Craft Schools
What if schools (why not education in general) were run by craftspeople? As Henrietta Thompson writes, “From houses to handbags, models of consumption are changing. Increasingly, we look to borrow rather than buy to ease the pressure on our over-burdened storage units, savings accounts, and souls. But, while many learn to make do with less, as with any major trend there is also big business to be found on the flip-side: collecting.” (Trends, Business Life, February 2019).
Of Ethics and Artificial Intelligence
Bias, privacy, and security issues are challenges that we already face in our very human lives, and they are mirrored in the development of AI. Strangely, it might give us a small degree of comfort to know that, although we don’t know exactly what AI will bring, it exhibits risk characteristics with which we are already familiar and against which we already strive to stay ahead of the game. Such risks will need to become part of risk management in schools, which includes the governance level as well as the senior management team.
Contagious
Being brave is not a risk. After all, that’s how you stand out. “It’s more of a risk to blend in because nobody notices you.” So goes the seemingly counter-intuitive advice in The Contagious Commandments, co-authored by Paul Kemp-Robertson and Chris Barth. Schools would do well to heed the risk of blending in. The tome is full of ‘commandments,’ a series of admonitions that result in a positive impact, whether that is increased brand awareness, attitudes toward a brand, or performance.
How Well Can We Serve Gifted Students
The topic of gifted education is a frequent one in international school circles. Some schools offer a gifted programme, while others are thinking about it, and still others eschew it entirely. There are many sides to the debate of whether to include gifted programming, yet what I don’t hear often enough is a questioning of the evidence as to whether such programmes are even effective. Do they truly benefit students that qualify as ‘gifted’?
Control of Combinatorial Explosion
One of the things I appreciate deeply about impactful school communities is how we treat knowledge and knowledge structures. Roger C. Schank once wrote that, “[k]nowing what particular knowledge structure we are in while processing can help us determine how much we want to know about a given event; that is, contexts help narrow the inference process” (AI Magazine 8.4). Continuing to focus on how we, as humans, engage in the intelligent process that we call inference, he says “[m]any possible ways exist to control the combinatorics of the inference process: deciding among them and implementing them is [serious].” (63)