The Blackboard Way of Knowledge

This talk was given this afternoon at the launch of Princeton University's Societal AI.

Thank you so much for inviting me here today to speak at the launch of Princeton’s Societal AI project. I recognize that – the topic is in the title of the event, after all – that we have a full day and you have a full initiative ahead of you that is all about artificial intelligence. But I do wonder if you are, perhaps like me, already pretty goddamn tired of the whole ballyhoo, this whole "AI" thing – a topic that seems to dominate almost every aspect of life these days, both personal and professional, conversations both casual and apocalyptic, with somehow both the least and highest stakes imaginable, thrust into everything app and every ad whether we like it or not.

I don't want to imply that all this chatter is bad. That would be quite rude at an event like this. Indeed, I think that concerns about "AI" are fueling a number of incredibly important grassroots movements – opposition to data centers, most notably, but also pushback against police surveillance cameras, against screens in the classroom. As Brian Merchant argued, these concerns are revitalizing even radicalizing our discussions about labor and workers' rights. And what many of these movements articulate is not simply a rejection of this specific technology, but a repudiation of much of what the tech industry has come to symbolize (and of course enact): job precarity and economic inequality; disregard for the environment; algorithmic decision-making and a loss of accountability; misinformation; loneliness; authoritarianism; war and genocide; inhumanity – that utter misanthropy displayed by tech oligarchs – a loss of any future we once imagined, for ourselves or our children; a seething hatred of education, particularly public education and higher education and any place – as both these tend to be – whether women now outnumber men. Go figure.

At (yet another!) recent AI-and-education event, I heard a professor claim that, while it was incredibly important for educators to be critical of "AI," that they needn't worry much about other technologies in the classroom; ed-tech in general was mostly fine, he reassured the audience. And I balked. I coughed and spluttered. (Or more accurately, I typed "WTF" in the Zoom chat.) I think this stance is a mistake. I believe -- and this has been the thrust of my work for a while now -- that many of the problems that educational institutions face cannot be so neatly reduced to "now" or to "AI." And even the problems of "now" and the problems of "AI" are not simply or solely the result of that technology itself.

Indeed, many of the things we might say about "AI," we can say about education technology and digital technology more broadly: that these products (their makers and their investors) have profoundly and often quite callously re-engineered the classroom, re-shaping and even misshaping teaching and learning in the process; they have altered what we expect teaching and learning to "look like," how we might construe assignments and assessments and hell, even "understanding"; they have undermined and destabilized educational institutions' expertise as well as their funding -- often with messaging that has been overtly hostile to academia, to public education, to professors, and to teachers' unions; they have offered solutions that tout "personalization" at the expense of dialogue, discussion, community. And to be clear, they have managed to do this not because these technologies are so great and powerful -- software, particularly educational software, well before Cory Doctorow ever dreamed up the word "enshittification," mostly sucks. Education has been anathema to technology -- and yes, I know the marketing has insisted that these tools are supposed to make us better, smarter, faster, stronger -- because the tech industry's oligarchs have made it very clear that they are in many ways opposed to education's very existence, particularly as a public, as a collective, as an egalitarian, and as a radical endeavor. (They believe they're all brilliant autodidacts, of course.)

I find it useful to talk about history – in no small part because the tech industry seems to always wish we wouldn't. Perhaps because we'd ask things like "didn't you just promise to revolutionize education a few years ago with a totally different product?"

They want us relentlessly focused on the future, no doubt, as political scientist Dave Karpf argues in his new book Vaporware, Inc so they can better control the present. Contrary to the narratives about "innovation" and "transformation" and "revolution," contrary to the story that new technologies appear out of nowhere, all these things -- cultural objects and cultural practices -- have histories.

So I want to talk about a different technology, one that much like "AI" (contrary to this story that "AI" is brand new) has a long history in schools; one that has already bent many of academia's bureaucratic and pedagogical practices to suit its design, to suit its needs; one that has, I'd argue, laid the groundwork for "AI" in some of the worst possible ways.

Well, I think we still “boo” the LMS, although sometimes I’m not so sure. (Which honestly makes me feel like I'm losing my mind.)

Many many years ago, when I was a graduate student, but even not-so-long ago too: the learning management system was despised -- loathed by professors and students alike. But something has shifted -- and let's be honest, it's not, despite what the marketing from Instructure or Blackboard would have you believe, that the technology has improved, that the interface is now sleeker and "more intuitive" (whatever the hell that means), that the software has become not just a necessity but a joy to use.

And yet, there've been several major outages of Canvas in the last year or so that have prompted cries (or at least headlines) that, without access to the LMS, "we can't do school." (My stepdaughter, affected by this as a grad student, texted me something along those lines. Another time that my response was the acronym "WTF.")