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Dr. Gary Ackerman @garyackermanphd.bsky.social · 57m

A blog post for students studying for the AWS Cloud Practitioner exam focusing on security;
hackscience.education/2025/10/09/a...

AWS Security

another post for my students preparing for the cloud practitioner exam 132: AWS Security The goal of the Cloud Practitioner’s security module isn’t to make you a cybersecurity guru over…

hackscience.education

Dr. Gary Ackerman @garyackermanphd.bsky.social · 15h

When you recognize contingency and randomness affect all decisions an outcomes you are beginning to be qualified to be a leader.

Dr. Gary Ackerman @garyackermanphd.bsky.social · 16h

If you post, “research shows,” but you don’t reference it, I assume you are making it up.

Dr. Gary Ackerman @garyackermanphd.bsky.social · 17h

Agency. We all want and need it in some part of our lives.

Dr. Gary Ackerman @garyackermanphd.bsky.social · 18h

If you are giving 0 for not handing work in, then you are giving participation grades.

Dr. Gary Ackerman @garyackermanphd.bsky.social · 19h

Don’t be that innovation coach who only recommends things you did before becoming a coach.

Dr. Gary Ackerman @garyackermanphd.bsky.social · 20h

The degree to which flexibility characterizes effective classrooms is overlooked in my opinion.

Dr. Gary Ackerman @garyackermanphd.bsky.social · 21h

Especially in education, long-standing practices have not necessarily proven better than the others.

Dr. Gary Ackerman @garyackermanphd.bsky.social · 22h

Education is about changing humans. When our students leave our classrooms, we expect they can do things, see things, and think things they could not before the class. If our students leave with their abilities unchanged, then they (and we) have wasted their time and energy.

Dr. Gary Ackerman @garyackermanphd.bsky.social · 23h

My blog post reviewing Code Dependent: Living in the Shadow of AI by Madhumita Murgia
tl;dr Read this book! Seriously, read it.
hackscience.education/2025/10/08/r...

Review of Code Dependent: Living in the Shadow of AI

The world is full of AI. Our searches, our social media inboxes, the apps on our phones, and our bookshelves. This becomes overwhelming if we are to try to separate the good stuff from the bad stuf…

hackscience.education

Dr. Gary Ackerman @garyackermanphd.bsky.social · 1d

Did you ever notice those emails to "clarify the process" rarely do?

Dr. Gary Ackerman @garyackermanphd.bsky.social · 1d

I work in IT. I spent all day reminding people we stopped using that system years ago.

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Dr. Gary Ackerman @garyackermanphd.bsky.social · 1d

One thing I learned during 30 years in education: while you are focusing on improving one thing, another becomes a crisis.

Dr. Gary Ackerman @garyackermanphd.bsky.social · 1d

“There is a free tier” isn’t “open source.”

Dr. Gary Ackerman @garyackermanphd.bsky.social · 1d

Classroom grades reflect one’s capacity to succeed in a social hierarchical situation. Let’s recognize that and teachers’ biases… it easier to call them out as they can’t hide behind “objectivity.”

Dr. Gary Ackerman @garyackermanphd.bsky.social · 1d

Your data… that “evidence your interventions work" may well be the Hawthorne Effect.

Dr. Gary Ackerman @garyackermanphd.bsky.social · 1d

Abandon topics and outcomes to focus lesson. Use questions or problems instead. It will improve your teaching and students’ learning.

Dr. Gary Ackerman @garyackermanphd.bsky.social · 1d

“Explain you thinking” helps until it doesn’t. The trick is for teachers to know when to stop.

Dr. Gary Ackerman @garyackermanphd.bsky.social · 1d

I work in IT. I spend all days watching spinning icons.

Dr. Gary Ackerman @garyackermanphd.bsky.social · 1d

The more teachers talk about how they report only academic learning in their grades (whatever they are), the more “other stuff” is included in what they are evaluating.

Dr. Gary Ackerman @garyackermanphd.bsky.social · 2d

Over the weekend, I watched no football games, but many matches.

Dr. Gary Ackerman @garyackermanphd.bsky.social · 2d

In education, we do some things very well. Unfortunately, they are not necessarily the things we should be doing.

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Dr. Gary Ackerman @garyackermanphd.bsky.social · 2d

Classrooms with seats in rows.

This elicits vastly different responses from teachers.

Dr. Gary Ackerman @garyackermanphd.bsky.social · 2d

When I was an undergraduate student doing botany research, we realized our measurements were proxies for something else. They were not reified in our minds. One thing that drive me out of k-12 teaching in the US, was the fact that test scores had become reified.

Dr. Gary Ackerman @garyackermanphd.bsky.social · 2d

It never ceases to amaze me to observe two or more people discussing “learning” and seeing they each have vastly different concepts of it but no one realizes it, yet they argue on. #education #teaching

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Dr. Gary Ackerman @garyackermanphd.bsky.social · 2d

“Taking a class in it” and “knowing it” are not the same thing.

Dr. Gary Ackerman @garyackermanphd.bsky.social · 2d

Learning. A human activity full of myth and mystery, and dedicated to creating fading and false memories.

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Dr. Gary Ackerman @garyackermanphd.bsky.social · 2d

Learning. Such a simple idea. We all have done it for our whole lives. As humans, we have done it since the inception of the species. It has been the subject of philosophical discourse for centuries. Yet we seem to act like we have no idea how it might work.

Dr. Gary Ackerman @garyackermanphd.bsky.social · 2d

"We are taking accessibility seriously," but we excuse leaders whose presentations are not.

Dr. Gary Ackerman @garyackermanphd.bsky.social · 3d

If you can’t tell me what’s wrong with your data, I’m not interested in hearing what you think is right about it.