I have a feeling that Audrey Watters and I would get along.  Watters, critical technology journalist/historian and author of the Hack Education blog, sent me down a rabbit hole over the past couple of weeks. While she retired the blog in 2022, there is a treasure trove of posts going back to 2010, and I have gobbled up at least half of them by now. So much of her writing confirms my experience working with educational technology at the ground level.

A few of my favorite Hack Education posts:

• The 100 Worst Ed-Tech Debacles of the Decade
• Educational Crises and Ed-Tech: A History
• Education Technology and The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
• The History of the Future of Education
• Clippy and the History of the Future of Educational Chatbots
• Ed-Tech Agitprop

If you can’t tell by the titles above… Watters says the quiet part out loud. She holds the edtech industry to the flame for its bloated claims, product failures, and abandoned promises. Yet, her rhetoric is not one of total helpless doom-and-gloom. In fact, Watters makes the case for a sort of hopeful, truth-to-power Luddite pedagogy that I find compelling (and challenging, I admit):

“A Luddite pedagogy is not about making everyone put away their laptops during class — remember those days? Again, Luddism is not about the machines per se; it’s about machines in the hands of capitalists and tyrants — in the case of ed-tech, that’s both the corporations and the State, especially ICE and the police. Machines in the hands of a data-driven school administration. Luddism is about a furious demand for justice, about the rights of workers to good working conditions, adequate remuneration, and the possibility of a better tomorrow — and let’s include students in our definition of “worker” here as we do call it “school work” after all. A Luddite pedagogy is about agency and urgency and freedom.”

Call it confirmation bias, but I find myself in a similar space in my work with faculty at times. I am simultaneously arguing for and against technology depending on the context, sometimes for the very same tools.

On one hand, I’m challenging instructor’s assumptions or reservations about tools (advocating for edtech tools.) I’ve seen evidence of multiple technology affordances (pg. 165, How People Learn II) in real-time. For example:

• Feedback: A writing instructor starts using Canvas SpeedGrader and Rubrics to annotate student writing and provide detailed feedback. This saves the instructor time reproducing comments, while also improving the quality and timeliness of feedback the student receives on their work.
• Open-ended learner input & linked representations: An instructor implements an open-format final project, where students work in one of many potential formats (timeline, poster, video presentation, annotated map, etc.) As a result, I’ve seen increased student engagement both in students’ own projects, and that of their peers. I’ve also seen students opt to take on extensive web projects, leveraging linked representations, in response to these open-ended projects.
• Communication: In a magazine design and writing class, students work together to produce a magazine and corresponding website, using Discord to chat with each other. The nature of the class requires frequent communication, and Discord facilitates this.

Yet, on the other hand, I’ve also personally seen educational technologies:

• Frustrate overwhelmed students and instructors
• Reinforce an adversarial relationship between students and teachers
• Distract from original goals
• Drain financial and time resources
• Create privacy, accessibility, academic integrity, or other policy-related headaches

These negative examples have led me to be very skeptical of new tools and pitches from edtech vendors. We are in an environment where educational institutions are the (captive?) customers of for-profit edtech companies whose promises and lived user experiences almost always differ.

Still, I feel optimistic that despite its failures, the benefits/affordances of learning technologies have and will continue to have a net positive impact on education and society. I am interested in learning evaluation and implementation methods that support positive outcomes and limit unintended negative consequences. My assumption is that a more human, consultative approach to implementation could improve outcomes.

I’ve begun to read Failure to Disrupt, by Justin Reich, and noticed a statement that captures this skeptical optimism perfectly: 

“In the decades ahead, educators can expect to hear a new generation of product pitches about the transformative potential of new technologies for school systems: how artificial intelligence or virtual reality or brain scanners are the innovations that, this time, will actually lead to profound changes in education. These pitches will also be wrong—these new technologies will not reinvent existing school systems (though some of them may make valuable incremental improvements)—and this book is an effort to explain why.”

This promise makes me very excited to dig into this book, I look forward to reading and reflecting further.

Educational technology: Expectations vs. reality.