Let me confess that I have a mad crush on Audrey Watters although I have never met her. I love her fearlessness, her keen intelligence, and her unapologetic humanity.
I wrote a few days ago that her recent post on the 100 Biggest Worst Ed-Tech Debacles was the best post I had read in the last decade.
She got a lot of feedback to that zinger of a post, and some readers asked her if she could name the 100 best things that happened in Ed-tech.
She answers that question boldly in this post.
I paraphrase: Ed-Tech has enough marketing, branding, shills, and paid mouthpieces. Hers is not one of them.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I agree with your praise and applaud her unwillingness to list 100 Ed tech ventures that are great as if that industry needs a boost. Audrey Watters says “no” and with good reason. She rejects the idea that everything happening in edtech must be presented as if there are two sides. That is a worthy idea and needed in more than edtech. .
Good for her. Especially good for her for pointing out the ridiculousness of the “two sides” fallacy. Why don’t we talk about what’s good about “Intelligent Design”? Because there isn’t anything.
Teachers generally, and English teachers in particular, should be given the resources (time, assistants, smaller classes) to be able to avoid, generally, using multiple-choice, true-false, and other such so-called “objective” formats for assessments. I admit, however, that I have used such formats in check tests just to find out, quickly, if students had actually done assigned reading. For the grading of such tests, one can use an app like ZIPGrade that saves a lot of time. And, if an electronic library like guttenburg.org or sacred-texts.com is considered a kind of “EdTech,” then I have to admit that there are a few examples of EdTech that are not insipid, stultifying, inane, mind-numbing, and dangerous. These are the rare exceptions, like albino crows. Asking someone like Ms. Watters to list “good” EdTech is like asking any of us to make a list of the “good” Nazi doctors. Well, there was this guy who once smuggled a prisoner out of a camp. . . .
Bill Gates made himself the richest man in the world by leveraging monopoly power over an operating system to peddle software. Years ago, he gave a speech in which he pointed out that the two greatest costs in education were a) facilities and b) teachers’ salaries, both of which could be vastly reduced by teaching people via computers. He didn’t mention that computerizing education would also, incidentally, make him and others like him a lot richer. (Funny, isn’t it, how these synchronicities occur!) This line of thinking led him to appoint Lord Coleman High Sheriff of ELA and math instruction in the United States and to pay for the development of Coleman’s backward, puerile “standards” bullet list so that there would be one list, nationwide, to key software to. And it led to his aborted attempt to create a vast, Orwellian, cradle-to-grave database of student and worker information–a kind of universal system for stack ranking and for controlling who and what products could gain entry to the courseware market. And it led to his subsidization of depersonalized ed tech software over the years, software that has failed, again and again and again–ad nauseam–to achieve positive outcomes for kids and teachers.
Thank you, Ms. Watters, for calling out the b.s.
And for the birds.
“What if ed-tech is totally inseparable from privatization, behavioral engineering, and surveillance?”
Computers are useful tools. When there is so much money behind ed-tech, there is bound to be “technology overreach” in order to sell more products. The technocrats have become abusive and invasive with the false claims about what technology can do. They are trying to dehumanize teaching and learning. They are invading students’ privacy, selling data and misusing technology in order to increase profits.
Ed-tech is the child of the distance learning (or remote learning) efforts of quite some time ago. First were correspondence courses that used mail. Then came TV courses. More recently were Internet-based coursed. All of these were designed to serve people who did not have ready access to institutions of higher learning.
They got incorporated into college offerings when we paid colleges for “participation.” At no time was there any concern as to who “qualified” for these services. If you signed up, you signed up. A survey at, if memory serves well, the University of Colorado, found that a large percentage of students taking online courses, were in residence at the university and were taking those course so that they didn’t, for example, have to get out of bed for an 8 AM course.
While there was some earnest interest on the part of educators in the incorporation of technology (computers, Internet, videoed lectures, etc.) a great deal of Ed-tech “advancement” was driven by profit motives. (Is a profit motive ever the right motive in education?) We are still scrambling trying to find the right applications of Ed-tech to support education.
Part of the problem is the widespread belief that education is something done to students, instead of being a social activity enrolling them in learning how to learn, as well as learning enough to support further learning.
At one time, in the early days of the Internet, there was a belief among Ed Deformers that remote, online courses would eventually supplant old-fashioned education in which people went to a place and were instructed by teachers. See Isaac Asimov’s short story “The Fun They Had.” But it turned out that completion rates for online courses were abysmally low. This is one example of a more general phenomenon–of the failure of those who hype technical solutions to account for the human consequences of tech. Teaching and learning have always been essentially (by definition) humane undertakings, involving personal interactions between people who know things and people who don’t yet. Those human interactions are not incidental. They are central, key, essential. There is a dark irony to the use by Distrupters/Deformers of the Doublespeak term “personalized education” for replacing instruction by humans with instruction by machines.
So, when it turned out that almost no students were actually finishing the online courses they signed up for, Ed Disrupters/Deformers retreated to two tweaked models for the takeover of education:
Make students complete the courses by increasing the stakes. In Florida, for example, students are not allowed to graduate from high school–to get their diplomas–unless they complete at least one online course.
Replace the remote learning model with a proctored model. This is the biggie. The idea is to put someone in charge of overseeing the students, face-to-face, in a physical location, to make sure that they are completing the computer work. So, you put 400 students in a room with a proctor who is there to make sure the kids (and the machines) are working.
It’s time to stop this attempt on the part of a few oligarchs to dehumanize education. People aren’t bots.
Mr. Ruis, this is BEAUTIFULLY said:
“Part of the problem is the widespread belief that education is something done to students, instead of being a social activity enrolling them in learning how to learn, as well as learning enough to support further learning.” –Steve Ruis
Thank you!!!
Coming to a state near you: sample legislation from ALEC (the American Legislative Exchange Council) for enabling and enforcing the computerization, depersonalization, and dehumanization of education:
https://www.alec.org/model-policy/digital-teaching-and-learning-plan/
https://www.alec.org/model-policy/course-choice-program-act/
https://www.alec.org/model-policy/k-12-technology-based-reading-intervention-for-english-learners-act/
https://www.alec.org/model-policy/statewide-online-education-act/
https://www.alec.org/model-policy/the-virtual-public-schools-act/
“A pedagogy controlled by algorithms can never be a pedagogy of care, integrity, or trust.” –Audrey Watters
Quite the opposite
“He sees you when you’re sleeping.” –from “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town,” John Frederick Coots and Haven Gillespie
“If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face–forever.” –George Orwell, 1984
“Every time I close my eyes, all I see is people dying.” –Sentence spoken spontaneously to San Franciscan Shawn Kinnear by the Amazon Echo personal assistant Alexa
“Those who care about humanity and democracy must do everything in their power to resist the algorithmization of command, coercion, and control.”
“Robert’s Rule: If you wonder about whether some new technology or policy is a good idea, imagine the worst person in the future, at the worst time, wielding its power.”
–Bob Shepherd
I’m joining in with the mad crush on Audrey Waters! She is asking the questions that few are asking!
Me too!!!! She is asking the right questions and providing essential warnings. An expert on computers, she does this at great personal risk and cost. She alienates those very techy moguls who might otherwise be a great source of future income and security for her. So, she is not only insightful and knowledgeable and very, very smart but also courageous because she freaking has a heart and isn’t willing to stand by and watch the coercion by tech machine roll over future generations. Add to this the fact that she is a breathtakingly gifted prose stylist. We need our George Orwell. In Audrey Watters, we may well have found that person.
I’ll never understand why they have to oversell everything. Why did they promote this so hard? If it had value to students and teachers they would incorporated it gradually according to need and usefulness. Instead they push everything so hard they discredit themselves.
The truth is they don’t trust people.They believe ordinary people are too stupid to find or adopt things that are good. It’s arrogance.
Why did the Obama Administration find it necessary to have superintendents sign “contracts” to jam in ed tech? If it’s good wouldn’t superintendents want it without the hard sell?
It was completely predictable that schools would regret these purchases and scale it back- it was inevitable. It’s ALL puffery and marketing.
Khan Academy is an instructor on a screen. Why did they feel the need to sell that as magical? It just is what it is. People might have used it without the paid cheering section.
The whole point of Ed Deform was to sell things. Databases, tests, depersonalized education software. It was engineered by a few wealthy oligarchs for precisely this purpose.
I have to say too, that anyone who thought a 12 year old with a smartphone in school wouldn’t be distracted by the phone has not spent a lot of time around 12 year olds.
What did they think would happen? Our school now has a lot of teachers taking the devices and storing them away for class time. They had to. The things had taken over their classroom. Arne Duncan and the rest didn’t anticipate that? Has he ever met a 12 year old?
It’s the fad-following and gimmickry that gets to me. Just once can they NOT follow a fad? Can they describe these things in normal terms instead of turning them into magical, cheap quick fixes for all the world’s problems? It’s just nonsense.
If there is a benefit to be gained from a product being sold to students or teachers, there is always a much larger opportunity cost involved that cannot be overlooked. Some teachers tell me they love having a website that, with just a few clicks, will send out a robo-message about grades or behavior to parents. They forgot about the importance of the authentic communication and relationship building that never took place. Some teachers tell me it’s so much easier to let a website grade the students’ work. They forgot to fight for smaller class sizes so they have time to get to know the students’ work. I am thankful to Audrey Watters for listing a hundred examples. And Audrey is correct that one of the worst costs of edu-tech is the incessant and inane push for innovation over quality.
If you give a child a fish, you feed her for a day. If you teach a child how to fish, you feed her for a lifetime. If you give a child an iPad and tell her to look up fishing, she will starve.
It strikes me that there might be many good things about ed-tech. May I number them?
It could be used to increase the amount of contact between students and their teachers. This would require that teachers are responsible for about a quarter of their present student load. Since I believe that increased contact between humans is a good thing, this is very good. But you must give me time to do this. My guess that between the added staff and technology you might have to raise the present budget by a factor of 4. The Tea Party is all in on this one.
2.It could be used to increase availability of reading material for the students. I got Les Misérables from Gutenberg for free. If all students had a device for downloading the free classics, we could just teach the curriculum we used to call a “great books” curriculum.
It might be used to explain Mechanical relationships in visual ways that cannot be duplicated by the best artist. Slow motion demonstrations of James Watt’s steam engine will make history come alive.
I could go on, but all of the examples of good things I see in technology require a massive increase in expenditure. This is not the way technology works. If a hammer comes into use, it is because it replaces the other tool. If we use an engine, it replaces a horse or ox. The problem is that education works in the reverse of industry. In industry, we replace people with tools. In education, tools make us need more people, not fewer.
“It might be used to explain Mechanical relationships in visual ways that cannot be duplicated by the best artist.”
Many years ago, Roy, I wrote quite a bit for just such a product–an online introduction to, of all things, Industrial Maintenance. It contained overviews of basic electronics, fluid power systems, types of basic machines, types of engines, control systems, and so on. This was a perfect topic for such treatment for the very reason that you mention. If you wanted to show students the difference between a compression-ignition engine and a spark-ignition engine, or whatever, you could present them with a cutaway gif that would be worth more than a thousand words.
Well, I tried to post a gif there, but with no luck. Here’s a link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_combustion_engine#/media/File:4StrokeEngine_Ortho_3D_Small.gif
(Before anyone gets upset with the following, remember we all have the right to disagree here.) Are there no libraries? No books with pictures and descriptions of engines? No sets of encyclopedias? No money for field trips to manufacturing plants? Are there no actual car engines in auto shop classes? Are there no shop classes? Oh, I remember now, we ditched the libraries and librarians for iPads, and shop classes for coding electives. We even got rid of the manufacturing plants and all the good union jobs that went with them. Oh well. Never mind what was lost.
My favorite line:
“What if, by surrendering to the narrative that schools must be increasingly technological, we have neglected to support them in being be remotely human? “
One of the Watters’ listed debacles should have been the Gates-funded SETDA. A former director of the State Education Technology Directors Association said the group of government employees, lobbies. The goals of SETDA are public private partnerships and digital learning. They host pitch fests for tech companies, have silver, gold and strategic partners from the private sector, offer seminars for business to scale up, etc- just what citizens want their public servants to do (sarcasm).