The Hammock Is Up!
Summer is nigh, so find your happy place, get your sway going, and get ready to stay sharp with your friends at Palmer Media!
It’s August. The height of hammock season. It’s time to relax and unwind. We have 31 days (30 now) to forget what day it is before September reminds us to get busy again.
We’ve got the hammock up in Brooklyn, teaching our three year old how to relax. He’s reminding us how much fun it is to sway back and forth. It’s all about value exchange after all.
But for fear of getting logy during the dog days around here, we’ve got three great shows to keep you sharp amid the haze. We talk to a retired poker pro who is now a decision education advocate, the CEO of a UK EdTech company with over 30 years experience and plenty of wisdom to impart, and the Managing Director of Schmidt Futures who is advocating for further investment in learning engineering and educational R&D. We conclude with a few goodbyes to folks who personified dignity and strength. Lots to chew on!
Thanks for the support!
-Your Friends at Palmer Media
Thinking in Bets with Annie Duke
Our latest Best of Trending in Ed features Annie Duke’s appearance from July of 2019 just after she released her book Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don’t Have All the Facts. We enjoy thinking back to that simpler time while also gleaning all the insights we can from our conversation with Annie.
Annie talks extensively about the importance of Decision Education in K12. While behavioral economics and decision science have made inroads in adult education, these topics typically don’t fit neatly into K12 schedules. She explains how she and Eric Brooks Co-Founded the Alliance for Decision Education to respond to this absence. Along the way, we explore Pete Carroll’s decision-making in Superbowl XLIX as a cautionary tale about “resulting” and other cognitive biases.
Annie’s written a few books, launched a podcast and a course of her own since we last caught. She continues to be awesome. You can find out more about all of this here.
More Sharp Takes from Al Kingsley
As if that weren’t enough. We’ve got more for you. This time with the latest interview from the Trending in Ed feed. Mike is rejoined by Al Kingsley who has been traveling the earth advocating for teachers and spotting emerging trends in EdTech.
Al has been the CEO of NetSupport for over 26 years and an Edtech Industry veteran for 30+ years. He is a school governor in his native U.K. and was just named co-chair of Workstream 4 at the Foundation for Educational Development. He’s a frequent speaker on the global edtech circuit and has his own podcast NetSupport Radio. He authored a book last summer titled, My Secret #EdTech Diary. And he was recently named Edtech Digest’s 2022 Best Edtech Author/Speaker or Podcaster.
He rejoins us for a conversation about the need for respect for educators in these challenging times. We explore pathways into careers in EdTech and School Leadership as Al imparts his broad experience in international education trends and online learning. He highlights the importance of focusing on the well-being of teachers as well as a learners in these challenging times when respect for the teaching profession is under siege.
And we were able to squeeze in Hogwarts and Austin Powers references along the way. It’s all about keeping it spicy these days, after all.
Kumar Garg on Learning Engineering Tools and R&D
And bringing it home for us this week, we’ve got Kumar Garg talking about emerging learning tools that blend computational thinking, data science, and learning science into breakthrough innovations for learning at scale. Kumar is featured in the latest episode of Future of Work - A Trending in Ed Series. You can find all of this here on the Trending in Ed site.
Kumar is the Managing Director of Schmidt Futures, a venture facility for public benefit that recently cosponsored the Futures Forum on Learning Tools Competition with Citadel. Kumar joins Mike to talk about the winners of the tools competition.
Kumar begins by sharing his origin story which includes an eight-year run in the Obama administration heading up its efforts to grow and develop STEM education in the US. From there we explore the idea of learning engineering which combines insights in computer science, computational thinking, and big data with emerging insights in learning science to create scalable breakthrough innovations in education. Kumar walks through the structure and design of the competition and reflects on the benefits of connecting entrepreneurial innovation with academic research and scientific methods to unlock learning innovation at scale.
From there, we discuss Rising on Air and UPchieve as case studies of the types of programs that emerged from the competition before concluding with Kumar's thoughts on the importance of R&D and infrastructure funding to drive the next generation of the learning ecosystem.
It's an insightful and far-reaching conversation about the future of Ed Tech that you won't want to miss.
Closing Thoughts
We got hit with a couple of big losses over the weekend. Bill Russell and Nichelle Nichols changed the world and lived with a dignity and strength from which we can all draw inspiration.
We’re working on the right treatment for all of this on Running It Back and Trending in Ed. Maybe we need to start a new feed dedicated to cutting-edge media that would make Lieutenant Uhura proud!?!?
More on that next time. For now we’ll need some quality time in the hammock to help the thinking coalesce. Beam us out!
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