Look, I’m glad my university is aware of and responding to the digital divide, but I’d appreciate a more critical treatment of what we’re doing. This sounds almost like ad copy for Apple, and it’s falling into a lot of tired edtech tropes about how technology must necessarily improve learning.

Last year, Daniela DiGiacomo, Sarah Barriage, and I published an article on student and principal perceptions of ClassDojo. Our findings weren’t entirely what we expected, even if they weren’t a huge surprise. In short, students and practitioners don’t always share the concerns about edtech platforms (like ClassDojo) that are gaining steam in the critical educational technology literature. I don’t say this to shame edtech users for not thinking the way that we ivory tower types do—rather, it speaks to a long-recognized tension between theoretical and conceptual concerns held by academics vs. the practical concerns held by those outside the academy.

It’s already indefensible that ClassDojo promises greater access to teachers for parents willing to pay, but these features also translate into letting richer parents put more pressure on teachers. This business model is awful.

I’d like to read the whole report before coming to definitive conclusions but wow, are there some important lessons in here for edtech—not least, that efficacy cannot be our only concern!

Kiddo’s school is contracting with a company called Booster to raise $78,000 for new technology for the school. U.S. schools are, of course, underfunded, and I’m generally in favor of getting more money into their bank accounts. I have a number of concerns about this fundraiser, though, and it’s making me grumpy.

what “technology”?

I have a PhD in educational technology, which means two things in this context. First, I’m very aware of the fundamental—and often useful—role that technology plays in learning, so I’m not opposed to updating the tech in kiddo’s school. Second, and in contrast, I’ve spent a fair amount of time reading critiques of educational technology. Consider this observation from Larry Cuban’s 2003 book Oversold and Underused, which is describing attitudes toward educational technology in the 1990s:

It’s good to ask whether generative AI is good or bad for students, instructors, or education, but it’s arguably more important for ed. stakeholders to ask who else generative AI is good or bad for. Edtech needs to pay more attention to broader contexts.

Student monitoring software is gross to begin with, but monitoring for LGBTQ+ content makes it even grosser. Love it when EFF tackles ed tech.

Heading into finals, campus sent out a message about AI detection tools maybe not being trustworthy, which is great. However, this is in the context of these tools being wrapped into plagiarism detection software we already have access to, so they should say the same about it, too.

Lots of helpful stuff in here.

If ClassDojo can send me “hey, check the new content in ClassDojo” emails, it could also send me that content in the email itself, so that I never have to open the app. Too bad it’s too dedicated to walled gardening.

After bouncing off of it a year or so ago, I recently decided to restart Cory Doctorow’s novel Walkaway (which led NPR reporter Jason Sheehan to describe Doctorow as “Super-weird in the best possible way”). The audiobook is excellent, and since I started a couple of days ago, it’s displaced my podcast listening and given me another chance to wrestle with Doctorow’s ideas here.

There is way too much going on (and I’m not far enough into the book) for me to engage with the underlying message of the novel (or even to be sure of what it is yet), but one passage stood out to me so much this morning that I have to write it down now. Walkaway is too delightfully weird to be able to give an easy explanation of the context here, but the following passage comes from an argument between (one of the many) protagonist(s) Limpopo and antagonist Jackstraw. Jackstraw believes that their “walkaway” community needs to be gamified and leaderboarded to be made more efficient. Limpopo is firmly against that:

The desire to “enhance” or “improve” learning is a noble one, but I’m increasingly convinced it gets too much attention—and distracts us from as (or more) important questions about education and technology.

Canvas: “You can draw conclusions about student participation with our analytics!” Also Canvas: “Mobile page view data aren’t exact, and our analytics only update every 24 hours, so don’t draw too many conclusions, lol.”

My sister-in-law recently gifted me a copy of R. Sikoryak’s weird but wonderful comic Terms and Conditions, which “adapts” the 2015 iTunes terms and conditions into a comic format. I was as delighted by the gift, which I’m sure only contributed to her bewilderment (she knew I wanted the book, but I can’t blame anyone for not understanding why I wanted it).

One of the gags of the comic is, obviously, the idea that a comic adaptation would get you to actually read through the whole document instead of just pretending that you have. The other gag—and one that breaks up the monotony of reading through the document—is that each page is an homage to a famous work of comic art, but with Steve Jobs inserted in the place of one of the characters. My favorite is one that I’ve shared in a previous post about the book, a shout-out to Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns:

Survey respondent mistyped “Infinite Campus” as “Infinite Camus,” and now I’m looking for a French existentialism punchline.

See, as worried as I am about ChatGPT use in education, this actually worries me more, because it’s basically plagiarism detection, which I’m opposed to.

Looking for help from people working in or familiar with ed and ed tech: Do you know anything about an LMS, student information system, or other software called “Reef”? It’s showing up in survey data, but I can’t find anything on it.

Personally, I’m not very optimistic about ChatGPT, and I think OpenAI should have better considered disruptions to fields like education before releasing the tool. That said, I don’t think a ban is the solution here.

Edtech professionals aren’t paying nearly enough attention to this sort of thing.

I see a worrying future for edtech ahead, and I’m not sure the academic discipline is adequately prepared for it.

The Black Friday email I got from ClassDojo today is representative of everything wrong with the ed tech industry.

Josh is doing important work here—the kind of work that edtech researchers often don’t consider as being in their purview. Glad to see this getting coverage.

See, I get the impression that it’s increasingly district, school, and legislative priorities that are driving tech choices. I agree that teachers ought to have the agency, but I don’t know that’s the case.

Really important story here, and glad to see George Veletsianos quoted. I’ve long been an advocate for developing assessments that are impossible to cheat at, but I don’t know if that’s the entire (or even a practical) response to GPT-3. We are continuing to develop technologies whose societal effects we are not prepares for.

I hate that there’s a need for articles like this, but I’m glad WIRED is putting them together.