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Hack Education

The History of the Future of Education Technology

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I just don't have it in me to write my annual "year in review." I am sorry. I don't. This was a shit year, and I think I could just repeat that a thousand times. Who needs a critic to analyze all that's happened? There's so much loss, I just can't dwell in it to form a coherent essay.

I was a speaker at the #AgainstSurveillance teach-in today, a fundraiser for Ian Linkletter, who's being sued by the online test-proctoring monster Proctorio. I talked a bit about the automation of reproductive labor and how surveillance is behaviorism. I was - I am - outraged by all this.

This is the transcript of the remarks I gave today at a Contact North webinar titled "Why Technology is Not the Answer." (I've changed the title for this blog post, but I do still get to "why technology is not the answer" in the talk, I swear.) Thank you to my co-host Paul Prinsloo for facilitating a great discussion afterwards.

This is the transcript of my talk "at" an ed psych class at San Jose State (via Zoom, of course). No surprise, I talked about behaviorism and B. F. Skinner, riffing off of Ellen Condliffe Lagemann's argument that Thorndike won and Dewey lost.

This is the transcript of my talk "at" a class at the Skyline High School (via Zoom, of course). Yup, it's time to talk about surveillance and ed-tech again. And Proctorio gets a special shout-out, like I promised I would each and every time I give a talk this year.

This is the transcript of my talk "at" a class at Illinois State University (via Zoom, of course). The class is on critical approaches to ed-tech, and I tried to demonstrate in my brief remarks how one might "read" a book from the Eighties about the future of learning with a critical gaze.

This is the transcript of my talk "at" a class at Brandeis University (via Zoom, of course). The class is on critical race studies, and I wanted to talk a bit about how education and technology both draw heavily on white supremacy, particularly with regards to algorithms, surveillance, and labor.

This is the transcript of my keynote at the Digital Pedagogy Lab. Except not really. It was a "flipped" keynote, so this is more like the pre-reading for what I actually talked about. Sort of. I ended up talking about my dog. But it's funny (not funny) how much ed-tech and dog obedience have in common.

This talk was part of a webinar hosted by Contact North. I admit, it is less about 'building' than it is about 'dismantling.' And dare I say, once we dismantle surveillance tech, I am less interested in building more, alternative tech. I want to talk about the underlying culture that demands this control in the first place.

This talk was presented at ICLS 2020. How do the stories we tell about the history and the future of education (and education technology) shape our beliefs about teaching and learning — the beliefs of educators, as well as those of the general public?

Here. I have chronicled for you a decade of ed-tech failures and fuck-ups and flawed ideas. Oh yes, I’m sure you can come up with some rousing successes and some triumphant moments that made you thrilled about the 2010s and that give you hope for “the future of education.” Good for you. But that’s not my job. (And honestly, it’s probably not your job either.) .

  ·  The Best of Hack Education: Selected Essays  ·  Featured Essay:

A book review of Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, a book that was long and rather melodramatic but that makes an argument that those in education technology need to pay attention to: these technologies curtail “the right to the future tense.”

  ·  The Best of Hack Education: Selected Talks  ·  Featured Talk:

This talk was delivered at OEB 2019 in Berlin. I wanted to call out the misinformation and disinformation repeated by those who get on stage at ed-tech events (as well as those who uncritically accept the fairy tales as truth). If we prance delightedly towards a dystopian ed-tech future, it is in part because of the storytellers in ed-tech who peddle this bullshit.

  ·  Hack Education Research  ·  Featured Research Projects:

The Columbia University School of Journalism awarded me a Spencer Education Journalism Fellowship for the 2017–2018 academic year. I have used my time (in part) 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)....

  ·  Books  ·  Latest Book:

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....

  ·  Why Pigeons?:

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....

Image credits: Bryan Mathers