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December 31, 2019 7:31 AM

Another decade-end list. This one is about educational technology and pedagogy the author claims have failed.
posted by eotvos (35 comments total)

Oh man, I still don't know what (#91) Unizin is but their homepage is so indescribable that the author didn't even attempt it.
posted by sjswitzer at 7:53 AM on December 31, 2019 [2 favorites]

What a treasure trove of news links. Great post!

It sure feels like 1999 and fuckedcompany.com again, with the sheer number of dreamy-eyed startups failing miserably. Who would have thought?
posted by Melismata at 8:21 AM on December 31, 2019 [2 favorites]

What, 3d printing is on the list? Our school library has a 3d printer, and students use it all the time. Sure it hasn't magically democratized all of education, but it makes for some fun toys and is an outlet for some kids' creativity.
posted by Wulfhere at 8:26 AM on December 31, 2019 [3 favorites]

The overarching theme here is that these fundamentally unsound ideas were driven by the business model first: how can we get schools on the hook for a subscription to our for-profit service? how can we get schools to give us valuable data for free?

What if, instead of wasting money on bad ideas funded by rich VCs seeking to get richer, we taxed the rich VCs and spent the money on more and better-paid teachers and aides? Or higher quality, no-cost meals for all students. Or college grants. Funny how VCs don't seem too interested in those things.
posted by jedicus at 8:28 AM on December 31, 2019 [28 favorites]

Oh man, I still don't know what (#91) Unizin is...

You can do anything at Unizin. Anything at all. The only limit is yourself.
posted by TedW at 8:39 AM on December 31, 2019 [11 favorites]

She's awesome. A shorter version of this list is her piece Ed-Tech Agitprop
posted by lalochezia at 8:41 AM on December 31, 2019 [3 favorites]

Yeah as a manufacturing engineer, I see putting additive manufacturing (what we call 3D printing) in the classroom as vital to STEM education.

There are things that can only be done with additive (as opposed to what we call "traditional manufacturing"), but it's vastly under-utilized, and I think that's because we need the next generation of engineers and designers; the ones who grew up with 3D printers in the classroom. The ones who have never looked at a drawing or had an idea and thought "how do I make this with mills/lathes/EDM etc".

Right now almost everything I'm seeing made via additive can be done with traditional. It's being done via additive because it's sexy. The next generation is really going to change that. We're still figuring out the capabilities and pushing the envelope of additive metal manufacturing.
posted by spikeleemajortomdickandharryconnickjrmints at 9:14 AM on December 31, 2019 [10 favorites]

I'm choosing to read the list as relating to specific instantiations of ideas, and their targeted marketing towards the education market, rather than about the underlying ideas or technologies themselves. Because, as others have pointed out, 3D printing is only a "failure" when measured against bizarrely exaggerated marketing fluff from MakerBot et al. (Much of it, I think, from when MakerBot was circling the drain as a company.) It's a perfectly reasonable technology to include in shop classes.

The copy on the Unizin 'About' site reads like it came out of one of those Markov Chain generators. What the hell?

Oh, and I think we can all agree that bundling textbooks—especially electronic, un-resellable textbooks—with tuition is some real bullshit and an obvious cash grab. Anyone pushing that model should die in a fire.

But more generally, a lot of stuff on the list seems like pretty typical overhyped VC garbage, which anyone who has worked in or around tech in the past few decades would almost certainly be suspicious of at first glance. Is there something about the .edu market that leads people to be more gullible to these sorts of—oh, let's just call them what they are—scams? I don't think you're ever going to eliminate VC-backed bullshit-laden sales pitches, at least not while capitalism is still the operative economic model; the surprising thing is that so many of these scams worked and got reasonable, presumably well-meaning people to shell out taxpayer cash for them. Why is that, and why do so many companies see education as a bunch of easy marks? And more importantly, how do we harden educators and the education market in general, to have at least the level of bullshit-shields-up cynicism that you'd get if you tried to make a sales pitch to any other industry?
posted by Kadin2048 at 9:16 AM on December 31, 2019 [3 favorites]

I was involved to a greater or lesser extent in three of these items. Do I win a prize, or just immediately get exiled?
posted by phooky at 9:38 AM on December 31, 2019 [2 favorites]

>Do I win a prize, or just immediately get exiled?

Depends on how good your gossip is.
posted by Feminazgul at 9:49 AM on December 31, 2019 [8 favorites]

Ctrl-F "flipped classroom"

At best, one student watches the video, and a couple more fastforward through it 5 minutes before class.
posted by betweenthebars at 9:54 AM on December 31, 2019 [4 favorites]

Lifelong teacher here. All ed tech claims since mimeographs and TVs have not panned out when unaccompanied by seriously good teaching and committed professional development.

Suggested reading: The Flickering Mind
posted by Peach at 10:15 AM on December 31, 2019 [15 favorites]

This made for a really interesting read from the perspective of someone in museums. Despite the expertise of people in #musetech, who understood that technology is only as good as its outcomes for users, for the past decade and more we've been harangued by old CEOs and board members who read something in Wired or Fast Company about how we needed to do, host, run, or install one or more of these. Usually more. I've been through entire projects meant to "revolutionize" museum learning through VR, badges, 3D printing, MOOCs, you name it. I am glad I know about this writer now.
posted by Miko at 10:22 AM on December 31, 2019 [8 favorites]

Audrey Watters is a national treasure.

Why is that, and why do so many companies see education as a bunch of easy marks?

Real learning (and by extension effective teaching) is hard and takes time. It requires effort, and therefore is expensive. But culturally the US does not value learning. Law makers, policy makers, (and therefore) administrators want the easy fast fix. We do not really want to pay what real learning costs, so of course the education market is easy pickings for the next edtech snake oil salesman. And the lesson we seem to draw, over and over, every time one of these promised solutions fails is “oh the tech just wasn’t [X] enough” or “students/teachers/parents aren’t [Y] enough.” It’s never “oh shit learning and assessing learning is hard!”

Because nobody really wants to hear that answer.
posted by DiscourseMarker at 10:42 AM on December 31, 2019 [26 favorites]

A very good takedown of the past decade of hype.
posted by doctornemo at 11:29 AM on December 31, 2019 [1 favorite]

The specialized language of education makes it vulnerable to empty fads.

I know a very successful educator who dedicated her life to educational improvement. She is hard-working, completely sincere, means well, and is a good human being.

But when she gave the eulogy at her mother's funeral, the first words out of her mouth were "the 10 takeaways from my mother's life are . . ."
posted by jamjam at 12:45 PM on December 31, 2019

Unizin is bundled expensive enterprise higher ed tech where if you buy in you get a break on the bottom line and perks that come with sharing resources and knowledge with other institutions.

The Horizon Report is absolutely bullshit, and I have to sit in meetings every year where we all pretend to take it seriously.

We have huge demand (from both students and faculty) for 3D printing, VR/AR and various other "maker" technologies at my institution ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
posted by soren_lorensen at 1:26 PM on December 31, 2019

Unizin is bundled expensive enterprise higher ed tech

And I'm still not sure what it means.
posted by Melismata at 1:34 PM on December 31, 2019

McKinsey, of course, makes an appearance

74. "Deliverology"
In 2010, Sir Michael Barber published Deliverology 101: A Field Guide for Educational Leaders. The book packaged the ideas he’d developed during his time in the Blair Administration and at McKinsey & Company on how to successfully manage policy reform efforts. “Three critical components of the approach,” he wrote, “are the formation of a delivery unit, data collection for setting targets and trajectories, and the establishment of routines.” In 2011, Barber went to work for Pearson as its Chief Education Advisor, continuing his advocacy for competition, data collection, measurements, and standards-based reforms. (See David Kernohan’s excellent keynote at OpenEd13 for more.) In 2013, on the heels of “the Year of the MOOC,” Barber released a report titled “An Avalanche is Coming,” calling for the “unbundling” of higher education.

The work of Michael Barber underscores the importance of highly paid consultants in shaping what politicians and administrators believe the future should look like and in giving them a set of metrics-obsessed management practices to get there.

posted by spamandkimchi at 1:34 PM on December 31, 2019 [1 favorite]

And I'm still not sure what it means.
It means you get a bunch of the stuff on that very list (e.g. Canvas and Turnitin) all together for one price that is less than buying the stuff all separately.

Lifelong teacher here. All ed tech claims since mimeographs and TVs have not panned out when unaccompanied by seriously good teaching and committed professional development.

Instructional technologist here and yep. I train university faculty how to use these things and I spend most of my time trying to tease out what they want to use it for and why (because none of it is required for anyone to use in their teaching). My recommendations and training will vary depending on the answer, but so many don't have an answer and haven't given it any thought. (Well, one memorable gentleman answered that he wanted to use a certain technology "because I'm not a very good teacher" and friend, I have got some bad news.)

I desperately wish people would stop using Turnitin. It's a garbage company with a garbage product built on a foundation of garbage ethics. It's the faculty driving this one at my institution. They insist on using it, I convey my misgivings, they ignore me.
posted by soren_lorensen at 1:48 PM on December 31, 2019 [4 favorites]

I'm horrified by how many faculty seem to take the line that students aren't to be trusted/ should be assumed to be cheaters, and thus must be monitored as much as possible.

Video monitoring for online test taking is so so so creepy. I told the ed-tech people on campus that I really really thought that rolling out Respondus Lockdown Browser was a bad idea, and they acknowledged that, but said something along the lines of "some faculty want it."

Watters on TurnitIn (#55 on the list): "Rather than trusting students, rather than re-evaluating what assignments and assessments look like, schools have invested heavily in any number of technology “solutions” to cheating — keystroke locking, facial recognition, video monitoring, and the like, all designed to identify students with “low integrity."

When I give online exams, I always make them open book/open notes. I don't need students to be able to recall exact terminology or policies from unaided memory.... I can barely remember what I did yesterday and when I'm tired, I can't even remember my own zipcode. What I do want students to do is to synthesize the course materials and discussions and apply/analyze.
posted by spamandkimchi at 2:03 PM on December 31, 2019 [5 favorites]

I train university faculty how to use these things and I spend most of my time trying to tease out what they want to use it for and why</em


All the tech bought at my institution is selected by professional support or by someone senior who hasn't taught in some time. The people stuck with using it haven't given any consideration to what they want to use it for, typically they have been told they will be using it as the dept is moving over to it regardless of their needs.
posted by biffa at 2:14 PM on December 31, 2019 [3 favorites]

This is a magnificent list. As someone who did Teach for America starting in 2010, I was exposed to more of these than I even realized at the time. My subsequent teaching career has felt like a kind of deprogramming from the disruptive privatizing ed-tech paradigm that underlies pretty much all of these initiatives, as well as much of the past decade's larger efforts toward "school reform."
posted by jshttnbm at 3:52 PM on December 31, 2019 [3 favorites]

Yeah it's part of the bullshit designed to convince people what we need is more privately owned tech and private-company contracting instead of massive public investment in the public good that is learning.
posted by Miko at 3:58 PM on December 31, 2019 [6 favorites]

Part of what drives this at the University level is that upper level administrators (deans and up) are rewarded for “innovation,” not for, say, good teaching or good research. Since “innovation” means “copying what other places did 5-10 years ago without learning from their experiences,” this drives desperate adoption of technical “Solutions” to problems that need to be solved with “more faculty.”
posted by GenjiandProust at 4:58 PM on December 31, 2019 [4 favorites]

I mostly agree with everything on the list. There are many very silly examples in there. The Flipped Classroom section gives me pause, though. (Which is why I posted this in the slightly hostile way I did.)

I'm not at all sure a flipped classroom works. I am sure it isn't revolutionary. (It is very different from a traditional literature seminar, though.) I am sure I would have hated it as a student and I will surely hate it if my institution lets me try it. But, there's a lot of evidence that active learning and problem solving is more effective than lecture. Solving problems with assistance is more or less how learning happens, at least in the quantitative fields. Trying out new, interesting ways to do that - especially if they're not half-assed attempts carried out by hostile faculty and with terribly designed incentives - doesn't see like a crazy idea. "This particular tech guru is a jerk" isn't a great argument against it. Even if the guy is a jerk.

As education author Alfie Kohn has long argued, homework represents a “second shift” for students, and there’s mixed evidence they get much out of it.

I usually try not to argue from cranky old-guy anecdote. But, I've taken around 50 college classes and never learned much of anything from any lecture or discussion except by doing homework. Some of the classes were fun, in the same way an entertaining film is fun, but they didn't leave me with any skills or real insight. I'd probably have learned much more if I spent the lecture time working sample problems instead. Except that I wouldn't have done that if there weren't a professor who would be disappointed in me if I didn't.

I'm tempted to argue the whole reason faculty build big concrete buildings and spend three hours a week dancing around on stage in each class is because that's a reasonably effective way to convince students to work problems and read and write papers, which is where the actual learning happens. I'm okay with being a cheerleader for learning rather than a teacher if it actually works better than anything else. But, looking around for something better seems like a fine idea. The idea that some clergy in 11th century Bologna got it right the first time seems unlikely.
posted by eotvos at 5:11 PM on December 31, 2019 [2 favorites]

(Also, my spouse pointed out that this article is filled with photos of pigeons. I genuinely didn't notice them at all when I read it. I'm not sure what that says about me.)
posted by eotvos at 5:13 PM on December 31, 2019

I'm tempted to argue the whole reason faculty build big concrete buildings

Faculty don’t build buildings, you know. We are victims of a much larger process.
posted by GenjiandProust at 5:59 PM on December 31, 2019 [5 favorites]

I had totally forgotten about Ning. So many community orgs I worked with created elaborate Ning sites while it was free, then just as quickly lost them when it shut down.

Oh, and the hilariously quaint, actually offensive OLPC: what an utter shitbox that was. I have friend whole collects them and enjoys showing off how painfully slow they are.
posted by scruss at 6:50 PM on December 31, 2019

Re: cheating. I gave a tough final exam to my (6th and 8th grade English) students and told them they could take with them one 5"x8" index card on which they had written everything they thought they needed to know for the exam. I gave them most of the last week of school to prepare the cards. They did some inventive miniaturizing and summarizing, and some even used novel organization systems, and everyone pretty much got an A on the exam and everyone learned all the material really well because they were reviewing, condensing, and summarizing the whole term on one piece of paper. Which was the point. I wanted them to learn something.

I really didn't care about the final exam, even though I did have to slog through grading it because we had a deal, the students and I, that they would take a test (sure they were pulling something over on me) and I would earnestly grade it as if they hadn't copied their answers from the index card that was the real final exam.

Yeah, I used Ning and Moodle and Canvas and my SMART board and laptops and I had them create websites and videos and blogs, and they used all the things administration kept buying for us, but I could have taught that course with a lot of pieces of cardboard and a bunch of sticks of charcoal.
posted by Peach at 9:19 PM on December 31, 2019 [11 favorites]

CTRL-F Blackboard

...phew. My job is safe. Ish. For now. Until the one higher-up guy who's a big Moodle fanatic gets it into his head to replace our VLE with his pet system...
posted by Mr. Bad Example at 6:43 AM on January 1, 2020

I'm horrified by how many faculty seem to take the line that students aren't to be trusted/ should be assumed to be cheaters, and thus must be monitored as much as possible.


You won't like this then

http://reddit.com/r/PaperMarket/new/

or these

https://www.chronicle.com/article/The-Shadow-Scholar/125329
https://www.amazon.com/Shadow-Scholar-Living-Helping-College/dp/1608197239
posted by lalochezia at 8:08 PM on January 1, 2020

this article is filled with photos of pigeons.
eotvos, this is a running thing for Audrey. She often criticizes behaviorism, which did a lot of work on pigeons. Free the pigeons - and us - is the idea.
posted by doctornemo at 9:12 AM on January 2, 2020 [1 favorite]

The Horizon Report is absolutely bullshit

I beg to differ.

Partly because I've worked on and with it for more than a decade, and know how it works, although I was never on NMC (or now EDUCAUSE*) staff.

But also because I've lost count of how many people in and adjacent to higher ed told me how useful it was for them in their planning and strategizing. And I've run plenty of workshops and meetings where participants learned and brainstormed based on it. I saw that benefit live and heard back afterwards. Campuses, businesses, and nonprofits invited me to present on Horizon; clearly they thought it was value.

And yeah, I have criticized it for various reasons over time, depending on which report it was**. I disagreed with some of the conclusions (which is unsurprising, given the modified Delphi method use, and since I wasn't a final author on the NMC series). As a futurist, I disliked the lack of reflecting back on previous reports. I wanted a larger focus beyond tech - which, to their credit, they achieved, a point often ignored by critics. NMC refused some criticisms, including mine, but did respond to others. Horizon developed over time.

Horizon from NMC wasn't perfect. In my own work I take several different approaches (trend analysis, scenarios, among others). But really, Horizon was very useful for a lot of folks. Let's see how it changes with EDUCAUSE.

*NMC created and ran Horizon for years, until the organization collapsed. EDUCAUSE then purchased the IP rights to Horizon (higher ed only; K-12 went elsewhere) during the NMC bankruptcy process.
**Horizon was an annual NMC thing, plus special editions for different domains: nations, regions, education segments (libraries, museums, K-12).
posted by doctornemo at 9:22 AM on January 2, 2020 [1 favorite]

I just found this article and am chiming in late because I like her take on Google Reader. I still miss it. I never saw ads or bots or promoted content. Feedly's ok but that's not the point. I value knowing who is writing the content I read.
posted by irisclara at 11:35 AM on January 4, 2020