Ed-Tech Dragnet
“With Ring, American Consumers Built a Surveillance Dragnet” writes 404 Media co-founder Jason Koebler, in response to Amazon’s ad in the Super Bowl promising that its front poor camera could be turned into a neighborhood surveillance network. The ad posits that this as a good thing -- it’s
Downhill
The News, Weakly
Apologies, I'm a day late to my weekly round-up of education/technology news. I've been a bit under the weather this week. Is it a cold? The flu? COVID? Or perhaps just that generalized depression and overwhelming sense of doom – I do not know. But I
Mad Maxxing
Snow Day
I'm working on a longer essay that I hope to finish up this weekend, but in the meantime, I wanted to send out a list of links to other important stories, essays, podcasts. I say "that I hope to finish up this weekend," but my weekend
The Storm Before the Calm
The Ruffled Mind
There's a scene in the 1927 film Metropolis in which Freder, the son of the city's mayor, is playing in the "pleasure garden" when a young woman named Maria brings the children of the working class up to see how their wealthy brethren live.
This Whole Ordeal
Spot the Difference
"School hasn't changed in hundreds of years." So goes the story invoked by politicians, entrepreneurs, and journalists -- a cliche often followed with an urgent call for school administrators to buy and teachers to adopt the latest technological gadgetry, gadgetry that's poised so these
The Magic Porridge Pot
Un-Listed
I've started and paused and restarted this email several times. I thought I'd send it Monday, then Wednesday, and now look: it's Friday afternoon (my time). We're already a week into the new year. Conventionally, “it’s a bit late to say