Hack Education

This talk was delivered at an event at CUNY on "The Labor of Open" -- a gathering of librarians talking about an open education and open publishing initiative at the university. I wanted to talk about how we imagine a technological future of labor and whose work (and what kind of work) is not seen in that framework....

This is the transcript from the talk I gave at the CUNY Graduate Center. I'm not sure why I agreed to give a talk as I am so swamped with end-of-semester work. I thought initially I'd just talk through the sample chapter I wrote. Instead I revised a previous talk a little and added some of my book-related research....

A few thoughts from ASU+GSV. I will have much more to say about venture capital and education technology in an upcoming article in The Baffler. So this is really just a companion piece to all my angst-filled tweets. Thank you everyone who's reached out to make sure I'm safe....

This is a book review of Brian Dear's The Friendly Orange Glow, a history of PLATO. Dear has been working on this project for decades, and it shows. It is incredibly well-researched and this "untold history" is deservedly well-told. I use the book here to think about what's become "dogma" -- in computing and in ed-tech more generally....

Betsy DeVos proved once again that she is utterly unfamiliar with the laws that govern education in this country. But then again, that seems to be the whole point of the Trump Administration and its supporters. There was some good news: Gavin Grimm won his court case. But mostly it was bad news: facial recognition technologies and fascism and such....

A brief history of the Speak & Spell, one of the most iconic pieces of education technology. First introduced at the Consumer Electronics Show in 1978, the Speak & Spell is a teaching machine in the behaviorist sense. Texas Instruments' development of the device involved an important technological breakthrough in speech technology....

This is the transcript of the talk I gave to NYCIST at the group's December meeting. I cannot believe that in the midst of everything I'm trying to accomplish right now I agreed to give a talk. But I did. There's not much new here. After all, I am pounding out so many other words in other stories. Who listens to any of it, I guess, when the billionaires tell and sell better tales....

2017 marks the eighth year in which I've reviewed the most important stories in the ed-tech industry from the previous twelve months. This isn't really a series about "trends," to be honest. It's not a list of products that schools should buy if they want to stay ahead of the innovative curve. Rather, it's a look at what we're told "innovation" will like....

The Columbia University School of Journalism has awarded me a Spencer Education Journalism Fellowship for the 2017–2018 academic year. I will use my time to study the networks of education technology investors and examine how they are shaping education policies (as well as our imagination about what the future of education might look like)....

This book is the latest in my “monsters of ed-tech” series – a sequel to The Monsters of Education Technology (2014) and The Revenge of the Monsters of Education Technology (2015) and The Curse of the Monsters of Education Technology (2016). Like those books, this new one is a collection of all the keynotes and talks I delivered in 2017....

What is up with all the pigeons? The bird appears across all the various Hack Education projects as it exemplifies how education technology has viewed learning and learners. In part, it's a reference to the work of Edward Thorndike and B. F. Skinner and their development of multiple choice tests, teaching machines, and behavioral (educational) psychology....