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Cooling Technologies, "Cool" Technologies, and Not At All Cool Technologies
I don't know about you, but I'm feeling that end-of-summer, post-Olympics melancholy this week, so this will be a fairly short one. (Shorter than Monday’s massive missive, at least.) I'd say I'm feeling a bit resentful that I'm having
Teaching Machines (for Bodies, Not Brains)
Many histories of education technology start with the hornbook, a fifteenth century invention that, according to Bill Ferster, "married pedagogy and content knowledge into a physical device" — a device that allowed students to learn their letters (without tearing up or writing in an actual book, I guess). Of
The Extra Mile
An author I very much admire complained on Facebook recently that the Olympics are an example of "scarcity economics" – only one gold medal so we don't celebrate everyone's immense talent. The Games – all manner of sports contests, she said – are closely bound up in
The Technologies of the Olympics, Continued
Wow. The US is having one helluva track meet over there in Paris. I'll have more to say in Monday's newsletter – Cole Hocker!!! – as I really am trying to restrict Friday's email to news about health and fitness technology, not just news about my
The Extra Mile
Maybe Not the Sports Technologies You Were Expecting
As a writer about and critic of education technology, I was often asked "what's your favorite piece of ed-tech" – some sort of "gotcha" question, I reckon, in which I was supposed to confess that, in fact, I hate everything. I'd answer "
The Extra Mile
Passing the Torch
Things feel like they've shifted maybe? I mean, is this what it feels like to have hope again? None of us knows if we can do this. And we are about to do it anyway. And the combination of those truths helped me, in those vertiginous few minutes,
The Extra Mile
One of the downsides, I guess, of waiting until Sunday afternoon to write my "Extra Mile" newsletter is that it feels like everyone else has already published their "take" on the week's news. So anything I have to say feels like a repetition of
When a Swim in the Seine Isn't the Week's Zaniest News
Well. The last week has been a year, hasn't it. I will have much more to say on Silicon Valley's Veep candidate and his investment portfolio, along with the latest updates on AI in education in Monday's "The Extra Mile." Let'
The Race Report
A terrible person once said something pithy about “known knowns,” “known unknowns,” and “unknown unknowns” — and my, wouldn’t it be a better world if he had been talking about one’s first triathlon and not, say, the fabrications the Bush Administration used to justify the Iraq War. Because the