Welcome to a discussion on a simple yet incredibly powerful technique to boost your learning and retention: prequestions. Often overlooked, the prequestion effect is a phenomenon supported by cognitive science research that shows asking students questions about learning material before they encounter it significantly enhances their learning. Think of it as preparing your brain, or Read More
149: Avoid Black Box Learning AI is all the rage right now. Students use it. Faculty complain about it. Bosses are trying to figure out which jobs can be replaced by it. We are all trying to figure out just how this technology will affect us. It is a challenging time, and responsible educators are Read More
a post for network security students Network security isn’t just about the hardware and software; it’s about understanding the underlying principles that make digital communication secure. Central to this understanding are cryptographic protocols. These aren’t just obscure algorithms; they are the invisible architects of trust and security in every online interaction, from browsing the web Read More
A post for students in my network security course In the domain of network security, while the mastery of technical controls such as firewalls, encryption protocols, and intrusion detection systems is paramount, a foundational understanding of potential adversaries and origins of compromise is equally important. This foundational knowledge pertains to the identification and classification of Read More
Until COVID, I did not read audio books. Now, I read them all the time. (Yes, listening to an audio book is reading; I learn as much from listening as from reading print. I use audiobooks for different purposes, sometimes listening to a book before buying a print copy, or listening to books I’ve already Read More
106: Teaching in the AI World: A Time for John Dewey I’ve been as educator for a long time. In the 1980’s, the folks who taught me how to do the work connected me with John Dewey. I have continued to read his work over my career and wondered what he would have thought of Read More
155: Is It Time to Reject Intelligence as a Construct? Decades ago, I first read Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man. The book was published first in 1981, then a revised edition in 1996 which included essays critical of the 1994 book The Bell Curve. It was this second edit that led a colleague Read More
My summer reading always includes listening to Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man. I discovered Gould in 1984 and have been a lifelong fan of his essays and books. Especially this year, I have been thinking more and more about intelligence and the really weak definitions of it that characterizes our understanding of it. Read More
103: Ownership of Knowledge and AI It is July 2025. “The MIT Article” is all anyone is talking about. This is the article on arXiv.org in which researchers compared the essays written by those using ChatGPT, web search, or only their brains. It is a long and interesting preprint article. The article is surely of Read More
There is a paper that has been causing lots of chatter recently. It is a paper released by authors from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and it suggests that using generative AI (in this case ChatGPT) has important effects humans write essays. Folks who I associate with are educators and technology experts, so they have Read More