In a separate post, Ryan Boren collects together a number responses to Watters’ post.
📑 The 100 Worst Ed-Tech Debacles of the Decade
For the past ten years, I have written a lengthy year-end series, documenting some of the dominant narratives and trends in education technology. I think it is worthwhile, as the decade draws to a close, to review those stories and to see how much (or how little) things have changed. You can read the series here: 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019.
I thought for a good long while about how best to summarize this decade, and inspired by the folks at The Verge, who published a list of “The 84 biggest flops, fails, and dead dreams of the decade in tech,” I decided to do something similar: chronicle for you a decade of ed-tech failures and fuck-ups and flawed ideas.
Oh yes, I’m sure you can come up with some rousing successes and some triumphant moments that made you thrilled about the 2010s and that give you hope for “the future of education.” Good for you. But that’s not my job. (And honestly, it’s probably not your job either.)
Audrey Watters closes the decade with an epic post documenting the worst of ed-tech. Full of ‘I forgot about …’ and ‘whatever happened to …’, this post is an important provocation to read and reflect upon in regards to the use of educational technology. Along with Watters’ review of the trends for 2019, she leaves a lot to stop and think about.
I’ve been seeing a lot of praise for Audrey Watters’s post The 100 Worst Ed-Tech Debacles of the Decade (these Tweets captured by Aaron Davis are typical). If you haven’t seen it, take this as a reminder to put it on your weekend reading list (it will take a bit to get through, because Watters does a lot more than just write a listicle here).