July 1, 2022

Educational Technology

This June, Audrey Watters retired her role as the Cassandra of educational technology. Watters is the author of Teaching Machines, the History of Personalized Learning, and, since 2010, writer of Hack Education, a blog dedicated to examining the ed tech "revolution" in the clear light of day. She'll undoubtedly move on to some other compelling subject, but her departure from critiquing this industry is an enormous loss, particularly at this moment when every teachers' experience with technology has, by virtue of the pandemic, been fast-forwarded a decade. Teachers are thinking about how educational technology fits in their work, and thinking about it through the lens of sustained experience with the digital tools that buoyed them through their season of remote instruction. They are prepared to see through some of the hype and probe the notion that "it's the world they're growing up in," the blithe equivocation that opened the classroom door to a lot of underwhelming and some truly evil digital tools. My go-to replacement for Watters' work is Real Life magazine, an online compendium of pieces about living with technology, "about how we live today and how our lives are mediated by devices." It's my great hope that, as schools examine their experience with digital tools during the pandemic, they take the time to examine them from a philosophical standpoint, particularly in measuring how any tool might promote or limit the freedom and dignity of the user.