Hack Education

This is the tenth (and final) post in my annual review of all things ed-tech. This one examines the myriad of ways that education technology exacerbates inequality -- socio-economic inequalities, information inequalities, political inequalities. I realize that many people believe ed-tech is necessarily progressive. I hope we realize soon that it is not....

The incoming Trump Administration continues to look like an utter horror show. Online charter schools are expected to see a boom, even though we know they're exploitative and fail to educate students. For-profit universities expect to see a boom, even though they're exploitative and send students into debt....

What happens to education technology under President Trump? What happens to data collection? What happens to algorithms? happens to theory? What happens to practice? What happens to academic freedom? What can we learn from the history of technology -- and fascism, and political repression?...

This talk was delivered at Virginia Commonwealth University as part of a seminar co-sponsored by the Departments of English and Sociology. It's an examination of technology forecasting. What can we learn from these predictions? Hint: we won't learn what the future will be, but we might learn what powerful people hope it to be....

For the seventh year in a row, I chronicle the "top trends" in education technology. This isn't a bulleted list or click bait. This isn't a corporate or VC-sponsored promotion of corporate or VC interests. This isn't a prediction about the future. It's an examination of the near-term history of the future and who's doing the fortune-telling....

I spent much of 2015 on the road, traveling and speaking extensively about education technology's histories, ideologies, and mythologies. This is a sequel of sorts to my 2014 book The Monsters of Education Technology, this one a collection of eleven of those talks on topics ranging from the algorithmic future of education to the Californian Ideology....

What is up with all the pigeons? The bird appears across all the various Hack Education projects as it exemplifies how education technology has viewed learning and learners. In part, it's a reference to the work of Edward Thorndike and B. F. Skinner and their development of multiple choice tests, teaching machines, and behavioral (educational) psychology....