Boy wonder Billionaire Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Dr. Priscilla Chan are placing their bets on technology to teach children better than humans.
https://www.insidephilanthropy.com/home/2017/6/6/chan-zuckerbergs-personalized-learning-grants
What is ironic about this is that Dr. Chan has often told interviewers that two teachers “changed her life.”
Do you think anyone will ever remember with gratitude the nameless, faceless monitor that changed their life?
Please join me in my personal crusade to refer to machine instruction as Depersonalized Learning. The tech billionaires not only want our money, they want to steal the integrity of language.
NO! Resist!
Diane Ravitch's blog 
So joined.
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If this kind of learning was so good, the highest paid executives at Facebook would be lining up to send their kids to a school that valued machine instruction.
If this kind of learning was so good, the rich private schools in silicon valley would be begging Zuckerberg to come in and change their schools. Their boards made up of the same billionaires would be DEMANDING that their private schools adopt the Zuckerberg program for their precious children.
I guess their children are too good for this. Is that what Zuckerberg and Chan want us to think? Only the unworthy get the kind of “personalized learning” that Zuckerberg and Chan’s friends and colleagues don’t demand for their own children?
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^^sorry I meant to say “depersonalized learning”
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Teachers should resist all attempts to replace human interaction by depersonalized learning. However, teachers are rarely in the driver’s seat. When they are, they are merely the chauffeur. Parents should be informed and urged to resist allowing computer instruction to replace or diminish human interaction. They need to put pressure on district administrators and state representatives to reject all types of depersonalized learning as it is tedious, ineffective and results in all testing and data mining all them time, invading children’s privacy. Depersonalized learning is a double corporate scam.
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would you consider the term impersonal learning?? shorter and easier to say??
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They say personalized, I say depersonalized.
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From dictionary . com:
Impersonal, adjective
1. not personal; without reference or connection to a particular person: an impersonal remark.
2. having no personality; devoid of human character or traits: an impersonal deity.
3. lacking human emotion or warmth: an impersonal manner.
depersonalize, verb (used with object), depersonalized, depersonalizing.
1. to make impersonal.
2. to deprive of personality or individuality:
a mechanistic society that is depersonalizing its members.
English/British definition:
verb (transitive)
1. to deprive (a person, organization, system, etc) of individual or personal qualities; render impersonal
2. to cause (someone) to lose his sense of personal identity
While both can be appropriate, I like depersonalized in Diane’s usage because it has the meaning of having taken away, deprived someone of their personhood versus just being a descriptor of that condition. Yes, computer learning is very impersonal, it serves to depersonalize the teaching and learning process.
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Thank you Dr, Ravitch for the accurate and meaningful usage of word.
Also, thank you veteran teacher Duane Swacker to provide the dictionary as the best proof for explanation. May.
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“Please face the screen. I am not capturing your puzzled (irritated) (half asleep) look.”
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I love your term. I also call it “computerized teaching.”
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No, it’s not “computerized teaching”. The art of teaching is far more than just presenting information and ascertaining correct answers to a question.
The term to use for your thought is “computerized training” since it is a Skinnerian behavioralistic type of training. Guess the right answer, get rewarded with a bell and whistle and then move to the next question to attempt to get the bell and whistle again, and again and again. We train animals and military recruits, we do not teach them because if either doesn’t “get it right” one doesn’t move on until the desired behavior is exhibited continually.
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If Dr. Chan were still a practicing pediatrician, I would NOT seek her as a physician for my children. I’m sure that the pediatricians that Zuck/Chan have for their child would never advocate for more screen time for children. What’s good for the goose is NOT good for the gander when it comes to the wealthy.
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Chan’s just the idle rich like Bill and Melinda Gates and Walton heirs. Their impact on the nation would be improved it they took up gardening. Or, they could reduce their adverse impact by driving up the price of art.
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No need for them to dirty their lily white little hands by gardening. That’s what illegal immigrants are for.
We need to have them go on a “three hour tour” and end up on a deserted island until they die.
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Your sentiment is right, but your proposal is also too good for their type of slime.
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Z-berg’s actions are expected. Facebook’s board includes (1) Peter Thiel, who based on his statements about the oxymoron of women voting and capitalistic democracy, believes women like Priscilla Chan are leeches and shouldn’t be allowed to vote (2) Marc Andreeson, who thinks India would be better off as a colony and (3) Reed Hastings, who wants an end to democratically elected school boards.
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Gang of thieves.
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Chan got her medical degree at the end of 2015. So, she’s like a TFA’er dipping her toes in the medicine pool and then promoting herself into management. The difference is she and Mark, like Bill and Melinda, advanced themselves beyond their self-anointed ed reform into a governing dictatorship, for the 99%.
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“The tech billionaires not only want our money, they want to steal the integrity of language.”
There is a long historical line of “stolen” integrity of language in the public education realm. Using terms such as standards or “measuring student achievement” perform the same function as the tech billionaires foul usage of terms, words and meanings to push an unstated agenda that harms many children. Falsehoods abound.
I’ll break the rest of my comment up into a few different posts. From Ch. 2 of my book (yeehaa, it’s at the printer with a $500 partial payment):
Fidelity to Truth in Educational Discourse
‘We do not err because truth is difficult to see. It is visible at a glance. We err because the lie is more comfortable.’ Solzhenitzyn
Yes, truth matters!
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Realizing that all truths are contextual not only in time, space and experience this study is limited to examining the veracity of claims of truth and validity (for how can something be truthful if it is not valid?) for the fundamental positions upon which educational practices of today are based. The educational practices examined—grading, educational standards and standardized testing–in this study are found overall to be riddled with error therefore lacking in validity and truth.
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The characteristics of truth in educational discourse can be understood as encompassing fidelity to truth in the following:
• Speech and/or writing accurately describes policies, practices and outcomes (discourse).
• Using the correct/intended meaning of a word in light of the context.
• Discourse serves to enlighten and not obscure meaning.
• Discourse is free of contradictions, error and falsehoods.
• The “control of belief by fact” (S. Blackburn).
• Discourse is based in skeptical rationo-logical thought processes in which a “scientific attitude” holds sway.
• Discourse based on/in faith conventions is eschewed and rejected outright due to separation of church and state constitutional concerns.
• Discourse of expediency based on the rationalizations of “Everyone is doing this”, “It is dictated by the State Department of Education” or “NCLB mandates that we have to do this” is firmly and rightly rejected.
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Who can take seriously a comment such as children will l”learn 100 times more than we learn today?” One might as well say a million bajillion – it would be just as meaningful. Given Zuck’s investments in Ed Tech, this might as well be a puff piece in “Advertising Today.” There is absolutely nothing philanthropic about this effort – subsidized by taxpayers through this foundation.
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Amen! And I think women should start the education of their children while in the womb because that would make them super babies. Maybe Zuck/Chan are developing an in utero probe to directly inject education into the youngest of developing minds. These people are crazy.
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How about educating sperm?
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Beat me to the punch with that one Diane! But hey let’s not forget the ovum, though.
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Sperm are clearly uneducable, being driven by testosterone (not unlike Deformers)
Eggs might be educable, but they don’t have any control with a bunch of sex-crazed sperm about.
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In rejecting expediency over truth as a guide to or rationale of instituting practices that are based on fundamental errors and falsehoods resulting in invalid conclusions that many times harm students, we should keep in mind Hanna Arendt’s concept of the “banality of evil.” She concluded that the Holocaust did not occur because of the monstrosity, the evil of the people involved but by the small everyday functioning of ordinary people, perhaps at best not knowing of or at worst of turning a willing blind eye to the results of their daily task along with the daily work of others that compounded into the atrocities of the Holocaust. The vast majority of “Good Germans”, including Eichmann, believed that they were just following orders as they had been brought up (educated) to do. Eichmann even believed that he was “saving” as many Jews as he could by instituting certain procedures.
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Diane: What’s missing? A whole century of critical research on child developmental needs. Or, as the note suggests, we so-easily forget what we had to go through to get to where we are. Even teachers sometimes fall into this oversight-bias.
In other words, as much as we appreciate techies for what they do, when they get into another professional field, LIKE EDUCATION, they are AMATEURS, no different than me, who has very little tech training, going into their tech-lab and telling them what to do with their technology (though in another meaning, I might want to do that as an exasperated teacher).
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I wonder if he got the idea from reading “A Wrinkle in Time” and seeing how children are taught on Camazotz?
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Brilliant!
With the all powerful IT controlling everything children think.
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I am with Diane on depersonalized. But there is some scary technology out there.
I get posts on technology from CB Insights, a funky website geared toward investors in tech. I am not one of those people, but the flows of money into sectors of the world economy (including education and artificial intelligence) is easy to see. The chatty purveyor of information also has some wonderful charts, graphs, and little known facts.
This caught my eye because social-emotional learning is so hot and this is a patent that is supposed to help track emotions on a smart phone.
Guess who has the patent.
https://www.cbinsights.com/blog/facebook-emotion-patents-analysis/?utm_source=CB+Insights+Newsletter&utm_campaign=0ca89be1e5-Top_Research_Briefs_6_3_2017&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_9dc0513989-0ca89be1e5-88273249
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Where can administrators go to learn how to resist the Silicon Valley sales pitches? To be skeptical consumers? Any money for that? The SF principals should use some of their $100,000 Benioff innovation grants for this purpose!
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Their children, of course, will go to a very expensive private school with small classes and very real human teachers where there will be no high-stakes tests and scripted computer programs that profit a company like Microsoft, Apple, or Pearson.
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This is the reform I support! Sidwell Friends for all! (Minus the overdose of progressive pedagogy).
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Wow, taxes will have to go to the moon to pay for those private school vouchers. How is that going to happen with most states cutting the taxes that go to the public schools?
Nationally, the most recent data indicates $11,009 is spent on public education per student. Significant variation exists across states; New York spends roughly $20,000 per student, while states like Utah and Idaho only spend about a third as much
http://www.governing.com/gov-data/education-data/state-education-spending-per-pupil-data.html
Sidwell Friends:
Lower School is almost $41k but it does include hot lunch and textbooks
Middle and Upper Schools is the same price but without the textbooks.
https://www.sidwell.edu/admissions/affording-sfs
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Isaac Asimov had this short story about depersonalized learning-
http://visual-memory.co.uk/daniel/funtheyhad.html
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Could you please explain why the website has only two active pages – one is this story and second is the list of contents? All other pages lead either to a ‘404’ else a ‘Not found’? And, why is this the only readable story in the whole list?
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Why is it all the software thieves drop out of college. Then they “become Billionaire education experts”. . I think it probably says something about their character. At another time when the working class was hurting . Americans also looked up to thieves. Bonnie and Clyde were almost folk heroes . Okay little over the top perhaps .
I’m with Baker and Stieglitz, Patents have to go. A 93% marginal tax rate would also bring them down a few notches. Too much time and money on their hands .
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Not too far over the top.
“It has to be mentioned that critics argue that the image of Bonnie and Clyde being folk heroes has been invented by the film-makers.”
https://www.univie.ac.at/Anglistik/easyrider/data/bonnie.htm
After all, most of the media has worked hard to help blame public school teachers in the U.S. for everything, and that isn’t over the top. I mean just about everything. If your sewer plugs up, blame a teacher because didn’t the contractor that built the hosue or the plumber go to school. If teachers can be fired for the results of the tests their students take, then yes, it isn’t over the top to call Bonnie and Clyde folk heroes.
I wonder what people will say about Donald Trump in a century.
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Hopefully that he had a massive coronary the day he was scheduled to join his family and staff in jail.
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If that day comes, I will join the millions in the U.S. and around the world that will run out of their homes and into the streets dancing with joy.
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Count me in!
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“Dr. Chan has often told interviewers that two teachers changed her life”
“Teachbots changed my life”
The teachbots changed my life
And made me who I am
They helped me get a wife
And made me give a damn
They taught me how to think
And also how to read
They kept me from the drink
And also from the weed
I owe it all to bots
That gave my life direction
For teachbots for the tots
I really have affection
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Reminds me of “The Chimney Sweep”.
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This post along with the Audrey Watters’ piece below make for some very interesting reading. I’m just catching up….the next day. It was a very busy school day.
Diane likes the term “depersonalized learning”. Based on all the comments I just looked at, it sounds like depersonalized LIVING.
I don’t know where all this technological change is going to go. But I’m a big believer in the wild card theory of history, so to speak. Something big and unexpected is bound to happen. Or, perhaps something we were expecting but never gave enough time and money to prepare for. (Cue Donald Rumsfeld and his “known unknowns” etc….)
BTW: My wife reminds me how unhappy I was during the Bush II regime, which included wild and wacky characters like “Rummy”. My God, how far we’ve fallen since then. Who would have thought we could end up with a Trump? What next?
I was just looking at the idea of Black Swan Theory.
I don’t know….something big will happen..or already it is and we just haven’t come up for a name for it. I sure hope we get some good news….a cure for a major disease, a major advance in energy technology….who knows..
But there’s a lot of potential for considerable mayhem out there. All this new technology is quite vulnerable. You know, the bigger they are, the harder they fall. Look at what some guys with box cutters did to us. We’re still trying to come to grips with it almost 16 years later.
Let’s home humanity can see a way through all this.
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If you are looking for a theory to explain what is currently happening, maybe the “Black Swamp theory” will do.
This theory says that every so often, an orange haired creature will emerge from the Black Swamp promising to clean up the swamp (which, of course, is about as likely as Oscar cleaning up his trash can.)
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Love it.
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Well, Zuckerberg did sue the locals on Kaua’i over right of way and Kuleana laws. Those laws exist so the locals have access to their own backyard…the beaches, mountains, and valleys. Zuckerberg thinks he’s above it all.
http://amp.usatoday.com/story/96774246/
He’s recanted and said this was just a misunderstanding. (Zuckerberg did retract his law suit.) But I suspect he’s just regrouping and/or buying off people. He’s a billionaire.
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How about Netflix CEO joining the fight for depersonalization?
DreamBox collects data on students’ performance, including accuracy rates and response times, and keeps track of how many hints kids needed to get the right answer to a given question. From there, the program either raises or lowers the difficulty level and amends the style of instruction.
http://www.businessinsider.com/netflixs-ceo-backs-math-education-program-2017-6
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Ironically, I got this link from Facebook friend.
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