Imagination is the ability to create “things” when they don’t exist. We envy imagination amongst children, and imaginative play is an activity that early childhood educators confirm is healthy for young children. It so healthy for their cognitive development, they many promote their programs as encouraging it. As children get older, we are less concerned Read More
I recently rediscovered a story from my teaching career decades ago. It was recalled in a paper written in the after 1990s while working on my master’s degree. The course was “Reading and Writing in the Content Areas,” and I was describing a situation in my grade 7 math classroom. “Today in class, we started talking about triangles. I put on the Read More
192: Understanding Scareware: How Fear Becomes a Cybersecurity Weapon a post for students in newtwork security class, I uploaded my notes about scareware to Co-pilot which wrote this post In the ever‑shifting landscape of cybersecurity threats, scareware stands out not because of its technical sophistication, but because of its psychological precision. Unlike stealthy malware that Read More
a post for students in my community college course A modern computer is an incredibly complex system consisting of processors, memory, hard disks, network interfaces, and a myriad of other input/output devices. If every application programmer had to understand the intricate details of how all these hardware components work, no software would ever get written. Read More
a post for studentsin my operating system course at a community college A modern computer is a highly complex system consisting of processors, memory, disks, network interfaces, and a wide variety of input/output devices. If every application programmer had to understand the intricate, idiosyncratic details of how all these hardware components work, no software would Read More
In 1989, I was preparing to participate in a science curriculum project; actually, I was invited to chair the committee, but the curriculum coordinator decided it would be very unpopular to have a first-year teacher assume that role. I did reflect on the work the committee was going to undertake, and this post contains a Read More
Recently, I have been looking through some writing I did in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Some of it is not noteworthy but some if it is. This post is drawn from a note I made in the spring of 1993. Science fair projects are a staple of science teaching (or at least it Read More
a post created by AI using my notes for my course in operating systems as source 1. Introduction: The OS as the “Beautiful” Interface To the contemporary systems architect, a computer is a staggeringly complex assembly of processors, main memory, disks, network interfaces, and diverse I/O devices. From an application programmer’s perspective, the raw hardware Read More
A post prepared for students in my network security course The internet is a complex construction of devices and connections that spans the globe. It can be difficult to conceptualize every aspect of the internet to use it securely. By understanding how black hats find targets and how they create attacks against those targets, the cybersecurity defenses we build are improved. Read More
174: Contingencies and Technology Planning The decisions that past technology teams made and the hardware, software, and network infrastructure they installed affect the decisions that can be made in the future. Especially in schools, the IT system tends to be a kluge; new features and functions were added piecemeal, and each was made to operate with extant systems. In many cases those integrations depended on custom programming and configurations. School budgets rarely allow for wholesale replacement of technology. The total cost of Read More