Well, here is a nice development for those of us who object to depersonalized learning. The data analytics firm called Knewton is going out of business. Knewton was acquired by Pearson and was supposed to be the ultimate refinement of data mining.
Peter Greene describes the rise and fall of Knewton here.
The founder and CEO of Knewton was Jose Ferreira, who believed he was bringing Big Data into the classroom. He claimed in a video that with his techniques, his company knew more about students than their parents did. Here is an article from 2013 in which his vision is portrayed as the wave of the future, one of those inevitable phenomena that would envelop us whether we liked it or not.
Here he is, extolling the virtues of data mining.
Knewton sounded too much like Brave New World to me, and I resented the fact that investors were creating a technology to spy on our children.
Peter Greene writes:
Adaptive learning. Computer-enhanced psychometrics. Personalized learning via computer. Knewton was going to do it all. Now it’s being sold for parts.
Knewton started in 2008, launched by Jose Ferreira. By 2012, Ferreira led the ed tech pack in overpromising that sounded both improbable and creepy. In a Forbes interview piece, Ferreira described Knewton as “what could become the world’s most valuable repository of the ways people learn.” Knewton could make this claim because it “builds its software into online classes that watch students’ every move: scores, speed, accuracy, delays, keystrokes, click-streams and drop-offs.”
Developments like this offer hope that other massive invasions of privacy, which are inherently dehumanizing, will fail. I’m on the side of flawed and fallible human beings. Teachers and parents, not machines.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Diane Here is a “BTW” about storytelling as education:
Subject: Your baby’s brain: If you want to build a better mind, tell stories – WHYY
This latest neuroscience research provides added evidence about the importance of two-gen programs.
https://whyy.org/articles/your-babys-brain-if-you-want-to-build-a-better-mind-tell-stories/
CBK
An extraordinarily important story, Catherine. Thank you.
David Coleman, the utter neophyte chosen by Bill Gates to be the decider for the rest of us about what constitutes proper instruction in English language arts, infamously gave speeches in which he defended the deemphasis on narrative writing in his puerile bullet list, the Common [sic] Core [sic] State [sic] Standards [sic]. But, ofc, narrative is one of the major means by which we make sense of ourselves and the world. It’s no exaggeration to say that it is to a large extent what makes us human. But in this, as in so much else, Coleman was basically ignorant. It didn’t matter to Gates, who simply needed a list, any list, to key software to in order to sell it “at scale” to a national audience. Here, a brief explanation of some of the key roles that narrative plays in our lives: https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2018/11/30/what-makes-humans-human/
Bob Shepherd Another BTW about the importance of story to child development is the work of much- maligned Bruno Bettelheim who, regardless of the truth of his fall from grace, wrote one of the most influential (to me) books that I have ever read: “The Uses of Enchantment.” CBK
Here are the links to the two studies from the news article:
http://www.jneurosci.org/content/38/36/7870
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0956797617742725
Very important!!!
Dear Billionaires:
You want to do something to “reform” education? Buy books for poor families with children–real books, made of paper. And take a clue from Andrew Carnegie and build libraries in poor neighborhoods.
Yes–and thanks, Bob.
Bravo! That’s real democracy at work.
Good riddance to really bad rubbish.
A series of amusing videos could be made comparing the hype from educational publishers and these ed tech startups with actual use of their products. How many other readers of this blog have attempted to use the online textbooks (student editions, teachers’ editions, and ancillary materials) from companies like Pearson? They are appalling. On most public school computer systems, they will barely load, they are so bulky. The are so burdened by components and features as not to be navigable. And then, once you drill down to it, the content is often extraordinarily poorly conceived. Why are these such a mess? Well, the biggest issue is that they suffer from featuritis. Some customer–e.g., some state adoption committee–responded favorably, once, to some feature in some competitor’s product–and so it was added. Suppose that you had godlike powers and wanted to design, from scratch, a human child, and you followed the educational publishers’ modus operandi: You would say, hmm, eagles have strong beaks, so you would add a beak. You would say, hmmm, dirigibles can fly, so you would add gas sacks. And you would end up with the creature that Dr. Moreau would have made if he had unlimited resources and time and had decided to add to one creature features from ALL the others.
And the programmed learning/data-collection stuff from the ed tech companies always follows a predictable pattern: lots and lots of hype. Initial excitement in the classroom (lasting from one hour to one week), a sudden crash in this enthusiasm, and then outright rebellion against it. I have seen this time after time after time. Hint to educational software developers: Sell as much of this crap as you can early. Early on, lock your customers into huge contracts involving not only your educational software itself but also some complex database with deep roots into the rest of the district system. Because if you wait until people actually start using this crap, you won’t be able to sell it.
Online learning–old, vinegary wine in new bottles:
Our closets are filled with ideas someone had to revolutionize teaching. They were purchased by some individual who took some class or went to some other school where they spent the afternoon watching students do something with the gizmos. They were given to teachers who either used them until they realized the time they took would be better spent elsewhere, or rejected them outright.
Got some “student response systems” you can sell cheaply, hey, Roy? LMAO.
Diane FYI Re: Melinda Gates:
Melinda Gates, The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World
10:55 pm ET Saturday; 7 pm ET Sunday (C-SPAN BookTV)
Philanthropist, businesswoman and global advocate Melinda Gates discusses her life and work with women around the world.
“The moment of lift’???
When she said “I do” to Billy G.
Duane Be nice. . . .
Sorry, but no.
Evidently, the Knewton assets have been sold to John Wiley and Sons (college publishers): https://apnews.com/Business%20Wire/5db0d68977ea4dacb950b327c97f08b7
One of the reasons why on-line learning has taken off is NCLB. The graduation rate elephant is in every room where on-line loosing is taking place. The kids are told they have to take courses they cannot pass. They fail the classes, they get put on a computer so that their schedule can be maintained and they can graduate. Years ago, teachers with brains responded as best they could to those who could not learn the material in an appropriate way with a learning process that took into account their needed pace and intellectual possibilities.
I guess humans are a whole lot more complicated than our technocrats believed.
Where did the Knewton data go when the data firm bit the dust? Was it sold to someone else? As physicists will tell you, information never disappears, not even in a black hole.
A (data) mine is a terrible thing to waste”
A mine is a terrible thing to waste
Especially when it’s data
Especially when it’s ne’er erased
There’s really nothing greata
I;m nit sure Pearson ever owned Knewton, I think was just a partnership.