The Pigeons of Education Technology

From The Atlantic: The extinction of various species has led to a segregation of human activity and natural activity, says Stewart Brand of The Long Now Foundation, which focuses on long-term strategies for the next 10,000 years. The organization develops biotechnology to allow humans to better co-exist with nature. In...

"Pigeon from Pakistan spreads hate message," The Times of India reports. The pigeon's flight across the India-Pakistan border follows incidents last week of balloons with "malicious messages." Notably residents of border village spread across the Radcliff Line have a common hobby of pigeon flying and spotting of Pakistani pigeons in...

"Pigeon racing faces extinction as clubs struggle to attract fledgling talent," says Australia's ABC. "Kids these days," the story suggests, are more interested in iPads than birds.

"Pigeons Resist Misguided Leaders," says The New York Times. The researchers found that when homing pigeon leaders go astray, the flock corrects the flight path. "...knowledge of how the pigeons work might be useful in creating swarms of small robots for activities like search and rescue. If researchers can reduce...

"Pigeons Can Read A Little Bit, New Research Shows," says Popular Science. After narrowing down to the four brightest birds out 18, over eight months of training, the advanced-class pigeons were taught to distinguish four-letter words from non-words. They were even able to tell the difference between correctly spelled words...

On September 22, I presented a keynote at the Designs on eLearning conference on pigeons and cyborgs. You can find the full transcript of the talk here. An excerpt: Training pigeons, whether for military service or otherwise, has a long history; studying this training, investigating how teaching and learning works...

This post also appeared on Hack Education "With or without aversive contingencies, it is easy to 'lose our pigeon' and the student never becomes a reader" -- B. F. Skinner, The Technology of Teaching I’m a bit tardy on writing up my thoughts on the “rebranding,” if you will, of...

Last week, I was chatting with Bryan Mathers, who I've commissioned to design some logos and imagery for Hack Education. He asked if I thought that most of my readers understood the pigeon references. I said "no." In some ways, it's a joke that is just for me and the...