Hack Education

The Return

Sat, 05 Oct 2024 07:01:00 +0000

Week in and week out, there are a litany of stories that, if I were paying attention to education technology, would prompt me to say “I told you so.” Why look, just in the last few days: coding bootcamps, pretty shady; Udemy, very shady. Google Notebook LLM in the classroom, totally and completely fucked up. But the industry's cheerleaders keep cheering.

I’ve spent the last few years trying my best to ignore all this stuff. After Isaiah’s death, I simply could not handle more grief. I’m not sure how else to describe the emotions that I feel about education -- this deep, deep sadness about about what feels like the surrender of any shared cultural belief in, any political commitment to, any financial investment in public education; a real despair about our handing teaching and learning over to the neoliberal elites, to the values of productivity, efficiency, individualism. I’d lost my son -- the future already felt dimmer for it. I didn’t have the energy to fight. I stepped away.

Since I’ve been gone, not much has changed -- other than I’ve been proven right about just about every startup and gadget I warned folks about. Not that that’s stopped anyone from hyping the latest snake oil -- it’s AI this time around (again) I guess. In the quest for data and “optimization,” we continue to drain the humanity from institutions that, frankly, were never that humane in the first place (despite all the teachers and students who populate these institutions and who do, I firmly believe, care deeply about one another).

I’ve flailed around since leaving Hack Education dormant, thinking I’d just do something else instead of being “ed-tech’s Cassandra.” I’ve become an athlete for the first time in my life, and I thought perhaps I could write a similar sort of tech criticism about fitness and health as I did about education. As hard as it is to become an athlete at 50+, let me just say, it’s just as hard to develop expertise in a new field of knowledge.

So for this and a million other reasons (and a couple of really specific reasons -- some dangerous dumb shit I've seen folks blog about recently, truth be told), I’m returning to education technology criticism -- it’s what I know. It’s what I’m good at. (Or at least some people tell me that.) I lost my son, but I’ll be damned if I’ll go quietly and let the techno-libertarian fantasies strip the future from the rest of us.

I have just started working on a book on artificial intelligence and education. A little bit of history -- we have been building “intelligent tutors” for decades now. Indeed what we consider “intelligence” is wrapped up in the history of education and testing (and eugenics -- probably worth pointing out). A little bit of science -- what do we know about how humans learn, and is this anything akin to “machine learning”? (Or has computer science shaped how we conceive of the mind?) A lot of technology criticism and literary analysis -- why are these stories about robot teachers so compelling? My plan right now is a collection of essays akin to the sorts of provocations that I’d once give as a speaker. Monsters of Ed-Tech: Back from the Dead. Or something.

I don’t plan to update Hack Education regularly. And since we’ve fucked up the Web, I don’t even know if folks will see this update or notice that anything has changed here. But if you stumble across this blog post, know that I do send out a newsletter, Second Breakfast, and there I’ll share some of my thoughts on AI and bodies and brains. (No, it's not free or "open" -- because that whole thing, as AI is showing us, is an absolute joke.)

The End

Wed, 15 Jun 2022 12:00:00 +0000

A couple of weeks ago, I received an email from my friend Eli Luberoff, the founder and CEO of Desmos. It was news I'd been anticipating — dreading, really — for some time: the startup had been acquired. Amplify was buying its curriculum division; the calculator part would become a free-standing public benefit corporation. The subject of the email from Eli said "good news," and I don't mean to imply that it isn't a good deal for him, for his employees, for his investors, or for Desmos users. But for me, well, it was a sign of something else altogether. (That said, let's check back in in a few years and see how this all has panned out, okay?)

For a long, long time, if anyone asked me if there was any ed-tech I liked — and I would get this question a lot, often asked as though it was some sort of "gotcha" — I'd reply in a heartbeat, "Desmos." I adore Eli; and Desmos has always had a great team, including, of course, the incredible Dan Meyer (who I also adore, even though I blame him whenever I chose the slowest check-out lane in the grocery store.)

I loved that Desmos' free online graphing calculator subverted the $100+ graphing calculator racket — a racket controlled by a couple of manufacturers and a handful of standardized test companies.

But even more than that, I loved that the spirit and culture of the company, which despite providing an instrument for math, was not strictly instrumentalist. This is absolutely a rarity in ed-tech, where almost everything is touted for its supposed productivity, efficiency, time- and cost-savings, student or learning or behavior management. Better, cheaper, faster, smarter — those are the values that most folks in ed-tech like to tout. And yes, I'm sure plenty of teachers used Desmos that way. But that wasn't the intent of Eli or Dan or even necessarily the design of the instrument, the graphing calculator. Kids made art with Desmos; kids made art with math; and with the Desmos curriculum, kids deliberated with and about math, a learning practice that runs counter to this firmly-held belief we have that math, unlike other fields of knowledge, is merely about getting a right or wrong answer and that the best way to develop and wield mathematical knowledge in school is to fill out worksheets as quickly as possible.

Desmos never bent its design or its trajectory, even in response to the most mundane usage, towards what are these common practices and pedagogies of ed-tech: "we can help students do their homework faster" or "we can help teachers automate their grading" or "check out our features that showcase some bullshit metrics that our investors like to see."

Now that the company has been acquired, I don't have an answer when someone asks me that "gotcha" question. You got me: "Nope. There's not a goddamn thing." And that certainly means it's time for me to step away from ed-tech for good.

I’ve already taken time away from this site to grieve the loss of my son. I’ve taken time away to write and promote my book. I’ve repeatedly told myself that I’m just tired from all of it — death, the pandemic, [gestures widely] etcetera — and that eventually my passion will return. But I don't think it's going to. It's time to move on to something else. I cannot, I will not be your Cassandra any more.

This site won't go away — I'll still pay for the domain for a while longer, at least — but the HEWN newsletter, the Patreon, and all Hack Education-related social media will. You'll be able to find my latest writing on my personal website. Remember blogging? Yeah. I'll do that for a while until I can figure something else out. I have to put this decade-long project to rest so that I can move on to something that doesn't consume me in its awfulness and make me dwell in doom.

Hope for the Future

Tue, 08 Mar 2022 12:00:00 +0000

This is the transcript of the keynote I gave today at Digifest. (Well, I recorded it a couple of weeks ago, but it was broadcast today, and I popped in for some "live" Q&A afterwards, where I was asked the obligatory "do you hate all ed-tech" question. And here I was, trying to be all sweetness and light...)

Thank you very much for inviting me to speak to you today. I'm happy to be here — and when I say "here," I do mean in my apartment, in sunny California. Personally, I'm not ready to travel yet, not remotely interested in getting back on an airplane — because let's be honest, air travel was already terrible. And I am pleased that, if nothing else good comes out of the pandemic, I can now do keynote talks in my bare feet and yoga pants.

Those of you who are familiar with my work are likely a bit taken aback to see that the title of my talk today contains the word "Hope." After all, I have been called "Ed-Tech's Cassandra," and like the Trojan priestess, I am known for my proclamations and predictions of doom. As such, I am not viewed as a messenger with good news. My talks, I'm often told, are "depressing" and make folks want to leave the field. (From time-to-time, when I do hear about some high-profile tech entrepreneur who has decided to turn away from "disrupting education" towards building "flying taxis" or whatever, I do like to think I played some small part in their frustrated disillusionment.)

The thing is, though, like Cassandra, I'm not wrong. I know that my work makes people feel uncomfortable, particularly when so much of the tech and ed-tech industry mantra rests on narratives promising a happy, shiny, better future. No one appreciates it when someone comes along and says "actually, if you wheel this giant horse — impressive as it looks — inside the gates, it'll destroy everything you love, everyone you care about. Don't do it."

And like Cassandra, it's exhausting to keep repeating "don't do it," and to have folks go right on ahead and do it anyway. I've been writing about ed-tech for over a decade now, cautioning people about the repercussions of handing over data, infrastructure, ideology, investment to Silicon Valley types. And for what?

And for what?

Trust me, I've spent a lot of the last few years stewing on that question — particularly as I have watched the awfulness of pandemic education (and its digital components) unfold: what has my work done? What change, what difference have I made?

For so many reasons, it's been hard not to sink into utter despair. I know many of us feel that way right now.

I don't think I'm exaggerating or even doomsaying to state that things don't look good. The pandemic. Still. Global climate change. (I say I'm glad to be in sunny California but it's actually the rainy season, and it hasn't rained in over a month.) Poverty. War and impending war. Inflation. Rising economic inequality and precarity. Drug overdoses. Genocide. Nationalism. White supremacy. Neoliberalism. Violence. Mass incarceration. Fanaticism. Surveillance technologies. Disinvestment from the public sphere. Anti-science rhetoric. A rejection of education. A rejection of knowledge. "Things are," as Malcolm Harris wrote on a sign during the Occupy Wall Street protests in Zucotti Park back in 2011 (and as he titled his recent book) "fucked up and bullshit." We aren't in a good place right now — structurally or socially or individually or psychologically or physically. And it's hard to see how we're headed towards a good place either.

Many of us are grieving; many of us are traumatized. Many of our students are grieving; many of our students are traumatized. Most, dare I say. All of us, even. Deeply and profoundly so. To ignore this, to minimize this, to pretend as though "back to normal" can or even should happen is injurious. To prescribe a piece of technology as some sort of solution or fix to any of this is insulting. To give a keynote full of sanitized sunshine is just gross.

And yet, we cannot not respond to trauma. We cannot not address what we have been through with the pandemic specifically and with — sweeping hand gesture — everything else.

Denial won't work. But the worst response, perhaps, is to forget (arguably a form of denial, but one that happens at a social not just on a psychological level).

And that's what many powerful forces want — it's what they always want. Because forgetting isn't just about sliding into complacency. Forgetting also leads to despair — and this is crucial to my argument today — and broadly speaking, this is why (I tell myself at least) my work matters. Contrary to those who dismiss my work as a critic as negative or destructive, criticism is generative; it can be one of many (small) acts of hope — criticism grounded in historical analysis is the antithesis of a numbing forgetfulness or an invented nostalgia.

One of the things I have written about quite a bit is the idea of an "ed-tech amnesia" — that is, there is a certain inattention to and erasure of the history of the field of education technology. And I don’t just mean forgetting or erasing what happened in the 1950s or 1980s (although I wrote a book on that). I mean forgetting what happened five, ten years ago — it's been ten years, incidentally, since Occupy Wall Street, and I fear we've forgotten that great push to hold the rich and the banks and the venture capitalists accountable. I specifically mean forgetting what happened during the last few years, during the pandemic.

Ed-tech amnesia.

Some of this is a result of an influx of Silicon Valley types in recent years — people with no ties to education or education technology who think that their ignorance and lack of expertise is a strength. (I use that phrase "Silicon Valley" less as a geographic marker than an ideological one.) And it doesn't help, of course, that there is, in general, a repudiation of history within the Silicon Valley framework itself. The tech industry's historical amnesia — the inability to learn about, to recognize, to remember what has come before — is deeply intertwined with the idea of "disruption" and its firm belief that new technologies are necessarily innovative and are always "progress." I like to cite, as an example, a New Yorker article from a few years ago, an interview with an Uber engineer who'd pleaded guilty to stealing Google's self-driving car technology. "The only thing that matters is the future," he told the magazine. "I don't even know why we study history. It's entertaining, I guess — the dinosaurs and the Neanderthals and the Industrial Revolution, and stuff like that. But what already happened doesn't really matter. You don't need to know that history to build on what they made. In technology, all that matters is tomorrow." (I could tie this attitude to the Italian Futurists and to fascism, but that’s a presentation for another day.)

There are other examples of this historical amnesia in ed-tech specifically, no doubt. Narratives about the “factory model of education." Stories that education hasn't changed in hundreds of years. Tall tales about the invention of the MOOC.

I want us to be vigilant about this amnesia because it has political implications. In the coming months and years, many people will want us to forget their mistakes; they will try to rehabilitate not just their bad ideas but their very reputations. By "many people," of course, I mean Ivanka Trump. Maybe Prince Charles. But I also mean any number of people in education and education technology, who've not only screwed up the tools and practices of teaching and learning over the past year or so, but who have a rather long history of bad if not dangerous ideas and decisions. These are people who have done real, substantive damage to students, to teachers, to public education. Again and again. We cannot forget this.

I worry we already have, of course.

If we forget, we cannot hold the perpetrators accountable for this damage. If we forget, we cannot see the ways in which we have been strong, resilient, even defiant in the face of it all.

"Memory produces hope in the same way that amnesia produces despair," the theologian Walter Brueggeman wrote. Rebecca Solnit cites him in her book Hope in the Dark, originally published in April 2004, at the start of the second term of President George W. Bush (speaking of people whose reputations have been rehabilitated), right as many of us despaired that his incompetence had led us to war, as well as to an expansion of governmental power and surveillance.

"Memory produces hope in the same way that amnesia produces despair." "It’s an extraordinary statement," Solnit writes, "one that reminds us that though hope is about the future, grounds for hope lie in the records and recollections of the past. We can tell of a past that was nothing but defeats and cruelties and injustices, or of a past that was some lovely golden age now irretrievably lost, or we can tell a more complicated and accurate story, one that has room for the best and worst, for atrocities and liberations, for grief and jubilation. A memory commensurate to the complexity of the past and the whole cast of participants, a memory that includes our power, produces that forward-directed energy called hope."

"Amnesia leads to despair in many ways," she continues. "The status quo would like you to believe it is immutable, inevitable, and invulnerable, and lack of memory of a dynamically changing world reinforces this view. In other words, when you don’t know how much things have changed, you don’t see that they are changing or that they can change."

The future is not pre-ordained. Yes, these are terrible times. Yes, the path forward seems incredibly challenging for those of us who believe in education, particularly public education, and who believe that education can be re-oriented away from exploitation and domination and towards justice.

Contrary to the popular story, there is no inevitability of a technological future of education. There's no inevitability to "online." There's not, despite how loudly ed-tech evangelists insist that "There's no going back now," so pleased that disaster capitalism has helped unlock the possibility they've longed for: one in which all teaching and learning is mediated through their digital platforms, in which labor unions are busted, in which public funding is eviscerated to make way for privatized profiteering.

Of course, there is no "back." Time doesn't work that way. And no one wants to go "back." That's a red herring, akin to thinking "luddite" is an insult. The luddites didn't want to go back; they wanted the future to be better. From where we are, there is always only forward. But the future is unwritten. Forward is open and incumbent upon us to shape.

"The best way to predict the future is to build it," computer scientist Alan Kay famously said. But computer scientists should not be alone in that building. (God forbid.)

I've long argued that the best way to predict the future is to issue a press release. Or the best way to predict the future is to complain about something in your weekly op-ed in The New York Times. By this, I mean that it's not always so much the building as it is the storytelling that sways the direction the future flows.

Again, that's why stories of the past matter as much as do stories of the future — even when (and especially when) predicting the future.

One of my favorite science fiction authors, Octavia Butler, was once asked about this:

'So do you really believe that in the future we’re going to have the kind of trouble you write about in your books?' a student asked me as I was signing books after a talk. The young man was referring to the troubles I’d described in Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, novels that take place in a near future of increasing drug addiction and illiteracy, marked by the popularity of prisons and the unpopularity of public schools, the vast and growing gap between the rich and everyone else, and the whole nasty family of problems brought on by global warming.

'I didn’t make up the problems,' I pointed out. 'All I did was look around at the problems we’re neglecting now and give them about 30 years to grow into full-fledged disasters.'

'Okay,' the young man challenged. 'So what’s the answer?'

'There isn’t one,' I told him.

'No answer? You mean we’re just doomed?' He smiled as though he thought this might be a joke.

'No,' I said. 'I mean there’s no single answer that will solve all of our future problems. There’s no magic bullet. Instead there are thousands of answers — at least. You can be one of them if you choose to be.'

You can be one of the answers if you choose to be.

"Writing novels about the future doesn’t give me any special ability to foretell the future," Butler said. "But it does encourage me to use our past and present behaviors as guides to the kind of world we seem to be creating. The past, for example, is filled with repeating cycles of strength and weakness, wisdom and stupidity, empire and ashes. To study history is to study humanity. And to try to foretell the future without studying history is like trying to learn to read without bothering to learn the alphabet."

Too many people who try to predict the future of education and education technology have not bothered to learn the alphabet — the grammar of schooling, to borrow a phrase from education historian Larry Cuban. That grammar includes the beliefs and practices and memory of schooling — our collective memory, not just our own personal experiences of school. That collective memory — that's history.

When I wrote my book Teaching Machines, I wanted to chronicle a longer history of ed-tech than the story that often gets told — a history that, strangely enough when you think about it, often begins and ends with the computer. Through this framework, computers — "the digital" — are teleological. And those who question technology are therefore aberrant because technology is all there ever was, is, or will be.

I wanted to show in my book that many of the ideas that get bandied about today as innovative or (god forbid) revolutionary have a long history. Educational psychologists, for example, have been building technologies to "personalize education" for over a century. To recognize this is to see the legacy of their work in our objects and in our practices today; it is to understand that if these objects were constructed they can be challenged and dismantled. They are not natural. They are not inevitable. And it is to know too that there has always been resistance and refusal — successful resistance and refusal — to the vision of an automated education.

There has always been change — and that change has come from the popular power of students and teachers, not just the financial and political power of businessmen, always so desperate to center themselves in our stories of "transformation." We have always been strong. We have had to be resilient.

"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past," as Rage Against the Machine sang in their 1999 song "Testify." OK, actually it's a quote from George Orwell's 1984, but hey. To control the past, we have to know our history. "The stories we tell about who we were and what we did shape what we can and will do," Rebecca Solnit argues.

And we can change the future. We have before. Never forget that. As my other favorite science fiction author Ursula Le Guin said, "any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings." And we must resist and we much change. We must believe we can. We must have hope.

A few years ago, I listened to a speaker who was quite critical — in passing, mind you — of hope. And she wasn't alone. There was so much energy channeled into that word when it became the slogan of a young Senator from Illinois and his starry-eyed Presidential campaign. After 8 years of Barack Obama in office and so many unfulfilled promises, so much disappointment (and of course the rise of a violent white nationalism in response) many people have lost hope. They've lost faith in hope. They're utterly disillusioned by it.

That speaker said that "you cannot counter structural inequality with good will." And I immediately thought of Antonio Gramsci, as one does. One of the greatest Marxist thinkers of the 20th century, Gramsci is best known for writing some 3000 pages of history during his imprisonment by the Fascist Italian government from 1927 until his death ten years later at age 46. Gramsci famously said "I am a pessimist because of intelligence but an optimist because of will." Will, according to Gramsci, is part of a revolutionary praxis. It recognizes the social structure, and it helps us to move deliberately from thinking about to acting for radical change. Will is, for Gramsci, political and intellectual. Will is a strategy, or part of a strategy of struggle. Will is bound of in the politics of hope. Hope is bound up in the politics of will.

You all came to this event because, I'd wager, of will. Good will. Willpower. A will to change your own pedagogical practices. A will to change your institutions. Will is necessary, politically. I hope that you will consider how to tie that will to action, to collective action. You are not alone. I believe that you came to education too because you believe in the future. You must to work in this field. Educators engage in the profound process and practice of engaging minds in change — intellectual transformation. Education straddles the past — "the curriculum" — and the future — individually and societally. Education is about what we learn today so we can be better tomorrow. Education is a practice of hope. You cannot be indifferent about the future and be an educator.

Another passage from Gramsci (who I put alongside Paolo Freire, Franz Fanon, bell hooks as one of the most important thinkers in education who's rarely recognized as such), from a 1917 letter "Indifferenti":

I hate the indifferent. I believe that life means taking sides. One who is really alive, can be nothing if not citizen and partisan. Indifference is lethargy: it is parasitism, not life. Therefore, I hate the indifferent.

Indifference is the dead weight of history. Indifference plays an important role in history. It plays a passive role, but it does play a role. It is fatality; it is something that cannot be counted on; it is something that disrupts programmes, overturns the best made plans; it is that awful something that chokes intelligence. What happens, the evil that touches everyone, happens because the majority relinquish their will to it, allowing the enactment of laws that only a revolution can revoke, letting men rise to power who, later, only a mutiny can remove.

... I am "partigiano", alive, and already I hear, in the consciences of those on my same side, the throbbing bustle of the city of the future that we are building. And in it, the social chain does not weigh on the shoulders of only a few .... There is no-one watching from the sidelines while others are sacrificed, bled dry. I am alive, partisan. And, therefore, I hate those who do not take sides; I hate the indifferent.

Memory counteracts indifference. Memory counteracts despair. Memory creates the space for hope. Memory reminds us: change is possible. It urges us: change is necessary.

It will not be easy. It never is. Even having hope can be hard, let alone making change.

"Hope is a discipline," prison abolitionist Mariame Kaba reminds us. It is not an emotion. It is not even as Gramsci put it simply "optimism" — a belief that things will get better. Hope is work. You have to put energy and time into it. You have to practice, repeatedly. You have to keep at it, keep moving, keep pushing. No one else will free you or fix you — except us, collectively through our power to imagine and build a better future.

Hope is not in technology. Hope is in our humanity.

A better future for all of us, for all living creatures on this planet does not look like an app or a platform or a gadget. It does not look like an institution founded hundreds of years ago, desperate to cling to old hierarchies. It does not look like an institution founded more recently, desperate to re-inscribe new hierarchies. Join me in refusing the old world, and in refusing the future envisioned by the techno-elite. Our refusals can be small. Our actions might seem insignificant. But do not despair. We aren't alone in this — resistance is part of our legacy. We can make it our future. We can hope.

The History of the School Bell

Sun, 30 Jan 2022 12:00:00 +0000

I'd wager it's the most frequently told story about ed-tech — one told with more gusto and more frequency even than "computers will revolutionize teaching" and "you can learn anything on YouTube." Indeed, someone invoked this story just the other day when chatting with me about the current shape and status of our education system: the school bell was implemented to acclimate students for life as factory workers, to train them to move and respond on command, their day broken into segments of time dictated by the machine rather than the rhythms of pre-industrial, rural life.

It's a story that seems plausible. The bell is a technology associated with behavioral conditioning, after all — Pavlov and his salivating dogs. It is a technology that organizes the school, controlling both space and time. The bell sounds out the logic of the day: it's time for math. It's time for recess. It's time for reading. Finally, thank god, around 3 o'clock or so, it's time to go home. And at the end of the school year, when "schools out completely," as Alice Cooper sings, the children cheer with joy as the final bell rings, the bell and their voices warping as the classic song fades out — freed from, as John Taylor Gatto put it, "the barren experiences of school bells in a prison of measured time." (1)

It should come as no surprise to close observers of invented histories of education that Gatto would have something to say (in almost all his books, in fact) about the tyranny of the bell. He was, after all, one of the most influential promoters of the "school-as-factory" narrative: that the origins of mass schooling are inextricably bound to the need to reshape a rebellious farming nation's sons and daughters into a docile, industrial workforce. It's a powerful, influential story, sure, but it's a pretty inaccurate history.

The bell also invokes another popular tale, often repeated by the same folks: the one in which schools haven't changed in hundreds of years. Some metal contraption still bangs in the hallways while the rest of the world has moved on to — gesturing widely — the digital. Need proof? Why, one can point to the fact that Alice Cooper's 1972 hit remains a popular, end-of-the-school-year anthem (as does "Another Brick in the Wall" which was also produced by Bob Erin who urged Pink Floyd to add a children's chorus as it was so successful in the Alice Cooper track. But I digress.) Surely this demonstrates how despicably moribund schools are, right?

Or at least, it shows how much we like stories about education that feel true — or maybe songs about education that make us feel like anti-establishment rebels.

Many institutions — not only schools and not only factories — have long used bells to mark beginnings and endings and important events. One can hardly point to the development of the mechanical clock and its connection to the strict observance of prayer times at monasteries and view the bell as a technology of liberation, no doubt. But one can perhaps reconsider citing John Taylor Gatto as your sole source of education history. (The guy called the people enslaved by Thomas Jefferson his "employees," for crying out loud.)

Bells, primarily handbells, have been a technology of school since their outset, well before "the factory" they were purportedly modeled on. They were used, as were the bells in churches, to summon students to ye old one room schoolhouse for the beginning of the day.

Architecture and Ed-Tech

The Common School movement that nineteenth century education reformer Horace Mann spearheaded (from roughly 1840-1880), advocating for the foundation of a public school system, did not just promote a common curriculum — an overt curriculum, that is, of reading, writing, and arithmetic or a covert curriculum of punctuality and obedience. It also advocated for the construction of standardized school buildings, replacing the one-room schoolhouses in urban areas. (It's worth noting that, even into the 1910s, half of the students in the US remained enrolled in the country's 212,000 one-room schools.) (2) Mann recommended that communities invest in a bell for these buildings. "Where the expense can be afforded, every schoolhouse should be provided with a bell. If not the only mode, it is probably the best one for insuring punctuality; and the importance of punctuality can hardly be overstated." (3)

The architecture of the school building informs the pedagogy that takes place therein — the same goes for the technologies that are implemented inside them. And that includes the school bell.

But bells weren't simply — or even primarily — a technology of pedagogy as much as one for announcements and alarms. Although companies like the Standard Electric Time Company (founded in Massachusetts in 1884) sold synchronized clock and bell systems to schools (and yes, factories), an early function of the latter was not to mimic the rhythm of the workplace but rather to warn occupants about fire.

(Insurance Engineering issued a widely-cited report in 1913, decrying the condition of some 250,000 schools in the US as "built to burn." "In 1911," the Moline, Illinois Dispatch worriedly detailed, "the value of school and college buildings destroyed by fire approximated $3,000,000. Estimates of the frequency of fires are as high as ten a week."(4) The story, incidentally, blames the introduction of a new piece of ed-tech for many of the blazes: the film projector.)

Bells and Platoons

The ringing of the bell to signal the beginning and end of a class period, rather than just the beginning and end of the school day is often traced to William Wirt, who became superintendent of schools in Gary, Indiana in 1908. Wirt, a student of progressive educator John Dewey, devised a system in which, when the bell rang, students would move from room to room for instruction, not only in reading, writing, and arithmetic, but in music and shop, as well as time outdoors on a playground.

Generally, children had two ninety-minute periods or three hours a day in the basic subjects, and six thirty minute periods in special subjects the other three hours of the school day. Obviously to function effectively this scheme required a high degree of administrative planning and precision timing in the moving of children. This was particularly true if the schools were large, as they were at Gary, where some of them included all twelve grades and eventually had as many as 3,000 students." (5)

Wirt called this the "work-study-play school," and Dewey praised the model in his 1915 book (co-written with daughter Evelyn) Schools of Tomorrow:

The question [Wirt] tried to answer was this: What did the Gary children need to make them good citizens and happy and prosperous human beings, and how could the money available for educational purposes supply all these needs? The industrial features of his schools will be taken up later, but it may be well to point out in passing that they were not instituted to turn out good workers for the steel company, nor to save the factories the expense of training their own workers, but for the educational value of the work they involved. In the same way it would be a mistake to consider the Gary schools simply as an attempt to take the unpromising immi- grant child and turn him into a self-supporting immigrant, or as an attempt to meet the demand of an industrial class for a certain sort of training. (6)

That John Dewey insisted what became known as the Gary Plan wasn't designed to condition students to become factory workers should maybe count for something. Maybe? It doesn't mean, of course, that the system didn't have incredible appeal to those reformers in the early twentieth century who were determined to reshape public education into a more efficient endeavor. Indeed as Callahan argues in his classic Education and the Cult of Efficiency, the Gary Plan was often showcased as an example of scientific management applied to schooling. But note: this was not because it trained children as workers but because it enabled a more efficient usage of the school building. That schools were empty at nights and on weekends and certain classrooms unused during the day was such a waste of money to those reformers, who argued that schools needed to be run more like businesses, indeed more like factories. ("Keep the students in the buildings year round, dammit!")

While this push for reform was largely administrative — a financial endeavor — there were concerns among parents and educators at the time that this system would have pedagogical, if not broader cultural implications. In a 1924 article in the New Republic titled "The Factory System," Chicago teacher Margaret Haley decried the Gary Plan, also known as the "platoon school." (School bells as a technology training students for the military — that's a Douglas Noble argument right there.) Clearly, she argued, the Gary Plan was simply an effort to lower the cost of education by enrolling more students than classrooms could hold, "dumping" the excess onto the playground or into auditorium or cafeteria spaces, and rotating them rapidly through classrooms so that, as a result, teachers would have hundreds of pupils per day. The platoon school was "the factory system carried into the public school, which needs only the closing-time whistle to make complete its identification with the great industrial plants!" (7)

Although the "platoon school" fell out of favor after 1930, with teachers and even some administrators decrying the Taylorization of education, the influence of efficiency-based reforms remained. Moreover, the adoption of the Carnegie Unit and the standardization of curricular requirements and teachers' workloads in the early twentieth century ha led to the adoption of a school schedule that appears, at least in some way, platoon-school-like: the day divided into 45-minute class periods.

This is a Public Service Announcement

But by and large, through much of the twentieth century, schools did not ring bells to move students from class to class, from room to room. Automated school bells, along with public announcement systems, were available but were not widely adopted until after World War II. Indeed, it was well into the 1960s that many schools finally wired every classroom up to an automated PA system so that the bell, rather than the teacher with an eye on the clock, dismissed class. (And in many communities, it was the PTA that led the fundraising for this bell equipment. You know the PTA, that bastion of bourgeois values so very committed to their children being trained by bells to become factory workers.)

(8)

That the ringing of the school bell was not part of some original and sinister strategy to habituate students for a life of labor doesn't mean the bell — like all technologies in or out of schools — didn't come with and be born from certain ideologies. But the school bell has a different, more complicated history than the "factory model schools" story tells it. It's worth understanding that history because to do so helps us understand the present and design the future. Schools haven't always or everywhere been modeled on factories, despite the efforts of business-minded reformers (still) to reshape them to that end for over a century. The bell hasn't always symbolized drudgery, and when it did signal compliance — and to be sure, it did — we need to think about what that expectation meant historically, not just rhetorically as we describe or decry education today. And don't even get me started on the phrase I've heard in some ed-tech circles, "cells and bells."

The history of education technology — and my rationale for writing this series of essays on the topic — should help us see the possibility for alternatives. Those who want us to forget (or mis-remember) the past are very much committed to our give up hope. Things weren't always this way; resistance is possible. That's all there's ever been, in fact — change — even with something as seemingly old and unchanging as the school bell.

(1) John Taylor Gatto, Weapons of Mass Instruction, 2009. p. 130.

(2) Jeffrey Lackney, "New Approaches for School Design." The Sage Handbook of Educational Leadership, 2011. p. 356.

(3) Horace Mann, "Supplementary Report on the Subject of Schoolhouses." (1838). Life and Works of Horace Mann, 1891. p. 486.

(4) "Local Schools in List of Dangerous." The Dispatch, Moline, Illinois, 16 April 1913.

(5) Raymond Callahan. Education and the Cult of Efficiency, 1962. p. 129.

(6) John and Evelyn Dewey. Schools of Tomorrow, 1915. p. 176.

(7) Callahan, p. 146.

(8) Archie, February 17, 1960.

What Happened & What's Next

Mon, 03 Jan 2022 12:00:00 +0000

Hack Education, as perhaps you've noticed, has been on hiatus for a while. What with the pandemic, the death of my son, and the publication of Teaching Machines, I really couldn't continue to pay attention to the day-to-day nonsense of ed-tech. (The book, in fairness, did have me focused on some of the mid-20th century nonsense.) And after taking a long break from "current events," I am not quite sure I'm ready to face any of it again.

But I suppose I must. There is no safety net for freelance writers and independent scholars; no bereavement leave; no institutional support to help me get through tough times. I need to get back to work — that is, I need to start earning some money again. I have toyed with the idea of leaving the field altogether, letting this website go dormant permanently. I thought about looking for a job here in the Bay Area where I could pretend to be an instructional technologist or project manager or something along those lines. But I'm not sure who'd hire me.

Thanks to an invitation to speak to the UN — part of a research project on ed-tech and the privatization of school — I was reminded that it'd be an uphill battle to launch a brand new career in a different or even adjacent field — particularly at my age, particularly if I want to be recognized as a global expert.

But then again, do I? Expertise is kinda weird these days.

I know that — whatever I do — it has to involve some political bent, some fight for a better future for everyone. And while my work for the past couple of decades has been on education and technology as the means/obstacle to justice, I'm not sure that's a fight I care to engage in. The past year-plus — "pandemic schooling" — has demonstrated how much of what I've said and done and written about has been pretty fucking pointless: the bullshit goes on. Indeed, in the chaos, folks have doubled-down on the very worst aspects of ed-tech, peddling the horrors of surveillance and control as yet education salvation.

Even though I haven't really been on social media for the past year, even though I haven't seen a single headline or read a single RSS feed about ed-tech, I bet I can tell you exactly what happened in 2021. I bet all the issues are the same as I've covered in my Year in Review essays in the past: surveillance, behaviorism, white saviorism, exploitation, extraction, control.

I can't keep throwing myself at the machine to the detriment of my well-being — mentally, physically, financially. It's time to do something a little different.

Rather than focusing my attention on the day-to-day ridiculousness of ed-tech, I'm going to continue to write essays on the history of ed-tech. I believe that these can help illuminate why schools and ed-tech take the shape they do today. Despite my passionate indifference to ed-tech as an industry, I do remain fascinated by the stories that we tell about the history of the future of education and how these narratives are often invented and wielded by those peddling educational reforms. The first essay, coming later this month, will be about one of the key technologies invoked this way: the school bell.

I also plan to start writing about some of the (histories of) technologies of health and "wellness." There's an important overlap here with ed-tech — not just due to the heavy reliance on pseudoscience. Much as, in the last few years, education reformers and entrepreneurs have sought to promote "social emotional learning" as a new avenue for kids' well-being — or rather, data collection and compliance — technologists and investors promote "wellness" for workers, parents, and citizens alike.

These non-ed-tech essays will appear on my personal website. All of my writing will go out on the HEWN newsletter — no longer the Hack Education Weekly Newsletter, but rather a monthly one. HEWN will continue to be free, but you can support my work via Patreon (or PayPal or Venmo) — or, you can hire me to speak to your class, conference, etc. I'll even talk about ed-tech, if that's what you really, really, really want. And pigeons. There will, of course, still be pigeons.

Book Birthday!

Tue, 03 Aug 2021 12:00:00 +0000

It's here!

Pre-Order Teaching Machines

Wed, 16 Jun 2021 16:00:00 +0000

Teaching Machines is available for pre-order via the MIT Press website (and anywhere books are sold — consider supporting your local bookseller).

I spent a few days trying to revamp the Teaching Machines website — before deciding that the template I had was just fine. Now I'm in the process of updating all my various social media accounts with a new profile pic based off the cover.

I absolutely love the cover, by the way. I wanted this photo to be used, but I wasn't sure permissions could be arranged. (That is, I wasn't sure the copyright holder could even be found.) I'll be writing more in the coming days and weeks — all before the publication date of August 3 — about various stories in and not in the book. Why this particular photo matters to me is definitely one of those stories.

I am not on social media these days, which is going to make book promotion interesting. But hopefully I can get back in the routine of blogging more often — most likely on the Teaching Machines site for the foreseeable future, although perhaps on my own personal blog too. And at least those who pay attention to the particular bat signal of RSS will know I'm still around. Hack Education, however, remains on hiatus. (So update your feed readers accordingly.)

Remember This Year

Wed, 30 Dec 2020 23:00:00 +0000

I have had "write year-in-review" on my To Do list for about a month-and-a-half now. But every day I ignore the task, hoping that I'll feel more like writing tomorrow. Tomorrow is the last day of this year, and I don't anticipate anything will change so I am going to try to type a few, very generic thoughts about what happened in ed-tech in 2020.

This reflection is not going to be as lengthy as in previous years. I don't have the heart right now. I can't revisit all the suffering this year has brought about. But there's one thing that I've learned penning these year-end posts for the last decade or so: not much changes. The themes are the same year after year after year: more surveillance, more inequality, more dismantling of public education by tech companies and by tech narratives about "the future of work" and so on. Even during a global pandemic — a year when I'm sure plenty of ed-tech evangelists will try to tell you that "everything changed" — what I think we have witnessed is an acceleration of certain trends that were already in motion rather than any major shift towards something new and different. More surveillance, more inequality, more dismantling of public education. "Cop shit."

In 2008, Clayton Christensen and Michael Horn gleefully predicted that, by 2019, half of all high school classes would be on the Internet. They were wrong, of course, and wrong by a long shot. And that all classes moved to the Internet in 2020 does not prove them right. That all classes moved online was not a triumph of online education, but rather a reflection of the steps schools had to take to prevent further loss of life and, no doubt, the result of the utter failure of leadership at all levels to prepare for the pandemic, let alone respond with compassion and care.

I'm sure that there will be many pronouncements about the failures of ed-tech this year. We've known for a very long time about what works and what doesn't work (although that's never stopped schools from investing heavily in the latest gadgets and gizmos with little attention to research). Unsurprisingly, the move to online education, facilitated by video-conferencing software and digital worksheets, hasn't been great — for teachers or students. Of course, face-to-face education wasn't so great for many teachers and students either.

It's been a cruel and terrible year — one that has changed many lives irrevocably. But will it change institutions? Will it change educational practices? I don't know. These callous monsters still demanded a college football season, so we know they'd rather see students and teachers die than make adjustments to tradition. (To revenue.)

I am certain that many education reformers and technology companies are hoping that they've managed to sink their claws securely into a fragile system, that crisis education becomes the permanent mode of operation. "There's no going back," they'll tell you. Again, I don't know. I think people long for a return to the Before Times and crave a Zoom-free life.

Then again, no one should want to go back — not to how things were.

Going forward, we have to build something better, not for the sake of the digital prophets — I cannot stress enough when I say "fuck those guys." We must build something better for the sake of an equitable and sustainable future, for the sake of democracy. And that future cannot be oriented around "cop shit." And folks, that means that future cannot be oriented around most ed-tech.

In my work, I write a lot about ed-tech amnesia — the ways in which the history of education and technology are forgotten, dismissed. What will we remember from 2020, and what will we forget? I often worry that we forget too much. As a result, we hold none of the monsters accountable, and so they return with new ventures, and we have to battle the bad ideas all over again. In my own small effort to fight the amnesia, I have written lengthy essays at the end of each year, detailing all that's happened, so that at least somewhere we have catalogued their names and misdeeds. Each year, I write, desperately hoping people will learn from the past.

But this year, I can't do it. I am too wrapped up in my own memories and my own grief. That said, this year, more than ever, I wonder and worry about what we are going to try to erase, telling ourselves and others that we must forget to move on from all this trauma. I don't believe that forgetting is the path to healing. But I admit, I can't see that path clearly from where I stand.

Behaviorism, Surveillance, and (School) Work

Tue, 01 Dec 2020 23:00:00 +0000

I was a speaker today at the #AgainstSurveillance teach-in, a fundraiser for Ian Linkletter who is being sued by the online test-proctoring software company Proctorio.

I am very pleased but also really outraged to be here today to help raise money for Ian Linkletter's defense and, more broadly, to help raise awareness about the dangers of ed-tech surveillance. It's nice to be part of an event where everyone is on the same page — politically, pedagogically — and I needn't be the sole person saying "hey wait, folks. This ed-tech stuff is, at best, snake oil and, at worst, fascist."

The challenge, on the other hand, is to not simply repeat the things that Sava, Maha, Benjamin, Chris, and Jesse have already said. I am lucky that these five are not just colleagues but dear friends, and the love and support they have shown me and the solidarity that all of you show today give me great hope that we can build better educational practices and that we aren't stuck with snake oil or fascism.

I will say this, even if it's been stated and restated a dozen or more times today: test proctoring is exploitative and extractive. It is harmful to all students, but particularly to those who are already disadvantaged by our institutions. To adopt test proctoring software is to maintain a pedagogical practice based on mistrust, surveillance, and punishment. To adopt test proctoring software is to enrich an unethical industry. To adopt Proctorio in particular is to align oneself with a company that has repeatedly demonstrated that it sees students, teachers, and staff as its enemy, a company that has no respect for academic freedom, for critical inquiry, or for the safety and well-being of the community that it purport to serve.

When we talk about surveillance and ed-tech, much of the focus — and rightly so — is on how this affects students. As we gather here today to raise funds for Ian, a learning technology specialist at UBC, we have to recognize, no doubt, how much surveillance and ed-tech affects teachers and staff as well.

This should not come as a surprise. A fair amount of education technology comes from what we call "enterprise technology" — that is, the kinds of software adopted by large corporations and government entities. Zoom, for example, was not designed for classroom use (although Stanford University was, interestingly, its first paying customer); it was designed to facilitate remote business meetings. (And I should add that it was designed rather poorly for even that. This spring, when schools and workplaces turned to videoconferencing tools en masse, the CEO of Zoom admitted that he'd never really thought about privacy and security issues on the platform. He couldn't fathom why someone would "zoom bomb" a class.)

Enterprise technology is utterly committed to monitoring and controlling workers, although I think many white-collar professionals imagine themselves laboring outside these sorts of constraints — much like professors seem to imagine that the plagiarism and proctoring software is only interested in their students' work, not their own. Microsoft and Google offer schools "productivity tools," for example, making it quite clear — I would hope — that whatever students or staff type or click on feeds into financial measurements of efficiency. (Quite literally so in the case of Microsoft, which now offers managers a way to measure and score workers based on how often they email, chat, or collaborate in Sharepoint. In ed-tech circles, we call this "learning analytics," but it's less about learning than it is about productivity.)

The learning management system, as the name suggests, is as much a piece of enterprise software as it is educational software. It too is committed to measuring and scoring based on how often its users email, chat, or collaborate. That word "management" is a dead giveaway that this software is designed neither for students nor for workers. The LMS is an administrative tool, designed at the outset to post course materials online in such a way that the institution, not the open web, could control access.

The LMS monitors "student performance" and productivity, to be sure. But it can readily be used to surveil instructors as well — to track which graduate students are on strike based on their log-ins, for example, to track how many hours teachers are working during the pandemic. Real world examples, not hypotheticals here. The co-founders of Blackboard, incidentally, are back with a new startup: an administrative layer on top of Zoom to make it work "better" for school, they say, with features like attendance-taking, test-proctoring, and eye-tracking. Congratulations to education technology for taking a surveillance tool designed for the office and making it even more exploitative when turning it on students and staff.

I want to pause here to make an important point: too often, when it comes to education technology — all technology, to be honest — we get really caught up in the material (or digital) object itself. We talk about "the tool" as though it has agency and ideas all its own, rather than recognizing that technology is part of the broader practices, systems, and ideologies at play in the world around us. Technologies have histories. The LMS has a history — one bound up in the technological constraints of student information systems in the late 1990s and the ed-tech imagination about what sort of web access students should (or shouldn't) have. That history gets carried forward today — analog beliefs and practices get "hard-coded" into software, creating new pedagogical constraints that students and teachers must work with. Technology never arrives "all of a sudden," even though stories about tech and ed-tech are prone to ignore history to highlight some so-called innovation. Proctorio did not emerge, fully-formed, out of Mike Olson's head — as the goddess of wisdom emerged out of Zeus's, but here with less wisdom and more litigiousness. Online test proctoring has a history; it has ideology. Indeed, test-taking itself is a cultural construct, embedded into longstanding beliefs and practices about schooling — what we test, how we test, "academic integrity," cheating, and so on. And the whole idea that there is rampant cheating is a nifty narrative, one that's been peddled for ages and is truly the philosophical cornerstone for how much of ed-tech gets designed.

Surveillance didn't just appear in educational institutions with the advent of the computer. So many of the deeply held beliefs and practices of education involve watching, monitoring, controlling. Watching, monitoring, controlling children and adults, students and teachers. And I'd argue that watching, monitoring, and controlling are fundamentally behaviorist practices.

We can think about the ways in which education technology has emerged from workplace technologies — as well as the ways in which schools adopt the language and culture of "productivity" — in order to control our bodies, our minds, our time, our behaviors. But much of the labor of education is reproductive labor — teaching and learning as the reproduction of knowledge and culture, teaching and learning as acts of care. What does it mean to bring surveillance and behaviorism to bear down on reproductive labor?

Wired ran one of those awful "future of work" stories last week. Something about how too many meetings make us unhappy and unproductive and therefore artificial intelligence will "optimize" all this by scheduling our appointments for us, by using facial recognition and body language-reading software to make sure we're paying attention and staying on track and maximizing our efficiency. The underlying message: more surveillance will make us better workers.

It's not hard to see how this gets repackaged for schools.

But I'm interested not just in this question of productive labor but reproductive. These are sort of loosely formed ideas so bear with me if it's not fully baked. What does it mean to automate and algorithmically program reproductivity. What does it mean, furthermore, when the demands of the workplace and the demands of school enter the site more commonly associated with reproductive labor — that is, the home.

Of course, we have for almost one hundred years now been developing technologies to and telling stories about the necessity of automating the home. That's this other influence that joins enterprise tech: consumer tech.

Let me tell you a quick story that bridges my book Teaching Machines with the next product I'm working on — this one on the history of the baby monitor (I mean, we have a thing called "baby monitor" and we have bought this product for almost a century now and all of a sudden folks want to talk about how children are so heavily surveilled and good lord, read some history). Anyway, let's talk about B. F. Skinner's efforts to develop a behaviorist technology for child-rearing: the "air crib."

Let's talk about Skinner because we should recognize that so much of surveillance in ed-tech comes from his behaviorist bent — his belief that we can observe learning by monitoring behavior and we can enhance learning by engineering behavior.

Skinner fabricated a climate-controlled environment for his second child in 1944. First called the "baby tender" and then – and I kid you not – the "heir conditioner," the device was meant to replace the crib, the bassinet, and the playpen. Writing in Ladies Home Journal one year later, Skinner said,

When we decided to have another child, my wife and I felt that it was time to apply a little labor-saving invention and design to the problems of the nursery. We began by going over the disheartening schedule of the young mother, step by step. We asked only one question: Is this practice important for the physical and psychological health of the baby? When it was not, we marked it for elimination. Then the "gadgeteering" began.

The crib Skinner "gadgeteered" for his daughter was made of metal, larger than a typical crib, and higher off the ground – labor-saving, in part, through less bending over, Skinner argued. It had three solid walls, a roof, and a safety-glass pane at the front which could be lowered to move the baby in and out. Canvas was stretched across the bottom to create a floor, and the bedding was stored on a spool outside the crib, to be rolled in to replace soiled linen. It was soundproof and "dirt proof," Skinner said, but its key feature was that the crib was temperature-controlled, so save the diaper, the baby was kept unclothed and unbundled. Skinner argued that clothing created unnecessary laundry and inhibited the baby's movement and thus the baby's exploration of her world.

This was a labor-saving machine — see, we even talk about reproductive labor in terms of productivity — Skinner boasted that the air crib meant it only would take "about one and one-half hours each day to feed, change, and otherwise care for the baby." Skinner insisted that his daughter, who stayed in the crib for the first two years of her life, was not "socially starved and robbed of affection and mother love." He wrote in Ladies Home Journal that

The compartment does not ostracize the baby. The large window is no more of a social barrier than the bars of a crib. The baby follows what is going on in the room, smiles at passers-by, plays "peek-a-boo" games, and obviously delights in company. And she is handled, talked to, and played with whenever she is changed or fed, and each afternoon during a play period, which is becoming longer as she grows older.

This invention never caught on, in no small part because the title of that Ladies Home Journal article – "Baby in a Box" – connected the crib to the "Skinner's Box," the operant conditioning chamber that he had designed for his experiments on rats and pigeons, thus associating the crib with the rewards and pellets that Skinner used to modify these animals' behavior in his laboratory. Indeed, Skinner described the crib's design and the practices he and his wife developed for their infant daughter as an "experiment" – a word that he probably didn't really mean in a strict scientific sense but that possibly suggested to readers that this was a piece of lab equipment, not a piece of furniture suited for a baby or for the home. The article also opened with the phrase "in that brave new world which science is preparing for the housewife of the future," and many readers would have likely been familiar with Aldous Huxley's 1932 novel Brave New World, thus making the connection between the air crib and Huxley's dystopia in which reproduction and child-rearing were engineered and controlled by a techno-scientific authoritarian government. But most damning, perhaps, was the photo that accompanied the article: little Deborah Skinner enclosed in the crib, with her face and hands pressed up against the glass.

Skinner's call to automate child-rearing also coincided with the publication of Dr. Benjamin Spock's The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care, which rejected the behaviorist methods promoted by psychologists like John B. Watson — strict, data-driven timetables for feeding and toilet training and so on — and argued, contrary to this sort of techno-scientific endeavor, that mothers — and it was mothers — should be more flexible, more "loving," more "natural."

Now, there are plenty of problems with this naturalized domesticity, to be sure — a naturalized domesticity that is certainly imagined as white, affluent, and American. And some of these are problems that the teaching profession, particularly at the K-12 level, still wrestles with today — white womanhood.

The air crib, psychologists Ludy Benjamin and Elizabeth Nielsen-Gamman argue, was viewed at the time as a "technology of displacement" – "a device that interferes with the usual modes of contact for human beings, in this case, parent and child; that is it displaces the parent." It's a similar problem, those two scholars contend, to that faced by one of Skinner's other inventions, the teaching machine – a concept he came up with in 1953 after visiting Deborah's fourth-grade classroom. Skinner's inventions both failed to achieve widespread adoption, they argue, because they were seen as subverting valuable human relationships – relationships necessary to child development.

But I'm not sure that either the ideas of the teaching machine or the baby monitor were truly rejected. If nothing else, they keep getting repackaged and reintroduced — at home, at work, at school.

The question before us now, I'd argue, is whether or not we want behaviorist technologies — and again, I'd argue all behaviorist technologies are surveillance technologies — to be central to human development. Remember, B. F. Skinner didn't believe in freedom. If we do, then we have to reject not just the latest shiny gadgetry and anti-cheating bullshittery, but we have to reject over a century of psychotechnologies and pedagogies of oppression. That's a lot of work ahead for us.

But if we just bite off one chunk, one tiny chunk, let's make sure Proctorio is wildly unsuccessful in all its legal and its business endeavors.

What Happens When Ed-Tech Forgets? Some Thoughts on Rehabilitating Reputations

Wed, 11 Nov 2020 23:00:00 +0000

I was a guest today in Chris Hoadley's NYU class on ed-tech and globalization. Here's a bit of my rant...

Thank you so much for inviting me to speak to you today. I have been really stumped as to what I should say. If you look at the talks I've given this year — and I've done quite a lot since I've volunteered to visit Zoom school and speak to classes — there are a couple of notable themes: behaviorism and surveillance. I could talk about both of these for hours, and I want to leave plenty of time after I rant at you for a bit for us to maybe tackle some of these issues. It’s worth noting that these were things I talked about before the pandemic — behaviorism, surveillance, and trauma — but many folks seem a lot more amenable to hear me now. Unlike previous moments when ed-tech was in the spotlight — notably in 2012, "the year of the MOOC" — I am now inundated with media requests to talk about the drawbacks and the dangers about the move online, particularly as it relates to online test-proctoring companies, at least one of which is proving to be as villainous a character in ed-tech circles as we've seen since (perhaps) Blackboard.

One of the things I have written about quite a bit is this idea of "ed-tech amnesia" — that is, this profound forgetting if not erasure of the history of the field. And I don’t just mean forgetting or erasing what happened in the 1950s or 1980s. I mean forgetting what happened five, ten years ago. Some of this is a result of an influx of Silicon Valley types in recent years — people with no ties to education or education technology who think that their ignorance and lack of expertise is a strength. And it doesn't help, of course, that there is, in general, a repudiation of history within Silicon Valley itself. Silicon Valley's historical amnesia — the inability to learn about, to recognize, to remember what has come before — is deeply intertwined with the idea of "disruption" and its firm belief that new technologies are necessarily innovative and are always "progress." I like to cite, as an example, a New Yorker article from a few years ago that interviewed Anthony Levandoski, the Uber engineer sued by Google for stealing its self-driving car technology. "The only thing that matters is the future," Levandoski told the magazine. "I don't even know why we study history. It's entertaining, I guess — the dinosaurs and the Neanderthals and the Industrial Revolution, and stuff like that. But what already happened doesn't really matter. You don't need to know that history to build on what they made. In technology, all that matters is tomorrow." (If this were a literature class, I would tie this attitude to the Italian Futurists and to fascism, but that’s a presentation for another day.)

There are other examples of this historical amnesia in ed-tech specifically, no doubt. Narratives about the “factory model of education” and whatnot. Some of these other examples appear in the introduction of my forthcoming book, which I won't spoil since I have to save a chapter like that for the book tour — if we can do book tours.

I want us to be vigilant about this amnesia, in no small part because I think it's going to be wielded — I use that verb because I'm thinking here of that little flashy light that Will Smith had in Men in Black — in the coming months and years as many people want us to forget their mistakes, as they try to rehabilitate not just their bad ideas but their very reputations. By "many people," of course I mean Jared and Ivanka. But I also mean any number of people in education and education technology, who've not only screwed up the tools and practices of pandemic teaching and learning today, but who have a rather long history of bad if not dangerous ideas and decisions. These are people who have done real, substantive damage to students, to teachers, to public education. We cannot forget this.

We already have, of course.

Remember AllLearn? (I'm guessing not. There's not even a Wikipedia entry. We've just memory-holed it.) It was a joint online education project founded by Yale, Stanford, and Oxford in 2000 that had over $12 million in investment and created over 100 courses. (Do the math there on the per course costs.) It closed some six years later. AllLearn was short for Alliance for Lifelong Learning. The pitch was that it would provide digital courseware from "the world's best universities" to those university alumni and to the public. The former would pay $200 a course; the latter $250. The Chair of AllLearn was also the head of Yale University at the time: Richard Levin. Despite the failure of AllLearn, in 2014, Levin was named the CEO of Coursera. (His Wikipedia entry also fails to mention AllLearn.)

AllLearn wasn't the only online education failure of the early 2000s, of course. Columbia University invested $30 million into its own online learning initiative, Fathom, that opened in 2000 and closed in 2003. Fathom, for its part, does have a Wikipedia entry. There, you can learn that this initiative was headed by one Michael M. Crow, who is now the President of Arizona State University and according to plenty of education reformers, the visionary behind "the new American university" — one whose interests are not those of the public, I'd say, but rather those of industry. (Crow's Wikipedia entry, for what it's worth, does not mention Fathom either. It does mention that he's the chairman of the board of In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the CIA.)

I talk a lot about the problems of industry when it comes to ed-tech — how venture capital and venture philanthropy have enormous influence on shaping the direction of education policy. But we should recognize too that the call, if you will, is also coming from inside the house. Terrible ed-tech isn't simply something that's imposed onto universities from the outside; it's something that certain folks on the inside and certain institutions in particular are readily promoting, designing, and adopting. The learning management system, for example, originated at universities. (We can debate which one. You can trace the LMS to PLATO at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign, for example, or you can trace it to CourseInfo at Cornell.) Plagiarism detection software originated at universities. (TurnItIn was founded at UC Berkeley.) And online test proctoring software has roots at universities as well. (ProctorU was founded at Andrew Jackson University. Proctorio was founded at Arizona State.)

Online test proctoring is pretty abhorrent. We're quite literally asking students to install spyware on their machines. This spyware extracts an incredible amount of information from students, including their biometric data, audio, and video, and then runs it through proprietary algorithms designed to identify suspicious behavior that might signal cheating. I don't think I need to detail to this audience why this is a bad idea technically and a bad idea politically and a bad idea pedagogically.

It's been fascinating, I think, to see the media pick up on this story, because for far too long critiques of ed-tech have been overwhelmed by the sheer volume of hype, overpromising, and marketing fluff. But I want to call out Proctorio in particular in this talk because this company has demonstrated it has no business in schools; its products have no business in classrooms. Online test proctoring is, as PhD student Jeffrey Moro has called it, "cop shit," — that is, "any pedagogical technique or technology that presumes an adversarial relationship between students and teachers." Cop shit supposedly brings order to the classroom by demanding compliance. Cop shit, like "broken windows policing," takes the immense amount of data that schools and ed-tech collect about students and uses that to identify potential criminal behavior — cheating and otherwise. Cop shit relies on carceral pedagogy (and carceral ed-tech), which stands in complete opposition to any sort of liberatory practice of teaching and learning. It stands in complete opposition to education as a practice of care and justice.

But Proctorio has taken its cop shit one step further, invoking the law to threaten students and university staff who challenge them. Proctorio is currently suing Ian Linkletter, an instructional technologist at the University of British Columbia, for infringing on its intellectual property rights. A critic of the company, Linkletter posted links to unlisted YouTube videos — that is, publicly available information — on Twitter. The company has also insinuated they might take legal action against an academic journal that published an article critical of online test proctoring. Proctorio also filed a DMCA takedown notice against a Miami University student who'd posted snippets of Proctorio's Google Chrome extension onto Twitter and who raised questions about some of the claims the company was making about its product. Proctorio's CEO, Mike Olson posted a student's private chat logs with the company's customer support to Reddit after the student complained about the product. What kind of leader does that? What kind of company culture sanctions that?

Proctorio has demonstrated again and again and again and again and again and again that it holds students and staff in deep disdain. It has demonstrated that it will bully people to get its way — to maintain and expand its market share, to spread the adoption of "cop shit." Let's not forget that.

For a long time, arguably Blackboard was one of the major ed-tech villains. I mean, nobody is particularly fond of the learning management system as a piece of ed-tech, but the LMS is not so much evil as it is insidiously unimaginative. Blackboard, however, really upset folks in 2006 when it filed a patent infringement lawsuit against its competitor Desire2Learn (D2L), one day after receiving the patent for "Internet-based education support system and methods." As I mentioned earlier, one can trace the origins of the learning management system and to "Internet-based education support system and methods" to much earlier technologies, including the PLATO system at the University of Illinois in the 1960s. But Blackboard filed the patent; and Blackboard decided to be the patent bully. What kind of leader does that? What kind of company culture sanctions that? Blackboard won its lawsuit against D2L, although after several years of legal wrangling, the patent office eventually rescinded some 44 IP claims made by Blackboard, and the two LMS companies announced in 2009 that they'd settled all the litigation between them. Nevertheless, this left a bitter taste in a lot of folks' mouths. We'll never forget, some said.

But guess who's back? Michael Chasen, one of the co-founders of Blackboard and its CEO from 1999 to 2012. He's launched a startup that offers a layer on top of Zoom to make it work "better" for schools — offering things like attendance, proctoring, and eye-tracking. And guess who else is back? Coursera founder Daphne Koller. She and her husband have launched a startup that also offers a replacement to Zoom. Just like Richard Levin did when he was appointed the CEO of Coursera, these folks are going to claim that they have deep experience with online education, but we might want to balk at that because they've never demonstrated any willingness to learn from the mistakes they have made in the past.

It makes me rather depressed to say I gave a talk six years ago called "Un-Fathom-able: The Hidden History of Ed-Tech" where I touched on some of these very same themes, these very same stories. I called it "Un-Fathom-able," thumbing my nose at the failures of Columbia University's Dot Com era disaster Fathom, sure, but also at what I knew at the time — 2014! — we'd see as the failure of Coursera. There wasn't a sustainable business model for AllLearn and there wasn't a sustainable business model (at the outset at least) for Coursera. (I'm not sure that there is one quite yet, although the company has ditched any pretense of "free and open" once heralded as the great innovation of the MOOC.)

Unfathomable. Impenetrable. Incomprehensible. Inexplicable. Unknowable. There's so often this hand-waving in the face of grave mistakes in ed-tech that no one could have possibly predicted, no one could have possibly known. But people did predict. People did know. That expertise, however, was dismissed; experiences were forgotten; reputations were rehabilitated without any reflection or humility.

This pandemic has given us a pretty pivotal moment for educational institutions, one in which we have to decide what we want school to do, to look like, whose values should it represent and carry forward. But I'd argue we won't be able to move forward with any sort of progressive politics or progressive pedagogy or progressive university mission until we reconcile where we've been before. We can't move forward towards any semblance of educational justice, until there is reconciliation and repair to the harm that ed-tech and it's proponents have caused. We will move forward if we just forget. We'll just keep getting the LMS and expensive video lectures and "cop shit" repackaged and sold to us as innovation.