The Curse of the Monsters of Education Technology

By Audrey Watters

A collection of keynotes and talks delivered throughout 2016 by "ed-tech's Cassandra," Audrey Watters. This book explores the history of the future of education technology: its politics, its mythology, and its monsters.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Audrey Watters
• Release date: Dec 25, 2016
• ISBN: 9780986314452

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.

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The Curse of the Monsters of Education Technology

AUDREY WATTERS

Copyright © 2016 Audrey Watters

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

For Clem and Kate and all the vagabonds

CONTENTS

Introduction

1 I Love My Label: Resisting the Pre-Packaged Sound in Ed-Tech

2 The Rough Beasts of Ed-Tech

3 Memory Machines: Learning, Knowing, and Technological Change

4 Re·Con·Figures: The Pigeons of Ed-tech

5 Attending to the Digital

6 (This Is Not a Morphology of) The Monsters of Education Technology

7 The Best Way to Predict the Future is to Issue a Press Release

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. I started my 2015 book The Revenge of the Monsters of Education Technology with that sentence too. And once again this year, I failed to finish Teaching Machines.

In the past, my excuse was all the traveling and all the speaking left little time for completing that particular book. It’s a slightly different excuse this time around: 2016 was simply a shitty year.

As with The Monsters of Education Technology and its sequel, this book is a collection of the talks I’ve given this year—seven total. That’s far fewer than I delivered in previous years, and I’m uncomfortable accounting for the loss of productivity.

Perhaps people have grown tired of listening to ed-tech’s Cassandra.

I’ve felt the curse of Cassandra quite strongly this year. I’m accustomed to having my cautionary keynotes and essays be dismissed, but the stakes feel higher now that Americans have elected Donald Trump as the next President.

Trump indicated on the campaign trail he would be interested in creating a registry to track Muslims’ whereabouts in the country; and while some technology companies and tech workers have sworn they would never participate in building a database to do this, the metadata to identify us and track us—by our religion, by our sexual identity, by our race, by our political preferences—already exists in these companies’ and in governments’ hands. Trump will soon have under his control vast surveillance powers—thanks in part to technology companies like Palantir (co-founded by Trump pal and ed-tech investor Peter Thiel), thanks in part to expanded NSA surveillance authorized by President Obama.

Meanwhile, schools and education companies have continued to expand their surveillance of students and faculty, with little concern, it seems, to how politically regressive all this data-mining and algorithmic decision-making might actually be.

I've tried to warn you.

And yet here we are—with the monsters of education technology still, with the monsters once again. We have created these monsters. We have ignored them as they’ve grown. We have pretended they do not exist. We have let the monsters thrive in our midst, in part because we’ve fallen for the tale that insists technology is benign and that technology is inevitable. And as I’ve argued again and again and again, there are monsters because there is a lack of care and an absence of justice in the work we do in education and education technology.

The seven chapters in this book are presented in the order that I delivered the talks on which they’re based, starting with one I gave at Davidson College in March and ending with one I gave at Virginia Commonwealth University in November. Rather than re-organize them by topic or theme, I’m opting for this order as I think it underscores the heightened sense of monstrosity as the year (in ed-tech and otherwise) progressed.

This year, as every year, I write out my keynotes in advance, and I publish the transcripts on my website Hack Education. Every keynote I give is a carefully crafted cautionary tale. Every keynote I give is unique, although admittedly I do return to certain themes and ideas. I repeat myself, as Cassandras are wont to do.

1 I LOVE MY LABEL: RESISTING THE PRE-PACKAGED SOUND in Ed-tech

I LOVE MY LABEL: INDIE VERSUS INDUSTRY AND THE FUTURE OF MUSIC EDUCATION TECHNOLOGY

The title of this talk could as easily be indie versus institution as indie versus industry. I have no love lost for either.

I call myself a serial dropout, as I’ve successfully failed to complete most stages of education: high school, undergrad, grad school. Nonetheless, I consider myself very fortunate that, even without all the proper credentials, I get to do some of the things I liked most about the academic part of my life: that is, I’m always learning, I’m always tackling new research projects.

I call myself a writer, and some days, when I’m feeling serious, I think of myself as a scholar. I’d like to believe that I’m pushing the boundaries, helping shape the future of my field. But what I do now—write about education technology – has nothing to do with what I studied formally as an undergraduate or a graduate student. But if nothing else, there I learned how to be a critical thinker, a thoughtful researcher, and a decent writer—and I’d contend that no matter what major you pursue in school, these are the sorts of skills all students should, ideally, come away with.

I also consider myself fortunate to have peers who believe in the value of open scholarship—that is, we share our work online (mostly via our blogs) in ways that bypass the paywalls of the academic publishing industry. As someone who works outside of academia, without an institutional affiliation, I can’t begin to tell you how frustrating it is to be unable to access journal articles. I always get so irked when I hear technology evangelists proclaim You can learn anything you want on the Internet. No, you can’t. Huge swaths of knowledge, art, science remain inaccessible; and it’s a loss for scholarship, which need not and does not only happen among those with access to a university research library or with log-in credentials to its online portal. That inaccessibility reflects institutional culture, industry culture, corporate culture, copyright (that is, intellectual property laws), capitalism, and code. That is, when we talk about the future of something like education technology or even when we talk about the future of research and scholarship or teaching and learning, we must grapple with issues that are technological, sociological, and above all, ideological.

Indie ed-tech—what we’re gathered here to talk about over the next few days—is inherently ideological as it seeks to challenge much of how we’ve come to see (and perhaps even acquiesce to) a certain vision for the future of education technology. An industry vision. An institutionalized vision. Indie ed-tech invokes some of the potential that was seen in the earliest Web technologies, before things were carved up into corporate properties and well-known Internet brands: that is, the ability to share information globally, not just among researchers, scientists, and scholars within academic institutions or its disciplines, but among all of us—those working inside and outside of powerful institutions, working across disciplines, working from the margins, recognizing the contributions of those who have not necessarily been certified—by school, by society—as experts. Distributed knowledge networks, rather than centralized information repositories. Small pieces, loosely joined.

Indie ed-tech offers a model whereby students, faculty, staff, and independent scholars alike can use the real-world tools of the Web—not simply those built for and sanctioned by and then siloed off by schools or departments—through initiatives like Davidson Domains, enabling them to be part of online communities of scholars, artists, scientists, citizens.

I’d like to place the emphasis in my talk today on that adjective indie rather than on the hyphenated phrase ed-tech. (Yes, the Hack Education style guide insists on the hyphen.) I want us to consider: why would we, why should we embrace the indie rather than the corporate, the institutional. What difference do these adjectives—well, really, these economies, these ideologies—make to the technologies we adopt, to the technologies we are forced to adopt, to the technologies we force our students to adopt, to the direction we take, to the stories we tell about the future of education?

Indie ed-tech draws rather explicitly on the spirit of indie music and the DIY (do-it-yourself) ethos of punk rock.

A connection between music and education might make you wince. After all, comparisons between the music industry and universities are commonplace and not always particularly helpful. The Internet, so one popular story goes, will be higher education’s Napster moment, hastening the disruption of the institution. According to this particular narrative: just as the development of the MP3 file format and of portable digital music players destroyed the music industry, digital content and communication will soon destroy the university. (The timelines vary. Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen famously predicted in 2012 that half of US universities would be bankrupt in a decade. So, I guess we’ve got about five and a half years left, by his calculations.)

Of course, the music industry hasn’t been destroyed—that’s just one problem with the whole Napster moment cautionary tale. Certainly it has changed.

Indie ed-tech posits a different narrative than one where venture-funded MOOCs are, as Clay Shirky put it, the lightning strike on a rotten tree. Indie ed-tech offers a narrative that draws on a history of how new technologies shaped indie music in particular. This history might suggest something about what new technologies can and do offer teaching, learning, and research—one that isn’t about doom and disruption (unless we’re talking doom and disruption for those corporate ed-tech executives who want to control the learning playlist).

I want, in part, to build today on that story as told by my colleagues Reclaim Hosting’s Jim Groom and the University of Oklahoma’s Adam Croom. They gave a joint presentation at a conference at Stanford last fall; I wasn’t there, but they both posted their presentations to their blogs, making it easy for me to build on their work. I’ll post this talk to my blog in turn…

So, let me briefly recap their argument, which contends that the Napster narrative doesn’t give a full or particularly accurate picture of how digital technologies have changed the music industry: Adam Croom cites UIC communications professor Steve Jones, who says that The real revolution in popular music in regard to the Internet is to be found in the availability of news, information, and discussion about music and musicians facilitated by Internet media. The barriers to entry—set high for musicians by radio and television in turn and for music commentators by magazines—have been lowered (somewhat). In this sense, Croom adds, "technology is not