Blog
Practical thinking for education and IT leaders on learning, AI, data, and measuring what matters.
Do Principles Stack?
We stacked our programming principles against our highest goal, enhancing learning for youth, and found a hierarchy. Here's how far it reaches, and where people take over.
SIF Meets AI
A new client, a hub built entirely on the SIF standard, a 227 MB specification and the first AI coding tools. The table and column descriptions turned out to be what made the AI useful.
Two Hours a Day: What Alpha School Gets Right About AI Tutors
Joe Liemandt's Alpha School shows some ingenious ways to run an AI-first school: hire people for what they're best at, let kids admit what they don't know to a tutor that never judges, and act on the data.
From Obedience to Curiosity: What a Philosophy of Education Course Taught Me About AI Tutors
Twenty-five centuries of education swing between obedience and curiosity. With AI tutors and a better grasp of how kids learn, we can finally build schools around the question-asker.
I Did It My Way, or We Followed Standards
With standards, automation gets simpler. Standards go from internal to industry-wide: naming, data modeling, and interoperability frameworks like HL7, SIF and IEEE.
Performance Rules?
Have you ever applied weights to project dimensions? A business need comes up that looks best served by an IT solution. Here's a consideration for a CIO writing the project charter.
Heads in the Clouds Meet the Complainers
CIOs care about networking. Servers, switches, routers — and maybe, once in a while, the social kind too. Here’s something worth knowing: your co-worker’s mood is contagious. The colleague who’s…
What’s a Pareto Distribution and Why Should a CIO Care?
You don’t need to be a mathematician to use this. You just need to know it exists, and that it’s probably already shaping your department right now. The Quick Version Most people assume things in…
Firefighters vs. Turtles — What’s Your Reward Model?
Every IT department has its heroes. The SWAT team that swoops in when the production database goes down at 2 a.m. The on-call engineer who restores service before the executive team finishes their…
When Is It Too Much Investment in an Enterprise Application?
The pitch is always good. The sales team walks you through the platform and every feature speaks directly to a problem you have. Hundreds of clients swear by them. They run massive conferences…
No Pain, No Gain — Finding Your IT Staff’s Real Pain Points
Every IT shop has them. The recurring tickets, the workarounds nobody documents, the late-night calls that everyone shrugs off as “just how things are.” If you’re not actively hunting for these…
When App Support and Infrastructure Actually Work Together
Most IT shops have a quiet rivalry between application support and infrastructure. Different priorities, different tools, different definitions of “done.” But every once in a while, two teams stop…
When Performance Is Measured, Performance Improves
There’s a quote I keep coming back to: “When we deal in generalities, we shall never succeed. When we deal in specifics, we shall rarely have a failure. When performance is measured, performance…
DYI projects have something in common. Can you guess?
There’s an owner, preferring to do the job themselves. Have you asked: Are there tasks done in our IT shop that we could offer up as self-serve services? Are our apps designed so stakeholders can…
Data. Is it your organization’s repository for change?
Part 1 of a 3-part post on your data. Data is primarily about people and their changes over time. Students take courses, Customers buy, Staff do jobs and change jobs, Patients get ill and then…
You hired a hotshot. Amazing!
Well. Let me give you some background on this fellow. He was charged with automating the Windows Updates for the app and DB servers. There were critical on-prem SharePoint servers in the mix. A…
Only Ask Questions: What I Learned Trying to Start a Socratic School
A podcast, a chance meeting in an elevator, and a pitch to bring an Acton Academy-style program into a school district. It didn't launch, but it left me with two rules for every conversation.
What's in a Question?
A kick under the table taught a blunt IT architect that questions don't back people into a corner. Pointing out problems directly does.
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