"This changes everything." I find this cliche about technology to be so exhausting, in no small part because I've heard it over and over and over again. Every new product release, a revolution. After a while, you have to decide whether you're going to
“Many decades ago, humans developed a process by which they could go into a store, pick an item off the shelf, and pay for it at the checkout counter. A few years ago, we lost it. Now you ring a buzzer, wait for an overworked employee to unlock an item
Who is ed-tech for? The marketing copy -- whether on websites or in PowerPoint or in TED Talks and the like -- will all insist that ed-tech is, at the end of the day, for "the students." Even the products that are pitched to make teachers' and
“The future is here. It’s just not very evenly distributed.” This quotation, attributed to science fiction author William Gibson, is often used to imply that some lucky few, particularly those surrounded by silicon gadgetry, live in some glorious high-tech promised land; while the rest of us, without access
The Atlantic has pronounced that “The End of Reading is Here,” the latest in a long series of stories, there and elsewhere, that lament that no one -- but specifically no student -- reads anymore. They don’t read; they can’t read. When I say “long series,” I really do mean
Many years ago, in an earlier era of silliness about a looming ed-tech revolution, a startup founder sent me an email, asking that I please hold off from writing anything about the company. They'd experienced a huge surge in demand for their app – it was fall, students
The history of education technology is inseparable from the history of standardized testing. That’s part of the argument I make in Teaching Machines, where I trace the development of both the machinery of teaching and the machinery of testing back to the early twentieth century. There are more recent
Just a short newsletter this week, full of links to others' writing – apologies. Ideologies: Fred Turner argues in The Baffler that the California Ideology, as articulated by Richard Barbrook and Andrew Cameron in their famous 1995 essay, is no longer central to Silicon Valley hegemony. Instead, Turner contends, it’
Despite a last minute call from Senator Elizabeth Warren to delay the IPO, SpaceX is set to go public today, making Elon Musk, already the world’s richest man and surely one of its most unsavory, into the world's first trillionaire. In a letter to the SEC, Warren
I’m a couple of weeks behind on sharing links, so apologies for the length of this email and for the outdatedness of some of the news therein. But I devoted much of last week, as I noted in Saturday’s missive, to reading the Pope’s encyclical letter, and
It's become quite commonplace to charge those of us who challenge technology – specifically children's use of technology -- with fomenting some sort of "moral panic." To do so invokes a long history of opposition to television and rock-n-roll and video games and comic
Every spring, we get a flood of stories about college graduation ceremonies -- typically full of tut-tutting about inappropriate behavior or inappropriate speech -- always presented as synecdochical of all of higher ed. Oh sure sure, there’s often the odd tale of triumph: someone’s service dog gets a diploma;
“The only thing that matters is the future,” he told me after the civil trial was settled. “I don’t even know why we study history. It’s entertaining, I guess -- the dinosaurs and the Neanderthals and the Industrial Revolution, and stuff like that. But what already happened doesn’t