Hack Education: 'Luddite Sensibilities' and the Future of Education
This is the transcript of my keynote at the Digital Pedagogy Lab this morning. Except not really. It was a "flipped" keynote, so this is more like the pre-reading for what I actually talked about. Sort of.
I have really struggled to prepare a keynote for you all. This isn't the first talk I've done since my son died. Hell, it's not even the second or third. But this one has been the hardest to write, in part because I am so close with so many of you in the DigPed community, and what I want right now is to be with you, in person, to cry with you and laugh with you and rage with you and scheme with you.
I know that we're all struggling to muddle through this crisis — or these crises, I should say: the pandemic, economic precarity, school re-opening, police violence, creeping authoritarianism. So much loss. So much death. And I know that it's probably for the best that we use digital technologies in lieu of gathering face-to-face — for school or for work or for professional development or for socializing. Plenty of folks insist that these digital tools can be used well for teaching and learning, that online education doesn't have to be inferior to offline, that offline can be pretty wretched already. (Indeed, that's likely why you all are here: to work on bettering your digital pedagogical practices with an eye to equity and justice.)
But I remain steadfast in my criticism of education technologies in almost all their forms and functions. Indeed, the problems that we've long identified with ed-tech — privacy violations, security concerns, racist algorithms, accessibility and access issues, all-male leadership teams, outsourcing, disruptive bullshittery, and so on — are still here. And I fear we are at a particularly dangerous crossroads for education because of ed-tech. The danger is not simply because of the entrepreneurial and the venture capitalist sharks circling our institutions, but also because the narratives, long foisted upon us, about the necessity of ed-tech are becoming more and more entrenched, more and more pervasive. These narratives have always tended to repress the trauma and anxiety associated with the adoption of new technologies and more broadly with the conditions, the precarity, of everyday life. These narratives want us to forget that ed-tech is, first and foremost, beholden to the ideologies of machines, efficiencies, and capitalism.
But this is ed-tech's big moment, or so we're told. And all those folks who predicted a decade or so ago that schools would all be online by 2020, that universities would all be bankrupt may CONTINUE READING: Hack Education: 'Luddite Sensibilities' and the Future of Education | National Education Policy Center