible, asymptoptic standards of respectability politics and (white, abled, cis, masculine-centric) professionalism simply because such attempts will always and inevitably be doomed to fail.
The Myth of the Male and Female Brain: Five Questions for Gina Rippon
The author of “Gender and Our Brains” argues that male and female brains are one and the same, that neuroimages are often misinterpreted, and that external factors like gender stereotypes and real-world experiences account for any detectable differences in mental processing between the genders.
“Pathological”/ “Extreme”/ “Rational” Demand-Avoidance: Reviewing and Refining its Contested Terrain Through an Educational Perspective
Pathological Demand-Avoidance (PDA) is a proposed mental Disorder which originated in the United Kingdom (UK), with persons identified with PDA exhibiting strong avoidance behaviours in response to “ordinary” demands. Initially proposed as a novel type of Disorder, it was briefly suggested it was a Pervasive Developmental Disorder, before often being argued to be an Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) in the UK. Currently, there is no consensus over what PDA is, or what features are associated with it, partly due to the small number and generally poor-quality studies. With many controversies surrounding PDA, frequently with intense passions invoked for and against its use in clinical practice. Hence, there are four different main schools of thought on how to conceptualise PDA. Primary justification for PDA is that it better describes an individual's actions and thus informs personalised education support packages based on collaborative approaches, which regularly breach adult-centric cultural boundaries.Since 2010, interest in PDA as an ASD in the UK, has resulted in the notion being a “culture-bound concept” in the UK. In part driven by some clinicians diagnosing PDA as an autism subtype and some researchers investigating PDA as an autism subtype. Independent from both the poor state of PDA research and ongoing-historical debates surrounding PDA. Despite arbiters of clinical practice taking a neutral stance on PDA and equally respecting divergent perspectives. There is a need ...