Second Breakfast
Ed-Tech Criticism. AI Refusal.
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(Not) Everything Changes
" This changes everything ." I find this cliche about technology to be so exhausting, in no small part because I've heard it over and over and over again. Every new product release, a revolution. After a while, you have to decide whether you're going to
No End in Sight
What Stories Are We Told?
“Many decades ago, humans developed a process by which they could go into a store, pick an item off the shelf, and pay for it at the checkout counter. A few years ago, we lost it. Now you ring a buzzer, wait for an overworked employee to unlock an
Kids These Days
Who Is Ed-Tech For?
Who is ed-tech for? The marketing copy -- whether on websites or in PowerPoint or in TED Talks and the like -- will all insist that ed-tech is, at the end of the day, for "the students." Even the products that are pitched to make teachers' and
Everyone Should Get to Play
The Future, Unevenly Distributed
“ The future is here. It’s just not very evenly distributed .” This quotation, attributed to science fiction author William Gibson, is often used to imply that some lucky few, particularly those surrounded by silicon gadgetry, live in some glorious high-tech promised land ; while the rest of
She's So Sure
End Over End
The Atlantic has pronounced that “ The End of Reading is Here ,” the latest in a long series of stories , there and elsewhere, that lament that no one -- but specifically no student -- reads anymore. They don’t read ; they can’t read . When I say “long
Unsportsmanlike Conduct
Financial Nonsense
Many years ago, in an earlier era of silliness about a looming ed-tech revolution, a startup founder sent me an email, asking that I please hold off from writing anything about the company. They'd experienced a huge surge in demand for their app – it was fall,
Messy Thoughts
The Algorithmic Order
The history of education technology is inseparable from the history of standardized testing. That’s part of the argument I make in Teaching Machines , where I trace the development of both the machinery of teaching and the machinery of testing back to the early twentieth century. There are more
Perceptual Engineering
Reflecting Pools
Just a short newsletter this week, full of links to others' writing – apologies. Ideologies : Fred Turner argues in The Baffler that the California Ideology, as articulated by Richard Barbrook and Andrew Cameron in their famous 1995 essay , is no longer central to Silicon Valley hegemony. Instead, Turner contends,