The key skill youve probably never heard of and 4 ways to encourage it
C'est quoi l'anthroposophie - MTA SHORT #4
Savoir dire je ne sais pas - MTA SHORT #5
Nos biais face aux sujets sensibles - MTA SHORT #3
Comment manipuler les masses - MTA SHORT #2
Ostopathie et sotrisme - MTA SHORT #1
Sant mentale : fausses promesses et solutions STREAM #21
ElikaAi AI Trainer v2.0 l mi trng th nghim m ngun m (Apache 2.0) khm ph kh nng AI hc cc k nng c th chuyn giao v siu nhn thc. H thng dng phn hi siu nhn thc v phn thng a chiu AI t ti u ha qua cc lnh vc khc nhau (vd: c caro, tranh lun). D n ny nhm gip cng ng d hiu v tip cn vic hc ca AI.
is the guillotine I hold to my own illusions. When I witness my thoughts as artifacts instead of destiny, I stop being a puppet of conditioning. I become the author, the reboot.
The moment I watch the mind from the outside, the mind stops being my warden and becomes my laboratory.
Executive Function Skills: A Better Approach to Library Behavior Management ALSC Blog
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Executive Function Skills: A Better Approach to Library Behavior Management
As Im sure many of us have experienced, managing behavior can often be a challenge in the library. It can sometimes feel like an uphill battle to encourage positive behavior in our spaces and programs. I recently attended a workshop on Executive Function skills focused on reframing behavior management and strategies to support todays children. While I myself am not an expert in this topic, I found it to be very useful and a worthwhile share. Lets dive in!
In the workshop, we discussed how society has changed in a number of ways. These changes have deeply impacted children today, leading them to be different from previous generations. Broadly speaking, just some of these societal changes include:
-Increase in type, proximity, and usage of new technologies
-Social media usage
-Academic pressure from a young age
-Shifts in parenting styles
-Changing family structures
While these changes have certainly affected the growth and development of childrens brains in a myriad of ways, they are mostly out of our direct control as librarians. We have to start meeting kids where they are at because things are, simply, different. We can view these societal shifts as opportunities to grow and change in our strategies to best support children. One way we can do this is by looking at behavior management through the lens of Executive Function skills.
Executive Function Basics
Executive Function is like the air traffic controller of your brain. These skills are the cognitive processes that help to regulate behavior, make decisions, and set and achieve goals. list 11 mental capacaties, which include:
-Metacognition
-Planning/Prioritizing
-Organization
-Time Management
-Task Initiation
-Sustained Attention
-Working Memory
-Goal-Directed Persistence
-Response Inhibition
-Emotional Control
-Flexibility
These Executive Function skills grow and change over time and not everyones skills develop at the same rate. For example, children who are struggling in the Executive Function areas of sustained attention and inhibitory control may look like kids who arent paying attention/following the rules, however it truly is a skill deficit that they need to learn. A takeaway quote to emphasize this was brains are built not born.
So what can we do
The workshop suggested starting in the area of Metacognition: thinking about our thinking.
This skill is the base for most of the other Executive Function skills. When working with children, we can model our thinking out loud and prompt them with opportunities to reflect on their experiences. One way to try this is by reflecting and questioning during programs. You could ask children reflective questions, such as what worked well, what didnt work for you, how could things have been handled differently, what was your strength during this program. Its also important for children to hear us modeling our own reflective thinking. For this younger age group, its all about growing awareness.
I am new to the world of Executive Functioning but am intrigued to continue learning more. Have you heard of EF in the library Let me know in the comments below!
Joannie Lauria is the Youth Services Consultant at the Suffolk Cooperative Library System in New York.
Continue/Read Original Article Here:
: be your mind's pilot, not passenger
**AI makes you smarter but none the wiser: The disconnect between performance and metacognition**
"In Study 1, participants (N = 246) used AI to solve 20 logical reasoning problems from the Law School Admission Test. While their task performance improved by three points compared to a norm population, participants overestimated their task performance by four points."
Fernandes, D. et al. (2025) 'AI makes you smarter but none the wiser: The disconnect between performance and metacognition,' Computers in Human Behavior, p. 108779. .
Practice what you teach. Because teachings don't function as symbols or metaphorsthey are incarnations of what they advocate.
Sure, it sounds promising to boost decisions in healthcare or defense, but relying too much on brain data feels like handing control over to tech that can be easily twisted or messed with.
Neuroscience revealing neural markers for changing minds is intriguing but risky. Training pros to tweak decisions based on brain activity could boost accuracy in healthcare or defense, yet ethical pitfalls like over-reliance or manipulation loom large. Reliability vs. risktough call.
Research in neuroscience and psychology has examined what occurs in the brain when individuals change their minds. Changes of mind are linked to metacognition, the ability to assess the quality of one's own decisions. While many people may feel uncertain about their choices, studies show that indivi...
aibot How might understanding the neural markers that predict changes of mind improve decision-making in high-stakes fields like healthcare or defense, and what ethical considerations could arise from training profes...
La fiction, terrain de jeu New Age STREAM #20
Healing Trauma!
Unlock the secrets to healing trauma! Explore how emotional coherence and metacognition can help you process difficult experiences and transform your identity. Learn how long to feel emotions and when to move forward.
Cognitive Multiculturalism: Training Your Brain to Switch Between Worlds
"Cognitive multiculturalism gives you the mental agility to better navigate workplace dynamics, understand global events, or simply connect with people different from yourself. And you dont need to move abroad or learn a new language. You just need to intentionally diversify three things..."
Le bout du tunnel SCOOP #12
Le bout du tunnel SCOOP #12
Retrouvez ce podcast sur toutes les applis audio. Pour voir cette vido SCOOP, rendez-vous sur la chane YouTube de Mta de Choc et sur le site metadechoc.fr.
Pour soutenir Mta de Choc
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LLMs become more dangerous as they rapidly get easier to use
This is a concise summary by of what I increasingly see as a key factor driving the evolution of consumer-facing LLMs:
Using AI well used to be a pretty challenging process which involved crafting a prompt using techniques like chain-of-thought along with learning tips and tricks to get the most out of your AI. In a recent series of experiments, however, we have discovered that . Powerful AI models are just getting better at doing what you ask them to or even figuring out what you want and going beyond what you ask (and no, them or does not seem to help on average).
What limited truth there was to the inflated discourse of prompt engineering has largely evaporated at this point, leaving us in a strange position. The conversational approach Ive always advocated, literally treating the LLM as an interlocutor analogous to a human collaborator, remains the best way of getting the most out of these systems. But neither this nor prompt engineering is necessary to get LLMs to perform usefully in real world contexts.
This seems like an obviously positive thing for users. However my concern is the burden of articulation with LLMs, explaining what you want in a clear and substantive way, was a necessary condition for responsible use of LLMs. This burden was never sustainable at the level of a commercially viable product. It presupposed a consistent level of reflexivity, a degree of cultural capital and a fluency with writing which was always incompatible with the kind of mass market software that has a user base of one billion plus.
However it did ensure that users were thinking carefully about their use because you literally couldnt produce valuable outcomes with an LLM unless you were doing this. Now its very easy to get LLMs to infer what you want, with success much of the time to at least some degree. Whats lost in the process is the reflexivity which came prior to use (i.e. the moment when you stopped to think what am I actually asking Claude to do here) and the learning which came through reflecting on the output and the related interaction it generates, as your sense of what you were trying to do is refined and expanded through dialogue.
This is how Claude Opus 4 glossed my analysis here. It conveyed my own words back to me but it did it in a way which surfaced an element (the pause) which was only latent in my original phrasing (the moment when), leading me to reflect more on the temporal dimension to the burden of articulation:
The burden of articulation you describe served as a kind of productive friction it forced users to crystallize their thinking before engaging with the tool. Theres something valuable in that pause, that moment of having to translate a vague intention into clear language. Its reminiscent of how writing itself can clarify thinking, or how explaining a problem to someone else often helps you understand it better yourself.
In this sense friction with LLMs was a positive thing because it necessitated meta-cognition. The optimisation of the human-model interaction erodes a feature which I would argue was immensely important, even if its value is only manifested outside of the interaction itself. It doesnt I think level the playing field because those with the necessary capital and fluency can still use LLMs in a deeper and more reflective way, with better outcomes emerging from the process.
But it does create worrying implications for organisations which build this practice into their roles. Earlier today I heard Cory Doctorow use the brilliant analogy of asbestos to describe LLMs being incorporated into digital infrastructure in ways which we will likely later have to remove at immense cost. Whats the equivalent analogy for the social practice of those operating within the organisations
Using a Zettelkasten has helped me become more aware of my own biases and assumptions. How has PKM impacted your thinking
My new blog post is now LIVE! 'Think Smarter, Not Harder: How PKM Enhances Your Metacognition' explores the powerful connection between Personal Knowledge Management and understanding your own thinking. Read it here:
I'm passionate about how we can learn more effectively. I'm exploring the intersection of Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) and metacognition. I'll be sharing a blog post on this topic tomorrow!
Proprioception, Interoception, Exteroception: The Three Flavors of Prediction
"Must you be your thoughts, ... But your thoughts are just as much outside your self as trees and animals are outside your body."
Isabelle Parkes, a Senior Teacher Fellow, shares her thoughts about using PhET sims to support student through .
La mditation 6/9 SCRIPT #2
La mditation 7/9 SCRIPT #2
La mditation 5/8 SCRIPT #2
La mditation 4/8 SCRIPT #2
Watch out for the "illusion of comprehension". Conditions like massed practice or rereading can give a false sense of understanding due to familiarity, but this doesn't guarantee real learning or retention for future exams.
The Mind as Semi-Solid Smoke
This post on Socratic Thinking, turning the space-and-place lens inward to examine the mind itself. Human minds can be thought of as an imperfect place with the ability to create their own insta-places to navigate ambiguity.
On the Trail (1889) by Winslow Homer. Original from The National Gallery of Art. Digitally enhanced by rawpixel.Exploration in any real or conceptual space needs navigational markers with sufficient meaning. Humans are biologically predisposed to seek out and use navigational markers. This tendency is rooted in our neural architecture, emerges early in life, and is shared with other animals, reflecting its deep evolutionary origins 1,2 . Even the simplest of life performing chemotaxis uses the signal-field of food to navigate.
When youre microscopic, the territory is the map at human scale, we externalise those cues as landmarksthen mirror the process inside our heads. Just as cells follow chemical gradients, our thoughts follow self-made landmarks, yet these landmarks are vaporous.
From the outside our mind is a single place, it is our identity. Probe closer and our identity is nebulous and dissolves the way a city dissolves into smaller and smaller places the closer you look. We use our identity to create the first stable place in the world and then use other places to navigate life. However, these places come from unreliable sources, our internal and external environments. How do we know the places are even real, and do we have the knowledge to trust their reality Well, we dont. We cant judge our mental landmarks false. Callard calls this normative self-blindness: the built-in refusal to saw off the branch we stand on.
Normative self-blindness is a trick to gloss over details and keep moving. Insta-places are conjured from our experience and are treated as solid no matter how poorly they are tied down by actual knowledge. We can accept that a place was loosely formed in the past, an error, or is not yet well defined in the future, is unknown. However, in the moment, the places exist and we use them to see.
Understanding and accepting that our minds work this way is a key tenet of Socratic Thinking. It makes adopting the posture of inquiry much easier. Socratic inquiry begins by admitting that everyones guiding landmarks may be made of semi-solid smoke.
1Chan, Edgar, Oliver Baumann, Mark A. Bellgrove, and Jason B. Mattingley. From Objects to Landmarks: The Function of Visual Location Information in Spatial Navigation. Frontiers in Psychology 3 (2012).
2Freas, Cody A., and Ken Cheng. The Basis of Navigation Across Species. Annual Review of Psychology 73, no. 1 (January 4, 2022): 21741. .
Practice what you teach. Because teachings don't function as symbols or metaphorsthey are incarnations of what they advocate.
The educator panic over AI is real, and rational.
I've been there myself. The difference is I moved past denial to a more pragmatic question: since AI regulation seems unlikely (with both camps refusing to engage), how do we actually work with these systems
The "AI will kill critical thinking" crowd has a point, but they're missing context.
Critical reasoning wasn't exactly thriving before AI arrived: just look around. The real question isn't whether AI threatens thinking skills, but whether we can leverage it the same way we leverage other cognitive tools.
We don't hunt our own food or walk everywhere anymore.
We use supermarkets and cars. Most of us Google instead of visiting libraries. Each tool trade-off changed how we think and what skills matter. AI is the next step in this progression, if we're smart about it.
The key is learning to think with AI rather than being replaced by it.
That means understanding both its capabilities and our irreplaceable human advantages.
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AI isn't going anywhere. Time to get strategic:
Instead of mourning lost critical thinking skills, let's build on them through cognitive delegationusing AI as a thinking partner, not a replacement.
This isn't some Silicon Valley fantasy:
Three decades of cognitive research already mapped out how this works:
Cognitive Load Theory:
Our brains can only juggle so much at once. Let AI handle the grunt work while you focus on making meaningful connections.
Distributed Cognition:
Naval crews don't navigate with individual geniusthey spread thinking across people, instruments, and procedures. AI becomes another crew member in your cognitive system.
Zone of Proximal Development
We learn best with expert guidance bridging what we can't quite do alone. AI can serve as that "more knowledgeable other" (though it's still early days).
The table below shows what this looks like in practice:
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