Hack Education
The History of the Future of Education Technology
I’m making some major changes to Hack Education this year – and no, not because I’ve received venture capital and my investors have told me I have to rewrite the publication’s mission statement again. That’s a different site you’re thinking of…
For a good portion of the year, Hack Education will go dormant. (The archives, I would note, are rich here. Read up.) I’m no longer going to write the Friday “Hack Education Weekly News,” my chronicle of all the education, technology, and ed-tech news of the week. I’m ending that project because I’m no longer going to write my lengthy series on the year-in-review either. Not in 2019 at least, as I have to focus on Teaching Machines (the draft is due in April and the final manuscript due in September).
Once the book is done, I plan to return to writing on this site and to publishing essays analyzing what’s happened and happening in education and technology. Many of these will be historical, since it seems that so many people who work in ed-tech are utterly ignorant (even purposefully ignorant) of the field’s rich (but troubling) history. Some of these will respond to the latest happenings, but I want the work I do here on Hack Education to be less reactive to the bad stuff that gets trotted out daily as “innovation.” I don’t want to have to read the ed-tech publications that make me so deeply sad about what’s being peddled and promoted and so deeply disappointed about people’s willingness to read and write and buy that crap. The way we get better and smarter will not be through these ed-tech’s marketers and hucksters.
I am hoping that the shift away from compiling all the goings-on for that weekly news round-up will give me more time to think deeply and critically about education and technology, instead of perpetually being enraged by how many terrible and silly things are marketed as “solutions” by folks who just want to sell a product or service – some aware, some unaware that their very well-funded load of futurist bullshit is pretty damn dystopian.
This site will remain vulture free. No investors, philanthropists, corporate sponsors, or advertisers. Just pigeons.
Image credits: Bryan Mathers