Nobody understands ed tech better than Audrey Watters, and nobody knows better what questions need to be asked.
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 principals’ and professors’ lives easier do so with the promise that, at the end of the day, it’s all in the service of helping students learn better — making education, in the words of Daft Punk, “harder, better, faster, stronger,” although we’d sure want to add in “cheaper” as well.
But ed-tech has largely and consistently failed to do that. The reasons are many. But one of them may just be that ed-tech isn’t actually designed or built for students (or teachers); it isn’t often bought by students (or teachers). While the stories about what ed-tech can do might appeal to lots of people — ah, that genial robotic rhythm: “harder, better, faster, stronger” — there’s often a massive gulf between the ed-tech imaginary and a real educational experience.
Who is ed-tech for?
I haven’t stopped thinking about this question lately — in part because it gets at the heart of what I think* is going to be the history I cover in my next book. (More to come on that soon / someday, LOL.)
I haven’t stopped thinking about this question since I read the story about the “lifelike” robot teacher purchased by Salamanca Central School District — I wrote about this in last week’s newsletter: a classroom technology built by a company that previously sold sex- and companion robots.
Who sat in the meeting where this idea was pitched? Who thought that this was a good idea? Who looked at the mock-ups for Sally the sexbot and thought “great idea!” “Let’s do this for the children!”
Who is ed-tech for?
I haven’t stopped thinking about this question since the release of Claude for Teachers, which has been received with a fair amount of pushback and derision — and in the case of one district, blocking it altogether.
Indeed, it’s right there in the name of the product, isn’t it: this is for teachers. But as Ben Riley asks, “why?” Why, particularly when much of Anthropic’s success has come from a pitch made to “the enterprise,” to the managerial imagination of big business, do this for teachers — that is, why build for and market to individual teachers? Why bypass district decision-making and district governance? And importantly here, why make teachers (and not schools or districts as the law dictates) be the ones responsible for protecting student data and student privacy?