Hack Education

I am not at AERA, and I am sorry about that. (Because I am in a far, far nastier place.) Here are the comments I was going to make on my panel this morning: ten minutes of a quick rant, explaining why I'm not there, explaining what I am working on, and raging against the capitalist machinery....

I'm working on the book proposal for Teaching Machines, which makes me realize there is really a dearth of good books about the history of education technology. Or maybe I am missing something. I'm probably missing something. Because the books can't all have been written by white guys, right?...

A very short post about guns and education technology. I am a little exhausted by the repetition that "arming teachers will never happen." Surveillance technologies are pervasive in schools. Education technologists promote this crap daily, but because they are so caught up in a narrative that ed-tech is progressive, they seem unwilling to address how weapons technologies are deeply intertwined in their vision of school....

Some thoughts on why the narrow definition of education technology - one touted by most education technologists - harms our ability to talk about infrastructure, history, practices, values. I riff on a recent story about the Department of Homeland Security and its development of a school shooting simulation program, as well as the history of metal detectors at urban schools. Folks try to insist neither are ed-tech. They're wrong....

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....

A couple of big education technology stories this week: the first, no doubt, involves Mark Zuckerberg's testimony before Congress. And I will say much more about that in my Saturday newsletter. The second involves the fire sale of Edmodo to Chinese game-maker NetDragon. There's a much bigger story in both these cases....

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....