The Revenge of the Monsters of Education Technology

By Audrey Watters

A collection of keynotes and talks delivered throughout 2015, this book explores the history of the future of education technology: its politics, its mythology, and its monsters. The book examines the century-long drive to automate education through various teaching machines.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Audrey Watters
• Release date: Nov 8, 2015
• ISBN: 9780986314438

Audrey Watters

Audrey Watters is a writer who focuses on education technology – the relationship between politics, pedagogy, business, culture, and ed-tech. She has worked in the education field for over 15 years: teaching, researching, organizing, and project-managing. Although she was two chapters into her dissertation (on a topic completely unrelated to ed-tech), she decided to abandon academia, and she now happily fulfills the one job recommended to her by a junior high aptitude test: freelance writer. She has written for The Atlantic, Edutopia, MindShift, Inside Higher Ed, The School Library Journal, The Huffington Post, and elsewhere, in addition to her own blog Hack Education. She is currently working on a book called Teaching Machines. No really. She is.

Book preview

The Revenge of the Monsters of Education Technology

AUDREY WATTERS

Copyright © 2015 Audrey Watters

The Revenge of the Monsters of Education Technology is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.

For Isaiah

CONTENTS

Introduction

I. The History of the Future of Education

1 The History of the Future of Education

2 The Golden Lasso of Education Technology

3 Teaching Machines and Turing Machines: The History of the Future of Labor and Learning

4 Learning Networks, Not Teaching Machines

5 The Algorithmic Future of Education

II. Education Technology’s Inequalities

6 Men (Still) Explain Technology to Me: Gender and Education Technology

7 Ed-Tech’s Inequalities

8 Is It Time to Give Up on Computers in Schools?

9 Technology Imperialism, the Californian Ideology, and the Future of Higher Education

III. Criticism and Care

10 The Functions of Ed-Tech Criticism

11 Existing Digitally

12 Criticism and Care and Writing and Robots

Afterword

Introduction

I started my 2014 book The Monsters of Education Technology with this sentence: I was supposed to write a different book this year. And that sentence applies once again to this, its sequel.

Indeed, I could probably take the whole introduction to the book I published last year—a collection of the keynotes I’d delivered in 2014—and copy-and-paste it into the opening pages of this new book. My story this year is much the same: despite my very best intentions to finish Teaching Machines, my ongoing investigation into the history of education technology, I found myself traveling around the world delivering talks and keynotes and public presentations instead.

That’s not meant to be a complaint. I love to travel (I spoke in six different countries this year), and I find the process of preparing for a keynote to be incredibly fruitful intellectually. A keynote is not a lecture (although it’s become fashionable to criticize both), but it is a rhetorical performance and a sustained argument. Talking for 30 minutes, 45 minutes, an hour, in front of a live audience is very different than writing articles, particularly the short ones that seem to be so common online. If nothing else, you can make a different sort of argument, more akin to a sermon perhaps, when you’re speaking to a live audience as opposed to when you’re writing—although I do always write my talks out so that I can publish the transcripts on my website, Hack Education.

As with The Monsters of Education Technology, this book is a collection of the talks I’ve given this year—eleven of them. (I’ve included an additional essay as well, written exclusively for this publication.)

When I’m asked to give a talk, I always try to come up with something new to say or at the very least to frame a thing I tend to repeat in a different way. I’m not a speaker that simply re-states and re-enacts what you can see in a TED Talk that’s been viewed millions of times on YouTube. (OK, I don’t actually have a TED Talk that’s been viewed millions of time.) I joked at NWeLearn this fall, borrowing from the oft-cited quotation by science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke, that any keynote who can be replaced by a machine should be.

Instead I build bespoke keynotes. I fashion artisanal keynotes. These are specially commissioned and individually handcrafted keynotes. These provocations will not be replaced by a machine.

I’ve titled this book The Revenge of the Monsters of Education Technology. Why revenge? No doubt, it’s a nod to the fact that this book is a sequel to last year’s similarly titled collection of keynotes. (And if I keep working the ed-tech speaking circuit—we’ll see how long folks in ed-tech actually tolerate me—I plan to publish titles like this annually. You’ll have to wait until Episode IV, of course, for me to use the tagline A New Hope.)

By using the word revenge in the title, I want to underscore something else: that the horrors of ed-tech are back this year with a vengeance. As I cautioned in the Afterword to last year’s book, Education technology requires our love and our care so as to not become even more monstrous, so that it can become marvelous instead. And in the intervening twelve months since I published that sentence? Well, it’s been a record-setting year for venture capital investment. Investors and education entrepreneurs continue their drumbeat for unbundling, disrupting, outsourcing, privatizing, and profiteering. Buzzwords, drawn largely from business and from educational psychology, are thrown about to justify new policies and new (technology) expenditures. Grit. Growth mindset. Disruptive innovation. Thanks to ed-tech, the surveillance of students continues—both at school and increasingly at home. Promises that more data extraction will fix education continue to be made, often accompanied by ridiculous claims about software that can adapt to individual students’ needs and can semi read students’ minds. All this is accompanied by the gleeful pronouncements--often from those with great financial privilege—that robots are coming for our jobs. (Not their jobs, of course. The rest of ours…)

These are, as I have long argued, the monsters of education technology. The field, the industry is full of monsters. We created them. We ignored them. We pretended they did not exist. We have let them thrive in our midst, in part because we’ve fallen for the tale that insists technology is good and that technology is inevitable. And in part, as I’ve argued before, there are monsters because there is a profound lack of care and justice in the work we do in education and education technology.

The first section of The Revenge of the Monsters of Education Technology looks at the history of the future of education—that is, the stories from the past and present that gesture towards a (largely technological) future of education. These stories, as I repeat time and time again, are not new.

The second section examines education technology’s inequalities. I want us to ask: what if ed-tech actually makes things worse? What if, embedded in its code and in its ideologies, there are features in ed-tech that will exacerbate already existing educational and socio-economic inequalities?

The third and final section is titled criticism and care. Too often, these are seen as antithetical: to criticize education technology comes from a position of callousness, some contend, not care. Criticism is destructive, I’m frequently told (or rather, I’m frequently scolded), not constructive. I disagree. I am a critic—a fierce and vocal critic, yes—of the shape of education technology because I care and because I am deeply committed to addressing ed-tech’s inequalities and injustices.

I want to build a world without monsters.

I’ll end this introduction, echoing the words I penned for The Monsters of Education Technology: I am hopeful that in 2016, I’ll be able to finish Teaching Machines. In the meantime, thank you for reading and supporting my work throughout 2015.

I. The HISTORY OF THE FUTURE OF EDUCATION

1 The History of the Future of EdUCATION

It’s a refrain throughout my work: we are suffering from an amnesia of sorts, whereby we seem to have forgotten much of the history of technology. As such, we now tell these stories about the past, present, and future whereby all innovations emerge from Silicon Valley, all innovations are recent innovations, and there is no force for change other than entrepreneurial genius and/or the inevitability of disruptive innovation.

This amnesia seeps from technology into education and education technology. The rich and fascinating past of education is forgotten and erased in an attempt to tell a story about the future of education that emphasizes products not processes, the private not the public, skills not inquiry. The future of education technology therefore is the story of Silicon Valley and a handful of elite private universities because the history of education technology has always been the story of Silicon Valley and a handful of elite private universities.

Or so the story goes.

I’ve been working on a book for a while now called Teaching Machines that explores the history of education technology in the twentieth century. And this year I’ve started a series on my blog, Hack Education, that also documents some of this lost or forgotten history. (I’ve looked at the origins of multiple choice tests and multiple choice testing machines, for example, the parallels between the Draw Me ads and for-profit correspondence schools of the 1920s and today’s MOOCs, and the development of one of my personal favorite pieces of ed-tech, the Speak & Spell.)

See, I’m exhausted by the claims by the latest batch of Silicon Valley ed-tech entrepreneurs and their investors that ed-tech is new and that education—I’m quoting one from The New York Times here—is one of the last industries to be touched by Internet technology. Again, this is a powerful and purposeful re-telling and revising of history designed to shape the direction of the future.

Of course, these revisionist narratives shouldn’t really surprise us. We always tell stories of our past in order to situate ourselves in the present and guide ourselves into the future. But that means these stories about education and education technology—past, present, future—matter greatly.

I am particularly interested in the history of the future of education, or as journalist Matt Novak has titled his blog, the paleofuture. How have we imagined the future of teaching and learning in the past? What can we learn by looking at the history of predictions about the future—in our case about the future of education? Whose imagination, what ideologies do these futures reflect? How do these fantasies shape the facts, the future?

This is perhaps one of the most frequently cited examples of the paleofuture of education technology:

This 1910 print is by the French artist Villemard and was part of a series "En l'an 2000 (In the Year 2000") released circa the World’s Fair and the new century. Here, we see the teacher stuffing textbooks—L'Histoire de France—into a machine, where the knowledge is ground up and delivered electronically into the heads of students.

Arguably this image is so popular because it confirms some of our beliefs and suspicions (our worst suspicions, that is) about the future of education: that it’s destined to become mechanized or automated and that it’s designed based on a belief that knowledge—educational content, curriculum—is something to be delivered. Students’ heads are something to be filled.

The other prints in this series are quite revealing as well:

In these images, we see the year 2000 imagined as one in which humans conquer the sky and the sea, as more and more work is accomplished by machine.

It’s worth noting that quite often (but not always) the labor we imagine being replaced by machine is the labor that society does not value highly. It’s menial labor. It’s emotional labor. The barber. The housekeeper. The farm girl. The teacher. The student.

So it’s interesting, don’t you think, when we see these pictures and hear the predictions that suggest that more and more teaching will be done by machine. Do we value the labor of teaching? Do we value the labor of learning?

Thomas Edison famously predicted in 1913 that Books will soon be obsolete in schools—but not because books were to be ground up by a knowledge mill. Rather, Edison believed that one of the technological inventions he was involved with and invested in—the motion picture—would displace both textbooks and teachers alike.

I believe that the motion picture is destined to revolutionize our educational system and that in a few years it will supplant largely, if not entirely, the use of textbooks, Edison asserted in 1922. I should say that on the average we get about two percent efficiency out of schoolbooks as they are written today. The education of the future, as I see it, will be conducted through the medium of the motion picture... where it should be possible to obtain one hundred percent efficiency.

100% efficiency. Efficiency. What does that even mean? Because unexamined, this prediction, this goal for education has become an undercurrent of so many predictions about the future of teaching and learning as enhanced by technology. Efficiency.

In some ways, it gets to the heart of that Villemard print too: this question of how we get the knowledge of the book or the instructor into all students’ brains as quickly and cheaply as possible.

The future: cheaper and faster. More mechanized. More technological. A Push Button School of Tomorrow.

This is the history of education technology throughout the twentieth century. It is the history of the future of education.

Radio. Radio books. Lectures via television. Professor as transmitter. Students as receivers. These are the imagined futures appearing in the mainstream press and in scientific magazines for over one hundred years now. From Popular Science in 1961, for example, a prediction that by 1965, half of all students will use teaching machines. And from a 1981 book School, Work and Play (World of Tomorrow):

If we look further into the future, there could be no schools and no teachers. Schoolwork may not exist. Instead you will have to do homework, for you will learn everything at home using your home video computer. You’ll learn a wide range of subjects quickly and at a time of day to suit you. ... The computer won’t seem like a machine. It will talk to you