Masking the real history of high school in America also helps the DeVoses of the world obscure legitimate problems the education system has always faced—problems that have been deliberately created and maintained. Funding inequality and racial segregation are rarely the focus of these sorts of stories about an ever-unchanging educational system. The dominant narrative instead tends to point to teachers or curricula, or even bells and early start times, as the reason schools are “broken” and that students aren’t being adequately prepared for the future.
Tag: Audrey Watters
“Those who ignore the past are destined to be in Wired Magazine” — George Santayana probably
No doubt, the pedagogical practices associated with the blackboard have shifted over the course of the past two hundred years. Now it’s more likely to be a device used by a teacher (a female teacher, a shift facilitated by Horace Mann’s normal schools) and not the student. Increasingly, I suppose, it’s a whiteboard, perhaps one with a touchscreen computer attached. But it is still worth thinking about the blackboard as a disciplinary technology – one that molds and constrains what happens in the classroom, one that (ostensibly) makes visible the mind and the character of the person at the board, whether that’s a student or a teacher.
In this talk to design students from Georgetown University, Audrey Watters unpacks a history of educational technology often overlooked. Too often when we talk about EdTech we rush to talk about the computer. The problem with this is that it overlooks so many developments and decisions that led to that point. To explain her point, she discusses the origin of the blackboard. What I found interesting were the pedagogical practices associated with its beginnings. A reminder of how technology is a system. I think that too often we choose narrative and convenience over complexity within such conversations.
Remember: the lack of communication does not just mean a failure to speak; it is also a failure to listen, to not give our attention to (and to distract others’ attention from) the things that we really must.
There is something that doesn’t sit right with me with all this supposed ‘charity’. I think Audrey Watters’ captures it best when she says, “there is no accountability in billionaires’ educational philanthropy”
My mum remembers (age 10 or so) eating six Tunnock’s teacakes and feeling quite ill on the bus from the train station at Lairg. She caught a trout on that trip, she says, too small to keep or eat, but she refused to throw it back and kept it in the wash basin in her room.
The family has told the stories from these vacations in Scotland for years — the knitted bathing suit and my uncle’s near-death experience (age 3) on the railway turntable in Rosemarkie. But as we drove through hills and over bridges, my mum and uncle squinted and hesitated and had to admit several times that perhaps the “what” and the “where” were different than what they recalled. (There was never a railway station in Rosemarkie, the villagers told us.)
EDUCAUSE is out today with the latest Horizon Report for Higher Education. This is, of course, a report that almost wasn’t as NMC, the original publisher of this project, abruptly closed its doors late last year. I had hoped that the whole thing would go away, but nothing ever dies in ed-tech. It just gets renamed – rebranded as “innovative” – and stays in circulation forever. Zombie ed-tech. Always on the horizon.
I am intrigued to what this looks like within education and users of GSuite for Edu? How does it relate to the saga around track email etc?
One of the teachers in that NYT article, incidentally, penned a story arguing that the future of the classroom should look something like a Starbucks. (The future of education is big brands, the education reformers and education investors keep repeating.) Again, it’s one of those allusions that I think is supposed to be inspirational but I find just utterly terrifying. Is this classroom the Starbucks where the white lady manager calls the cops on young Black men who make her uncomfortable?
It’s been almost six years since I rode in one of Google’s self-driving cars. I think about all the data that Google has amassed since then – all the mapping data and geolocation data and sensor data and historical data and traffic data and all the machine learning that their machines are supposedly doing with that. Why, it’s almost as if the problems of navigating the world with AI are much, much harder than engineers imagined.
I really like Audrey Watters’ point about investing in public transport:
Personally, I’d prefer to see greater investment in public transportation than in cars, and I’d rather hear stories that predict that sort of future.
Interestingly, that might be a more logical space for automation, especially trains.
The obituary is a strange genre. (I say this having written two.) An obituary typically contains the basic facts of the deceased’s life: where and when they were born; when and sometimes how they died; where they went to school; the names of wives and husbands and children and the names of any other “surviving family members.” An obituary, whether written by a family member or by someone at the newspaper, attempts to narrate a life – who was this person; what did they do; what were they like?
Audrey Watters reflects on the stories told in the form of obituaries. This reminds me of Austin Kleon’s
Show Your Work
:
Obituaries aren’t really about death; they’re about life. “The sum of every obituary is how heroic people are, and how noble,” writes artist Maira Kalman. Reading about people who are dead now and did things with their lives makes me want to get up and do something decent with mine. Thinking about death every morning makes me want to live.
It’s better to blog on your own site than to spend time on others’. You control the words; you control the context. You don’t have to let someone else monetize your frustration or your joy
I am so fed up with Twitter. I have been for years now, no doubt. But it’s hard, as a self-employed writer, to ditch the site altogether. I use it to promote my work. (I’ll post a link to this newsletter there as soon as I hit “publish.”) And I find news and other writers’ stories there too – things that I wouldn’t necessarily stumble upon, thanks in no small part to the demise of RSS. Nevertheless, due to changes this week to Twitter’s API – changes that mean my desktop Twitter client of choice, Tweetbot, no longer really works – it is unlikely I’ll be on the site much for the foreseeable future.
I think Americans’ homes are designed for that – they’re designed in ways that encourage you to fill up the closets and garages and spare bedrooms with stuff. There are catalogs upon catalogs with products and websites upon websites with ideas of how to buy things and build things that transform rooms to your liking.
This is an insightful look into home spaces and the way we use it.
We have worked at home (and with great frequency, it feels, worked on the road) for about a decade now. And the typical home or apartment – no matter its size or location – isn’t really designed for that.
If I were to really formalize such an “Audrey test,” I think it would also have to involve what you know, what you think about education, about teaching, about learning, about politics and theory and practice — its history, its present, its future.
Via Maha Bali
Pedagogies and environments (and the objects in these environments) are interconnected. Necessarily so. As we stumble towards the hottest global temperatures on record, perhaps we need to look up from our own “personalized” self-streams and think about global, sustainable gardens.
In part Watters’ reference Mike Caulfield’s notion of the garden and the stream. It is also interesting to consider it in light of the argument that space does not matter.
There are three points about the risks of what ISTE deployed at their conference to know: (1) the ‘smart badge’ is a really effective locator beacon, transmitting signals that are trivial to intercept and read, (2) you can’t turn it off, and (3) most people I spoke to had no idea how it worked. (I freaked out more than a few people by telling them what their badge number was by reading it from my phone. Most of those incidents ended up with ‘smart badges’ being removed and destroyed.)
Doug Levin reflects on the introduction of ‘smart badges’ at ISTE. Really just a Bluetooth tracking device that then allowed vendors (and anyone for that matter) to collect data on attendees. Levin hacked a badge to unpacking their use. He explains that with little effort they could be used by anybody to track somebody:
Downloading a free mobile app, as I did, an attacker could easily track a specific badge and be notified when it goes out of or comes into range. With little technical skill, an attacker could use it to approach someone outside of the convention center (at a bar or restaurant or tourist attraction) and by employing social engineering techniques attempt to gain their trust. I myself was able to identify that there were over a dozen ISTE conference participants on my train platform on Wednesday morning bound for Chicago O’Hare. When one ISTE participant entered my train car at a later stop, that was trivial to identify. While there were no other ISTE participants on my flight back to the DC area, I located two badges in the baggage claim area (likely packed in someone’s luggage or carry-on).
Audrey Watters suggests that, “ISTE has helped here to normalize surveillance as part of the ed-tech experience. She suggests that it is only time that this results in abuse. Mike Crowley wonders why in a post-GDPR world attendees are not asked for consent? If this is the future, then maybe Levin’s ‘must-have’ guide will be an important read for everyone.
It’s official. I signed the book contract late last night: the MIT University Press has agreed to publish Teaching Machines.
To hear Larry Cuban say he is glad I am writing this book was a huge boost to my confidence.
I am glad too, although I guess I am not Larry.
That was an interesting comment about behaviourism. It is a reminder that history is always a trace or thread and can never really be a complete recreation.