

Why Every Educator Should Read Hacker News - ajjuliani
http://educationismylife.com/why-every-educator-should-read-hacker-news/

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spindritf
> As educators we are constantly trying to spark our student’s “intellectual
> curiosity”.

Rarely. Let's be honest here, most teachers are not even teaching, not to
mention sparking anything. They're just (slightly) glorified babysitters
maintaining a space where people store their kids during the day (vide
<http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html>) with some supposed benefit to the kids
and society at large but the results are so hard to quantify that no really
knows.

You're an outlier in your field. Which is also probably why there is no
popular site like HN for educators -- there are too few of you who really
care, not in theory, not in declaration but in the constant effort to improve
their process and results. I'm not blaming them, there are no incentives, no
feedback loop, and almost no leaders to imitate.

~~~
ajjuliani
I think I may have agreed with you completely five years ago, but today's
world of education is changing...fast.

We may be still seen as outliers in our field, but the landscape is changing
an many educators are getting on board. I'm also looking at the glass
somewhere half full, which may not be the case...

~~~
malandrew
There are enough tools now for these teachers to find one another rather than
been islands in a school.

Growing up, I can count the number of educators that cared enough to "hack
their craft" on one hand. None of them knew about each other. What has changed
is that these people now have a way to know one another. This also helps some
teachers with hacking potential that would have otherwise slipped through the
cracks to realize potential as a hacking teacher.

TBH, without a site like hacker news and places like github, how many here
would still be working a lame enterprise programming job coding in VB.NET or
Java in the basement of some big company where programming isn't the core
business, but simply view as another job that needs to be done.

~~~
japhyr
"There are enough tools now for these teachers to find one another rather than
been islands in a school."

This is not true. I've been teaching for 15 years, and I've looked every year
or two for good online ed communities. There are some good ideas out there,
but every one I have seen has a significant shortcoming: over-commercialized,
technologically inferior, poorly moderated, diluted by the whining and
complaining that plagues staff rooms...

The value of a true HN clone is real. I'd love to see someone make an exact
clone of HN, called Educator News, if pg would be fine with it. I can't run
it, but I'd sure help moderate it.

------
gaelenh
I loathe passing around links about education to anyone in the profession. The
comments almost immediately go negative. The first comment on this post was
calling teachers babysitters. Everyone immediately turns against each other
(parents, teachers, armchair educators, politicians).

Most good school teachers don't have time to read sites like hacker news for
even an hour a day. They're in the weeds --running after school programs,
early morning programs, writing IEPs, planning upcoming lessons, and whole
slew of other stuff most people don't even think about.

People in the tech field all have the luxury to stop working to check out a
few articles on the internet. We even pretend like this is making us better at
our job. Teachers do not have this kind of time. They are on the moment they
walk in to the moment they walk out (and them some more before they go to
sleep).

Good teachers are like full stack engineers. They have to worry about
everything and carry all the wait. They're thrown into a 50+ year system that
almost never changes. Their version of a startup is creating a new school, and
that's still a derisive, hot topic (chart schools). Instead most of them work
for the education equivalent of IBM.

But still, Academic Recess sounds like a good idea. I just signed up. Hit me
up at gaelenh at gmail dot com if you want any help.

~~~
ajjuliani
Don't let the haters get us down! I'll reiterate that I do believe perception
is changing amongst many teachers in the field. However, the perception
outside of the field is what you said...

~~~
gaelenh
In NYC I would say that it's still a mixed. The comment section on
gothamschools.org (great local edu news site) is full of Angry Teachers
waiting in the wing to jump on editorials and commenters with vitriolic
language.

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japhyr
I am a high school teacher who reads HN as well. I completely agree; there are
many ideas in the hacker world that are quite relevant to education. I would
love to see an "Educator News" clone of HN. A simple site where the focus is
on high-quality ed articles, where all the BS banter and whining that occurs
on almost all ed sites is downvoted and killed. A site where educators who act
as professionals every day gather, and start to take education back from
politicians and legislators. I will check out Academic Recess. If it's a clone
of HN, and it is well-moderated, I will love it. If it's just inspired by HN,
I'll wait and see.

~~~
ajjuliani
We are planning a similar site and we are looking for moderators... Thanks for
the interest and I completely agree.

~~~
japhyr
I just signed up. I'd be happy to be a moderator with the goal of creating a
professionally-minded community that demonstrates ownership of education.

------
malandrew
Interestingly I think the OP indirectly touch upon the reason why everyone
should learn to program and not just people who want to do so as a profession.

Programming is the lever which allows members of a community to surmount all
the obstacles that form a barrier to sharing, collaboration and developing
best practices out in the open with others.

Without programming, sharing and collaboration is reduced to the amount
afforded by fundamentally human "bandwidth". Programming gives you the tools
to create and marginally, but constantly improve systems to increase not only
the bandwidth between two members of the community, but the number of people
within the community with whom a single member can collaborate and share with.

I would say that tools like Github are the most important tools in the
community because use of it ultimately inspires a lot of the discussion in the
community. It takes the basic building block of what the community is most
passionate about, code, and accelerates and multiplies the interactions
between two to many people involving that code.

In the educational community, something similar that involves lesson plans,
exercises and other teaching material would be awesome.

For example, were I a science teacher, how could would it be if it were easy
to share exercises, fork and modify them, hack together individual exercises
of greater complexity that not only teach underlying principles but how
multiple underlying principles work together.

What tools would allow people who have a passion for teaching to come together
and collaborate over material? Programming allows the building of those tools.
The more members there are of a community that can program, the more likely
that there will be diversity of solutions and rapid iterations of those
solutions.

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bgraves
Very interesting post. I've been getting more into educational technology (I
have school aged children and recently became co-chair of the tech committee
at their school).

I've been thinking of a "Hacker News for Education" for some time, so I signed
up for academicrecess -- let me in! :)

<http://academicrecess.com/?lrRef=4EVtr>

