Hack Education

This talk was delivered at MIT for Justin Reich's Comparative Media Studies class "Learning, Media, and Technology." As the opening weeks of the class address histories and theories of learning, I wanted to underscore how things (ideologies, really) get hard-coded into practices and products. I can't believe I gave a talk on SCORM....

A response to this weekend's story in The New York Times on "brand ambassadors" and the ethics of education technology marketing. I'm particularly interested in how the teachers featured (and more broadly ed-tech celebrity in general) reflects whiteness and affluence. Who gets to be an "influencer" and why, and to what end?...

Betsy DeVos is traveling around the US as part of some "Rethink Schools" thing. Mostly, I think, her "rethinking" is really just a push for "dismantling" as she makes it clear that her interests are in individual students rather than systems and institutions. Other places to watch the narratives: all these headlines about robots replacing teachers....

There have been calls recently that education technology become a "discipline." It's a call that overlooks, no doubt, the number of degrees, conferences, publications, and job titles that already presume such a thing exists. But if, as some fear, ed-tech isn't disciplined enough, what are the implications for those of us on the margins?...

This talk was delivered at The University of Edinburgh. Ostensibly it's a talk about automation, artificial intelligence, and education technology, but as I wrote it, it also became a talk about autonomous vehicles and self-driving cars. What sort of future is one where the model for learning is "the driverless university"?...

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 research project examines what the blockchain is - how it works technically and ideologically, who is funding blockchain efforts, and how proponents imagine it will be used in school. (We can hope, I'd argue, that it will not be, not just because it's a bad idea practically but because it's a dangerous one politically.)...

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). Like those two books, this new one is a collection of all the keynotes and talks I delivered in 2016....

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....