** “Reading used to mean sitting down with a book and turning pages as a story unfolded. Today it may mean sitting down with a device that offers multimedia experiences and blurs the line between books and toys. All of this has led to a major disruption in how, what, when, and where children and teens read, and there is much we don’t yet know.” ~ Benjamin Herold
** “There is a popular meme called ‘Famous Failures’ featuring quotations on overcoming rejections, failure, and loss from Micheal Jordon, Steve Jobs, Walt Disney, the Beatles, Oprah, and Albert Einstein. The message is familiar. Abundant success lies on the other end of failure. Could guiding our students through their own failures inspire the next groundbreaking physicist, talk-show star, or iPhone inventor? Possible … but not likely. Even if the results end up being a little less grandiose, I think they are just as important. Learning to fail could help our students become more resilient, self-aware, innovative, and compassionate. Not bad for a bunch of ‘failures.'” ~ Anne Sobel, Northwestern University
** “Our children deserve better than having their writing evaluated by machines whose workings are both flawed and hidden from public scrutiny. Whatever benefit current computer technology can provide emerging writers is already embodied in imperfect but useful word processors. Conversations with colleagues at MIT who know much more than I do about artificial intelligence has led me to Perelman’s Conjecture: People’s belief in the current adequacy of Automated Essay Scoring is proportional to the square of their intellectual distance from people who actually know what they’re talking about.” ~ Les Perelman, MIT
** “Their lives swirl in technology, but the nation’s high school students spend little time studying the computer science that is the basis of it all. Few are taught to write lines of code, and few take classes that delve into the workings of the Internet or explain how to create an app.” ~ Donna St. George