Hack Education

It is a very short summary of what happened this year, because folks, I have been trying very hard to not pay attention. I spent 2019 writing and rewriting my book, avoiding the ed-tech news as much as I could. I mean, you better believe I had a good chuckle at some of the news. And you better believe that I still have something to say about the year that was.

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.

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 book draft is done. Next up: editing. Meanwhile, here are some thoughts about “the ed-tech imaginary,” particularly as it pertains to teaching machines in the 1950s and 1960s. (But really, how it pertains to computer-assisted instruction today.)

The MIT Press has agreed to publish Teaching Machines. I’m excited and thrilled and overwhelmed. I definitely wouldn’t have been able to do this without the Spencer Fellowship (and without taking Sam Freedman’s book writing class at the Columbia School of Journalism). Stay tuned for more details (but probably, if I’m honest, less “Hack Education”).

It's a much shorter "year in review" this year. Typically it takes me about 500 hours of work to do this project. I'm not willing to commit those hours this year, as Teaching Machines deserves all my attention. Honestly, taking a bit of a closer look at the shitshow that's ed-tech and you can see that little of this deserves any of our attention. But the attention merchants are out there nonetheless....

This talk was given to Eddie Maloney’s class at Georgetown University (specifically, its Learning and Design program) on “Technology & Innovation By Design.” This is me, trying to figure out what the introduction to Teaching Machines is going to look like – you know, why this matters…

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)....

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....