I had the pleasure of reading the galleys of Audrey Watter’s fascinating new book—Teaching Machines: The History of Personalized Learning—about the origins of education technology, which began with the search for a machine that could replace teachers: a teaching machine. She goes into detail about the pioneers of this innovation, notably B.F. Skinner, who tried relentlessly to find a publisher to produce and monetize his invention.
Watter’s’ book was published by MIT Press. You will enjoy it.
The search for the best “teaching machine” seems akin to the search for the Fountain of Youth or Shangri-La, but with a big profit when on the market.
You can listen to Audrey talk about her new book with Leonie Haimson on Leonie’s radio show.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“Teaching machines” like “remote learning” have been grasped by those conservative forces in our culture who are looking to profit from the process. They see paying for “teaching services” as a sunk cost that needs to be reclaimed and eliminated if possible.
This desire is based upon the misunderstanding that education is an information transferal process rather than a social process in which we show our young how to learn and how to work together with others. You cannot show people how to learn from and work with others without “others.” The education systems that acknowledge this (Finland, China to some extent, etc.) do very well in educating their young people. Those which focus on information transferal (memorize the sacred texts, etc.) are not doing so well.
Just some clearly anecdotal info on China. My son supervised a MS candidate’s research a few years back. She was a very competent assistant, able to follow the direction of a senior scientist. She had an incredibly difficult time formulating her own research questions. My son was extremely frustrated with her until I clued him in that he would have to teach her how to identify questions, something that had not been part of her Chinese education.
EXACTLY said: “…conservative forces in our culture who are looking to profit from the process. They see paying for “teaching services” as a sunk cost that needs to be reclaimed and eliminated if possible.”
It’s a shame that individualized learning has been connected to a machine . It gives any effort to focus on the individual a bad name. This is especially problematic when due to time away from in school clases , students skills will be all over the board leaving the one size fits all concept a disaster.
One size fits all leaves the horrible choice for those students who suffered from time away from school 2 basic choices. 1. pass them without learning or 2 . retain them thus pushing back their graduation a year if not more.
Pretending that students will maintain their skills through summer school or tutoring is a false narrative administration’s will use That way they can justify keeping large class sizes and a disaster for teachers who are forced to deal with students having a wide range of skills
This trickery allows them to continue to blame teachers for impossible situations. The system is designed to fail! Until that system changes , the blame game will go on.
I agree that a certain degree of individ. learning in the day is a game changer. Very low class sizes (esp in elementary) …… shifting funds from other areas…… would allow teachers to have more time to work 1:1 or in small groups throughout the day.
I must read this book. Looks outstanding! B.F. Skinner thought of humans as no more advanced than lab rats or Pavlov’s dogs. Sounds like Bill Gates to me, alright.
The tech industry is so full of itself that software engineers still believe in a “teaching box.” I was around for the earlier of CBE wave in the 1970s. It was mind numbingly dull, dry tedium. No matter how hard tech companies try to put “lipstick on its pig” through banners, colorful graphics and sound effects, it is the same old pig.
Humans are social-emotional beings. Unless education can touch that part of humanity, it will fail. Human education must be humane. It must muster up compassion, empathy, humor and a sense of belonging to a community to touch hearts and minds. There is no peer effect from the discussion that occurs in a human led class. The interview used the term “drudgery” to define the endless maze of multiple choice questions in CBE. It is no substitute for a real human education.
Computers are useful tools that should be in the hands of competent teachers. Districts should not purchase expensive, complete programs without any evidence that what they are buying is worth it, and they should not impose them on schools in a top down manner. A steady diet of technology is unhealthy to the eyes, brains and emotional health of young people. The interview mentioned the “game changing” whiteboards that were supposed to “revolutionize learning.” They are not gathering dust in closets of schools across the country after tech companies made a lot of money from this fad.
cx: they are now gathering dust in closets of schools….
A teaching machine is just a small part of the Holy Grail of computer scientists: artificial general intelligence (AGI)
In other words, the goal is not just to replace the teacher but to replace the human generally with a machine.
So far, there is a Wild West anything goes mentality when it comes to AI development, with few restrictions on what is produced or how it is implemented.
There is no AGI yet, but some people (including the late Stephen Hawking) believe that unless controls are in place before it is achieved, it could spell the end of the human race.
Of course, even before AGI is achieved, there will be massive displacement of human workers (including many professional ones) by machines operating under more specific “weak AI”. And so far, we are woefully unprepared as a society even for the ramifications of that.
Ironically, the jobs that are most resistant to replacement by machines are not the ones performed by college educated “knowledge workers” but ones like the traditional trades (plumber, carpenter, mason, electrician, etc).
Even computer “science” itself is not resistant, since most “coding” lends itself to automation. In fact, a lot of automatic code generation is already being done. Automated web site development is a perfect example of this. Up until relatively recently, one had to know programming (eg, html and JavaScript) to develop a web site but now one can do it without knowing anything at all about programming.
I just replaced a rotted post under a deck.
The almost completely rotted post was hidden under the trim, which boxed the post.
My guess is that It is going to be a long time before there exists a machine that is capable not only of identifying and assessing such a problem but actually fixing it.
Not the mention the question of whether a house owner is going to trust a machine that arrives in their driveway to remove and replace a post that is holding up their deck. Personally, I would say “Thanks, but no thanks”
Especially if the machine were designed by a computer “scientist”.
I have worked with a lot of CS grads and many of them jump right into “solutions” before they really understand the problem.
Engineers and real scientists I trust.
Computer “scientists” not so much.
Well said. The tech moguls are like Gengis Khan plowing down resistance to tech adoption. The whole CCSS is designed for more behaviorism that supplants human instruction for the masses despite their unfounded marketing claims.
A perfect example of the Wild West of AI development is self driving cars.
There is virtually no control over the companies producing these things. And in fact, in many cases, even the people developing the systems have little or no understanding of how they operate, since they are often based on what are essentially black boxes (neural nets)
On the other hand, every time l drive on a highway and see how little regard lunatics have for the lives of other motorists, I am more convinced that AI-assisted driving technology is a wonderful thing and needs to be implemented and improved as widely and quickly as possible.
Bloomberg News had an article today about the failure of AI. Including AI cars, which are not reliable.
Neither are human drivers.
AI driving technology is already in cars in the form of steering assistance, emergency auto-braking, gap maintenance, blind spot technology, etc. Reliable true “self-driving” may be a ways off, but we’re already benefiting from this safety technology and we’ll benefit a lot more as it continues to develop.
From Bloomberg today:
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-10-04/artificial-intelligence-ain-t-that-smart-look-at-tesla-facebook-healthcare
For Tesla, Facebook and Others, AI’s Flaws Are Getting Harder to Ignore
Investors are pouring money into artificial intelligence, despite clear setbacks in self-driving cars, social media and even healthcare.
What do Facebook Inc. co-founder Mark Zuckerberg and Tesla Inc. Chief Executive Elon Musk have in common? Both are grappling with big problems that stem, at least in part, from putting faith in artificial intelligence systems that have underdelivered. Zuckerberg is dealing with algorithms that are failing to stop the spread of harmful content; Musk with software that has yet to drive a car in the ways he has frequently promised.
There is one lesson to be gleaned from their experiences: AI is not yet ready for prime time. Furthermore, it is hard to know when it will be. Companies should consider focusing on cultivating high-quality data — lots of it — and hiring people to do the work that AI is not ready to do.
Designed to loosely emulate the human brain, deep-learning AI systems can spot tumors, drive cars and write text, showing spectacular results in a lab setting. But therein lies the catch. When it comes to using the technology in the unpredictable real world, AI sometimes falls short. That’s worrying when it is touted for use in high-stakes applications like healthcare.
“When it comes to using the technology in the unpredictable real world, AI sometimes falls short.”
That’s because much of the (weak) AI is based on “deep learning” with neural networks, which depends on the data it is trained on.
It such systems encounter situations outside their training data, they can have very unpredictable, illogical responses (because their actions are based on statistics, not rules based logic).
The AGI singularity is childlike science fiction, just as is Mars colonization. It’s for dopes and dupes. In other words, it’s for whacked out billionaires. For humans to create an artificial consciousness, we would first need to know what consciousness is, if it exists, and how the mammalian brain creates it (or the illusion of it). Billionaires live in a fantasy world, and enjoy experimenting on human beings in the real world, ruining lives in the process. It’s their form of play. Pretty immature if you ask me. Am I smarter than Stephen Hawking? No. But regarding AI, maybe.
Stephen Hawking was not certain that AGI would be achieved.
But he was very concerned about the possibility of it’s being achieved with no protections in place.
I think that’s a perfectly valid concern.
There is a great deal of hype associated with (weak) AI, but it has also had great success in some areas.
And like every other technology, AI has the potential for both good and bad.
My issue with AI is that there is little or no oversight and regulation over it’s development and implementation.
Simply putting faith in a bunch of computer “scientists” is a big mistake, in my opinion.
And I say that as someone who has worked with a lot of CS grads.
I have a problem with the word “intelligence” being coupled with “artificial”. Worrying about what will happen when artificiality becomes intelligent is foolishness. It will never happen. It is not possible.
Contemporary ed tech is simply old-fashioned behaviorist “programmed learning” but with added graphics. Older teachers will remember the behaviorist “language labs.”
This stuff failed then and is failing now. The only difference is that the hype is more intense. Investors keep pouring money into ed tech startups, and they keep failing. And even the ones that don’t fail financially fail educationally.
So, Ms. Watters’s book is timely and important.
Ed tech companies are, of course, trying to take advantage of the pandemic to sell politicians and administrators on replacing teachers with educational technology. So, thought I would try my hand at writing some ad copy for these companies:
Help your students go the distance with distance technology!!!!! With our Remote Learning Software, there’s a remote chance that they will be learning!
These are difficult times for educators, and that’s why we at Bob’s Ultimate Lesson Learning Software [with] Hyper Individualized Technology (B.U.L.L.S.H.I.T.) are stepping up and offering our product to schools ABSOLUTELY FREE.* Our proprietary Deep Doo Diagnostic Engine uses HIGHLY COMPLEX, CUTTING EDGE QUANTUM-MECHANICAL ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE ALGORITHMS to PERSONALIZE INSTRUCTION and tell you exactly where your students stand compared to kids in other schools and countries, what lessons are right for them given their level of mastery, what they should eat for breakfast, their level of socio-emotional development, how many children and parking tickets they will have as adults, how many jobs they will have over their lifetimes, what they will earn in the year 2046, whether their energy fields and chakras are properly aligned, what psychological disorders they will develop in the future, what tax preparer they will prefer at age 50, the meaning of life, what existed before the Big Bang, who the next big TicTok star will be, when the oil in the students’ parents’ cars needs changing. You name it. Math skills? Reading skills? Innate intelligence? Gritfulness? Propensity for psychopathy and a career with an equity or consulting firm? THERE IS NOTHING THAT OUR DIAGNOSTIC ISN’T ABLE TO DETERMINE with complete RIGOR, providing you with actionable—wait for it!!!!–yes!!!–DATA. Data. Oh, data. Oh. Yes, yes, yes. Which is, of course, what school is all about!!! How are we able to do this is a bit complicated to explain (it’s very mathematical and you wouldn’t be able to understand) but suffice it to say that with our Educator Proof ™ software, teachers are ABSOLUTELY UNNECESSARY!
And, check out our add-in packages that cook dinner, walk the dog, solve international crises, and navigate long, dark nights of the soul! Too good to be true? Well, step into the HYPE VORTEX and see for yourself!
B.U.L.L.S.H.I.T. Now with personalizable student avatars! So much fun, your students will prefer this to having their flesh removed from their bodies with curry combs! Speaking of which, we’re the Common Core-iest! No one cores students as we do!!! Also perfectly aligned to your NEW not-at-all-Common-Corey state standards!!!
Because students need to be standardized, as fish need bicycles.
*after billed monthly server time hours and fees for onboarding, roster maintenance, reporting, professional development, documentation fees, administrative fees, student data updating fees. Promotion good only for basic INTRODUCTORY package consisting of an abacus and clay tablet.
Great parody, Bob1 Big tech does not want to consider privacy rights. All the BS leads to the monetization of students’ data. Parents should be very concerned about this as well as the mental and physical health factors related to too much screen time.
These extrinsic reward systems used in the ed tech programs don’t work as people work, so they do exactly the opposite of what is claimed for them: they kill student interest. Every teacher has seen this again and again. The huge hype. The initial interest during or right after onboarding. The plummeting student interest.
And what is the hidden curriculum of that? That learning (for that’s what this garbage is called) is boring.
Not exactly what we want to be teaching, is it?
Technology cannot provided a thought provoking, engaging education particularly in the arts and social sciences. It can reinforce rote, repetitive topics in math or science in certain skills based topics, but these decisions should be up to the instructor.
cx: provide
I recently looked at some computer based learning programs my nephew was using for math and Spanish homework and was struck by how similar they actually were to programs i used 40 years ago (!) run on a microcomputer.
The math program was particularly poor. There was no partial credit for problems and even you answered all but the last exercise of a series correctly, you had to restart from the beginning and do a whole new series of problems.
But maybe there are better programs out there . I certainly hope so because the ones I looked at sucked eggs.
And worst of all, the programs gave you no idea what you had done wrong.
Other than that you got the wrong answer.
Exactly. No progress. Just added graphics.
Many of them do have explanations of why answers are wrong built into them. This is easily automated, and so it is done. But the whole business of doing these worksheets on a screen is extraordinarily onerous to students. After a short time doing them, they want to scream. They would rather have all their body hair pulled out with tweezers and sign on to the program one more time. The “exciting graphics” have precisely the opposite of the intended effect–they seem to students lame and stupid (because for the most part they are). No kid wants to watch the Mario the Pizza Guy Does Fractions cartoon video. Kids have superb crap detectors, as Neil Postman used to say.
Typically, these programs have multiple-choice answers. If the kid gets the right answer, he or she wins points and there is some sort of fanfare. If he or she gets a wrong answer, there is usually an explanation (often a lame one) that pops up and at least hints at why that answer is not correct. The folks who write these for the companies are given instructions to choose likely wrong answers and to provide the explanation of what went wrong with each. It’s been this way since the early days of programmed learning–the second generation of Pressey’s machines.
That was perfect, Bob. B.U.L.L.S.H.I.T. indeed. Thoroughly enjoyed.
hahaha(snort!) Thanks, Bob. I needed that.
Audrey Watters is brilliant and knowledgeable and humane. Any book by her would be one worth reading.