edtech
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Things I was Wrong About Pt3 – The democratisation of social media
(Remember FriendFeed?) Following on from QR Codes and The Death of the VLE, I offer the third in my potentially never-ending series of Things I Was Wrong About. This one requires more of a serious face. In a week when the richest man in the world is using the global communication platform he purchased to undermine the government in the UK, promote the idea of civil war and push right wing ideology, the very idea of democratisation through social media seems naive and ludicrous. But reader, imagine if you can the heady days of 2007-2010. Web 2.0 is in its heyday and we are considering the concept of digital scholarship…
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Sasquatch hunting in Ed Tech
As a horror reader, cryptids (animals that some people believe exist, but whose existence is disputed) feature a lot in the literature. I mean, who doesn’t find the idea of rampant weird creatures descending on an annoying bunch of privileged American teens appealing? The archetypal cryptid is Sasquatch (Bigfoot), who many people firmly believe exists. I came across a free Audiobook, purporting to examine the evidence impartially (reader, he is not impartial). I came away less convinced of their existence than I did going in, which was pretty low. But of all the cryptids, Sasquatch is the one that makes me think there is maybe 1% chance it actually exists, compared…
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Things I was wrong about: Part 1 QR Codes
As an antidote to the tech gurus pontificating about how they’ve been warning/predicting X for years, I thought I’d consider the things I have been wrong about over the course of my career. The list of all the things I have been wrong about is quite extensive, so I’m limiting it to ed tech here, which still leaves a substantial amount. It’s a more interesting perspective in many ways, why did I think some things would or wouldn’t take off, or they developed in a manner I didn’t predict? Boasting about your failures is not always conducive to developing a successful career, but now I’m of a certain age, it’s…
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Don’t look back in anger (or anything else)
Because I was too busy indulging in self-pity in my last post I forgot to blog about Udacity being acquired by Accenture to build a platform to take advantage of AI, blah, blah. Audrey Watters taking a rare foray back into ed tech to say “I told you so” reminded me to blog something. Audrey says it better, but that’s never stopped me before… There are lots of takeaways from this tale. Here are some that occur to me: Self-Reflection is the real unicorn. Investors like to talk about unicorn companies, but it seems the real unicorn (as in, it doesn’t exist) is any sense of self-reflection or humility in…
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Ed tech indie horror
I’ve been reading some interesting takes on horror recently: the meta-fiction of Native American author Stephen Graham-Jones; the influential feminist analysis of horror exploitation movies Men, Women and Chainsaws by Carol Clover; a personal account of the importance of horror in Kris Rose’s Final Girl: How Horror Movies Made Me a Better Feminist; and The Black Guy Dies First, Robin Means Coleman’s analysis of black representation in horror. And it got me thinking about analogies to ed tech. I know, as usual. First of all, the horror take… It has to be acknowledged up front that horror is often problematic – slasher films centre on the male gaze; women tend…
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The Post Office lessons for ed tech
I expect we’ll see a lot of these types of posts so I apologise in advance for bandwagon jumping. For those outside the UK, there has been a recent TV drama, Mr Bates vs The Post Office, which has dramatised the Post Office scandal, where hundreds of sub postmasters were falsely accused (and convicted) of fraud because of a faulty accounting system that was rolled out in the 00s. The TV series has caused fresh outcry, actions and recriminations, and is probably one of the most important drams made in the last decade or so. Like many people I had vaguely followed the story, but not until the TV series…
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What is the purpose of educational technology?
I don’t mean that title as a rhetorical, smartass, question, but rather a more fundamental one. It’s probably not one we ask ourselves very often, we tend to be caught up in the application of a particular technology, or trying to solve a specific problem. But at the more abstract level, what do you think educational technology is for? When we adopt it, what is the purpose we are intending it to fulfil? I expect the answer will vary depending on technology or context, and not be limited to one function overall. But of you had to answer the question “what is the main purpose of educational technology?” at a…
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July round-up
My “doing it for the newsletter” monthly round-up of activity and random bits for July. It’s been a bit of a disjointed month, because after returning from the Eden conference in Dublin at the end of June, both Maren and I came down with covid (no-one else from the conference seems to have been inflicted so probably an airport/plane thing). It was as rough as the first time around, a reminder that it’s still there and still carries a punch. I made sure to take time off work this time around though – last time I soldiered on attending Teams meetings and I think that meant it lingered around longer…
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Generative AI & the taste of sweet surrender
I’ve attended a lot of AI talks recently (I mean, even if I tried to avoid them I would still have racked up a few). And here’s my hot take for education – just go for it. I don’t say this as an AI enthusiast, I find it quite boring and kind of soul sucking, but shouting loudly and hoping it will go away isn’t a viable strategy. As I argued in my last post, it has a strong inevitability factor, and lack of engagement risks doing ourselves and our students a disservice. That’s not to say we shouldn’t fight to make it open, to avoid bias in datasets, and…
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The inevitability, or otherwise, of ed tech
In Metaphors, I have a chapter about VAR (Video Assisted Refereeing) and Learning Analytics. In it I make the case that VAR got to the point where its implementation in football seemed inevitable. Everyone (fans, pundits, players, not sure about referees) wanted it – mistakes were made by refs, and then analysed in detail in the studio by pundits with access to multiple high definition camera angles. It seemed ludicrous that the ref, who was actually making the decisions, shouldn’t have the same access. I go into some of the problems with the actual implementation in the chapter, but I want to revisit that idea of ‘inevitability’ in this post.…
