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Facebook’s plans for two ambitious projects: one to develop a system for letting you type with just your thoughts, and another to let you “hear” using vibrations on your skin. This would be done through brain-computer interfaces — devices that can read neural activity and translate it into digital signals, and vice versa

Facebook’s goal is to develop something it calls a “brain click — a way to complete tasks in augmented reality using your mind. You could brain click to dismiss a notification that popped up on your AR glasses, for example

letting people type with their thoughts

There’s an idea that’s been gaining ground in the tech community lately: Everyone should learn to code. But here’s the problem with that idea: Coding is not the new literacy.

Selling coding as a ticket to economic salvation for the masses is dishonest

It’s one thing to have to relearn behaviours when you switch machines, it’s another to have to re-learn them every time you plug in a peripheral.

the necessity, or not, of drivers for accessories was a big part of that competitive push by Apple, which made a point of ensuring out-of-the-box support for many of the most commonly used peripherals like printers, cameras and mice. When Steve Jobs said “it just works”, this is the sort of thing he was referring to: the ability to plug in a mouse and have it Just Work. Installing drivers for a mouse to enable a niche behaviour is no great hardship, but it still left me moderately concerned. Microsoft made both the mouse and the laptop, yet the two weren’t able to play nicely together without my intervention. This digging in the nuts and bolts of the machine was not something I had missed.

It’s a fantastic machine. Small and powerful, with a long battery life, it impresses as a laptop, but its real strengths are revealed when you undock the screen from its base. Being able to carry my laptop around the kitchen when doing the weekly shop, before docking it back and typing up some recipes, was genuinely cool.

we see little to be concerned about with the game

Granted, kids’ enthusiasm for Fortnite can be a little much, but we are old enough to remember Garbage Pail kids and have played Pokémon.

one of the best things educators can do is bystander training. That is, we can teach kids appropriate ways to respond when they see distrustful, harassing, or hateful behavior.

The claim that the students who didn’t use tablets performed better academically is based upon exam scores, which were only one-third of a standard deviation higher for the non-tablet crowd than the others. Some might see this as a large difference; I do not, and I doubt a majority of statisticians would either. But hey–why let the fact that this was a superficial study conducted with a small sample size of atypical students examining only one type of technology deter you from claiming that all technology in the classroom is bad? This is what people in the psych business call “confirmation bias,” I believe.

no mention of pedagogy at all

They don’t even acknowledge, much less control for, pedagogy.

Too often, designers of educational materials and activities simply add a thin layer of technology and gaming over antiquated curriculum and pedagogy

But I’m also sure that some students found it very discouraging and disempowering. And the activity put an emphasis on questions that can be answered quickly with right and wrong answers — certainly not the type of questions that I would prioritize in a classroom.

In many cases, the skeptics apply very different standards to new technologies than to “old” technologies. They worry about the antisocial impact of a child spending hours working on a computer, while they don’t have any concerns about a child spending the same time reading a book. They worry that children interacting with computers don’t spend enough time outside, but they don’t voice similar concerns about children playing musical instruments. I’m not suggesting that there are no reasons for concern. I’m just asking for more consistency.

the profile of a programmer’s mind is pretty uncommon. As well as being highly analytical and creative, software developers need almost superhuman focus to manage the complexity of their tasks

you’d never hear someone say that brain surgery is “fun,” or that structural engineering is “easy.” When it comes to programming, why do policymakers and technologists pretend otherwise?

Insisting on the glamor and fun of coding is the wrong way to acquaint kids with computer science. It insults their intelligence and plants the pernicious notion in their heads that you don’t need discipline in order to progress. As anyone with even minimal exposure to making software knows, behind a minute of typing lies an hour of study.

the study has a number of features that reduce confidence in the robustness of the findings.

The review of prior literature is unbalanced to emphasise adverse effects of screen time and ignore conflicting studies

too small to give reliable estimates of effects of screen time

there’s still no longitudinal data about digital reading. As she put it, “We’re in a place of apprehension rather than comprehension.” And it’s quite possible that the apprehension is misplaced: perhaps digital reading isn’t worse so much as different than print reading

they also need different sorts of training to excel at each medium. The online world, she argues, may require students to exercise much greater self-control than a physical book. “In reading on paper, you may have to monitor yourself once, to actually pick up the book,” she says. “On the Internet, that monitoring and self-regulation cycle happens again and again.