The History of the Future of Education Technology
Week in and week out, there are a litany of stories that, if I were paying attention to education technology, would prompt me to say “I told you so.” Why look, just in the last few days: coding bootcamps, pretty shady ; Udemy, very shady . Google Notebook LLM in the classroom, totally and completely fucked up . But the industry's cheerleaders keep cheering. I’ve spent the last few years trying my…
A couple of weeks ago, I received an email from my friend Eli Luberoff, the founder and CEO of Desmos. It was news I'd been anticipating — dreading , really — for some time: the startup had been acquired. Amplify was buying its curriculum division; the calculator part would become a free-standing public benefit corporation. The subject of the email from Eli said "good news," and I don't mean to…
This is the transcript of the keynote I gave today at Digifest. (Well, I recorded it a couple of weeks ago, but it was broadcast today, and I popped in for some "live" Q&A afterwards, where I was asked the obligatory "do you hate all ed-tech" question. And here I was, trying to be all sweetness and light...) Thank you very much for inviting me to speak to you today. I'm happy to be here — and when…
I'd wager it's the most frequently told story about ed-tech — one told with more gusto and more frequency even than "computers will revolutionize teaching" and "you can learn anything on YouTube." Indeed, someone invoked this story just the other day when chatting with me about the current shape and status of our education system: the school bell was implemented to acclimate students for life as…
Hack Education, as perhaps you've noticed, has been on hiatus for a while. What with the pandemic, the death of my son, and the publication of Teaching Machines , I really couldn't continue to pay attention to the day-to-day nonsense of ed-tech. (The book, in fairness, did have me focused on some of the mid-20th century nonsense.) And after taking a long break from "current events," I am not quite…
It's here!
Teaching Machines is available for pre-order via the MIT Press website (and anywhere books are sold — consider supporting your local bookseller ). I spent a few days trying to revamp the Teaching Machines website — before deciding that the template I had was just fine. Now I'm in the process of updating all my various social media accounts with a new profile pic based off the cover. I absolutely…
I have had "write year-in-review" on my To Do list for about a month-and-a-half now. But every day I ignore the task, hoping that I'll feel more like writing tomorrow. Tomorrow is the last day of this year, and I don't anticipate anything will change so I am going to try to type a few, very generic thoughts about what happened in ed-tech in 2020. This reflection is not going to be as lengthy as in…
I was a speaker today at the #AgainstSurveillance teach-in , a fundraiser for Ian Linkletter who is being sued by the online test-proctoring software company Proctorio . I am very pleased but also really outraged to be here today to help raise money for Ian Linkletter's defense and, more broadly, to help raise awareness about the dangers of ed-tech surveillance. It's nice to be part of an event…
I was a guest today in Chris Hoadley's NYU class on ed-tech and globalization. Here's a bit of my rant... Thank you so much for inviting me to speak to you today. I have been really stumped as to what I should say. If you look at the talks I've given this year — and I've done quite a lot since I've volunteered to visit Zoom school and speak to classes — there are a couple of notable themes:…