We need more forgetful educational technologies. The default mode is always record and preserve first, deal with data issues after that. Privacy policies are not sufficient. We need intentional forgetting in edtech. Here's why.

Do students know or care that technology is always watching?

This past year many of us have been participants in a grand experiment in surveillance, conducting classes on video meeting platforms like Zoom or Teams or Meet and, for good and noble reasons, recording those videos. I have myself recorded all my classes, both online and face to face, going back at least 2 years and then in more piecemeal fashion before that. My main use case was about accessibility, as a way to allow students who needed extra help with note-taking access the class for longer and without having to struggle with their note-taking during class sessions. Video technologies have put in our face questions about data retention and student visibility in online platforms that have been there for a long time. There was, for example, vigorous debate in the pedagogical twitterverse (and elsewhere) about whether students should be required to have their cameras on during online class sessions. It is a defining feature — indeed, a selling feature — of most major edtech products, from LMS to single-purpose tool, that such tools can provide analytics about students. Trends change quickly with tech and, by extension, in edtech. In the space of five years it feels like my students have gone from being completely unaware about the amount of data collected by learning platforms to being moderately aware that their logins are tracked, their reading behavior in online “textbooks” is recorded, their actions in any tool are cataloged and analyzed; in most cases, it didn't seem to faze them. I had been concerned by that, but then the switch to video impacted them more acutely, in that they could feel being watched in real time. In certain ways it was like the ubiquitous passive surveillance was finally visible to them.

Many still didn't care and took it for granted. This reaction concerns me.

Video is in many ways easier to control and be intentional about. We get immediate feedback that we are being watched and it feels like we can address issues more immediately. Turn off the camera. Log in or log out and you're there or not. Things like an LMS or various online textbook platforms are more subtle. I have at various points shown students the kind of data that teachers see about login, page views, and the like in the major LMS platforms. When they are surprised by this, there tends to be a bit of a surprise that I might look at data like that or use that to expose in particular students who have, for example, not logged in to the course recently. I tend to think most of these “analytics” fall in the category of junk statistics. There's some benefit to the big numbers — i.e. students who log in rarely and never or, conversely, those who are spending hours logged on and looking at pages over and over. But that comes through pretty clearly in other areas of their course performance.

So what function do these metrics really serve? Cynically I might say that they are all marketing. It's something that can be sold as a form of “insight” into student behavior. It's a way to claim “engagement.” Hey look, you have all this visibility into what students are doing in online courses. And, sure, there can be ways that you can use that to understand certain trends, e.g. when students tend to complete assignments, how many submit stuff late and so forth. That's all well and good.

But is that benefit worth the effect of having students always being watched? It's not surveillance of the sort that has caused outrage about spying, as with various remote proctoring services. It's just login data. It seems somehow more innocuous. Or, one might argue, it's just the same stuff that happens with an Amazon Kindle or some other commercial product.

I am thinking more and more that those seemingly innocuous bits of data retention are a major problem in edtech. It is the ubiquitous surveillance that we take for granted and is even sold as a benefit of edtech products (“analytics”, “insights”, etc.) But the utility of such surveillance remains unproven while their cost is too often underappreciated. Surveillance, even passive surveillance in the form of metrics and logs and “insights”, realigns power relationships in teaching and makes the process of learning dependent upon observation rather than dialogue and mutual meaning-making.

Thus my question: What would a forgetful edtech look like? What would it look like if you could reset things every day, or every week or every so often, if forgetting were built into technology for learning? Would it even be possible to build such a thing in our current commercial landscape? (Preview on the last question: I suspect not.)

The Forgetful Classroom

Educational technology demands that we think of classrooms as spaces for remembering and forgetting in a way that I suspect we wouldn't have even 10 or 15 years ago.

Imagine for a second that your classroom or lecture hall has cameras not just on you but on every student, all the time, recording, for some future and as yet unknown use, that you are in there and even when you're not. What would you make of that system? Would it seem like a good? Would you want to turn it off? Would you change your behavior and, more importantly, would students change theirs?

(It is true that at various points this ubiquitous use of video has been something that educational theorists and futurists have imagined as a positive. It's a staple of sci-fi to see automated learning that looks like some sort of AI-interactive surveillance system.)

There is, in the physical space, a rhythm and pattern of remembering and forgetting which not only does not translate to digital space but is radically distorted by working in digital space. In situations where you have the same classroom and it isn't shared by others, there's a way in which you can reset that space each day, while keeping reminders of what has been done in the past, visible markers of the previous day and weeks of assignments. In other scenarios, with shared space or in the higher-ed situation where typically you visit a classroom space only a few times each week, there is something of a reset each time.

There are a number of benefits to this pedagogical clean slate and stability, to the fact that your basic surroundings are the same. By contrast, in an online course built into an LMS for example, we might say that the interface is stable in a similar way. But there's a difference in terms of how we are tracked. Physical space doesn't record the traces of your behavior for a third party to dissect. It is not, fundamentally, a space of surveillance.

By contrast, anything online is, by default and by nature, a place of potential surveillance. It is built into the technology. It is the economic model for Big Tech. How can those values help but be baked into educational experiences built on those technologies?

What if, by default, all student interaction on a platform wasn't logged? What if notifications were not the default, if constant automation were not the default? What if you just arrived at a menu and decided what to open up from there. Would that be so bad?

Further, what if everything was opt-in, where you have to trigger a specific action in order to things. There is no passive anything. Nothing happens that a human doesn't trigger intentionally.

We take for granted that educational technologies track our students and, to a certain extent, teachers and anyone who interacts with the system. There are good technical and security reasons to log events and actions in computer systems; however, that paradigm doesn't have to apply at the level that is closest to users. Forgetful behaviors could be built into software. – It would, in my mind, be a great value, to be able to say to students that this platform retains your information for the duration of the class, while we are working, but then it is archived for a brief period and deleted. A clear life cycle for everyone's data goes beyond a simple privacy statement (which is about use and abuse and sharing of data) and foregrounds the pedagogical purpose to which the data is being used. – Default behavior which requires students to commit their data or information to the system rather than passively tracking anything they do. At the user level, the UX is completely about intentional actions, never about passive surveillance. – Drafts by default. In a typical system like an LMS, student actions on the platform are immediate. You submit an assignment — that's the main action. Drafting capabilities lie entirely with teachers. It is a non-trivial technical change but a significant ideological change to make educational platforms places which are about drafts of things. Tools like google docs or others work well in part because of that killer feature of auto-save. As much as that violates my idea about intentionality, I recognize that there is power in the way that that turns everything into a working draft, because it is changeable and editable most times If it were the case that such a tool also forgot about your data at the end and wasn't doing all manner of other unknown things with it along the way, then it would fit the bill (but of course, it's the big G, so they are most certainly taking your data for all sorts of purposes, if not right now, then down the road.)

I suspect their are more, perhaps forms of self-destructing data or other kinds of encryption that allow for more robust privacy. A more extreme example would allow users control of their data through decentralization or federation.

We need to imagine a more forgetful kind of edtech because the alternative is one that continues to walk in lock-step with the world of big tech, where even well-meaning initiatives by the major platforms are still built upon the assumptions that the monetary value of people is in the data that they provide. That is inherent to the platform and the business model of companies like Facebook and Google in toto and many others in significant degrees. (On this last point, I highly recommend reading anything by Jaron Lanier, and especially 10 Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now.)

In pedagogical terms, it is an important lesson from the field of memory studies that meaning requires forgetting. The rare individuals who have excessive and near perfect memory (classically, S. in Luria's Mind of a Mnemonist) are crippled in certain ways precisely because of their inability to forget. To understand in the present we must often forget parts of the past. Growth requires both retaining and leaving behind details. It is as true of personal memory as it is of collective memory. Where technologies seem to provide absolute memory, they are in fact failing us as media for making meaning.

Recently in the news: Florida's legislature approves and to some extent encourages students to spy on their teachers in higher ed; conversely, student surveillance company Proctorio continues its ill-advised lawsuit against its critics. These are very different examples, but all part of the continuum of creeping classroom surveillance. It is a bad trend. Learning requires the freedom to make mistakes and room to experiment, support for growth and the messiness that is education. The expectation and acceptance of surveillance, face to face or online through technology, runs counter to those values.

Memory isn't the same thing as privacy

Discussions about edtech surveillance and data logging (and for data retention in most tech platforms generally) are often framed as issues of privacy. Data privacy policies must indicate and spell out how data will be used and for what purposes. While it is true that data retention is a part of that kind of data policy language, these policies are much more about making clear commercial and non-commercial uses of data, a legal butt-covering to make sure that possible use cases have been enumerated should anyone find out at a later date that their particular data has been used in some way that has not been cataloged in the privacy policy.

The more robust policies of the GDPR are something I wish would gain traction in the U.S., but even those guidelines and principles are of a different sort than what I am describing here. (The policies around retaining minimal data necessary are all hugely important steps in the right direction.) But educational technologies requires not simply privacy practices (e.g. FERPA) but best practices around inentional forgetting. We do a disservice to students to have only flimsy and piecemeal protections against their younger selves, their learning selves, leaving behind lasting traces that they don't have control over. That is not a problem only for their future, when they might be embarrassed by something they said on video when younger or when novices. That is a problem of the here and now, because knowing that you leave lasting traces, that you are being recorded changes behaviors.

It's easy to think of things like anonymity or forgetting as negatives, to imagine that we are losing something, taking away something that should otherwise be preserved. And in our present moment where wearable technologies and the quantified self are sold as an obvious good and inevitable direction of health tech, it's easy to think that tracking is inevitable. (Side note: measuring the value of self-quantification is complicated.) I don't think it is inevitable that tracking is the norm forever, particularly, especially if we can articulate alternatives that provide other kinds of value beyond what the marketers and big tech companies want to extract as user data that feeds back into their platforms.

Paradoxically, forgetting is often the most important mechanism for making things meaningful, not just because you know that something must exist in a particular moment, but because you know that the arena for it that matters most is in your own memory, not offloaded onto the computer system. When I think of a forgetful kind of edtech, I think mostly about how forgetting might help create more meaningful experiences with technology. That might involve some combination of temporary anonymization, rolling windows of auto-deleting records, scrubbing information as early as possible. It's paradoxical because computing is, by nature, about storing bits and bytes and then doing something with those stored bits and bytes — it is all built on the mechanics of recording data. So thinking about forgetful edtech, or forgetful computing is an interesting problem. But the field of “intentional forgetting” is an important area of study (see, e.g. http://www.spp1921.de/index.html for the Intentional Forgetting in Organizations projects) and one which may have benefits for education. Many of the insights gleaned from outside education may have larger impacts if implemented for students, providing a direct counterpoint to the seemingly inevitable trend towards educational technologies that record everything, while at the same time opening the way to new, more meaningful educational experiences.

Postscript: This is a first attempt to think through this topic, but there is a lot more to say, particularly in light of the growing literature on intentional forgetting (which I have not referred to much in the above). More coming...

#minimalism #lessismore #edtech #edtechminimalism #minimalistedtech

This recent piece about the psychological reasons why it might be hard to think of solutions in terms of subtracting something rather than adding features hit home with me. (Of course it did: less is more and all that...) I am particularly fond of their “No-bell”:

Every time we subtract an activity that is not helping us create or share knowledge, we ring the bell and celebrate the No-Bell Prize. Quit a dead-end research project? Ding! Cancel a time-suck meeting? Ding! One way to get more meaningful work done is to add work hours. A better way is to subtract tedious time-fillers.

I could have annoyed my office neighbors with that quite a bit; probably every time I deleted an email from on high. That seems a bit extreme as an action, but I do appreciate the idea of turning subtraction into a reward and celebrating the idea of less.

Immediately I was reminded of the old advice about writing and public speaking. You make your last step removing something and almost always the whole thing is better for it. In the case of lectures and academic talks, this is a great technique both because it means that you will feel more relaxed about bringing the talk in on time but also because in any question or answer session you usually have at least one answer (on the stuff you cut out) in the bag. In fact, because you cut it out and it likely had a natural place in what you were saying, it is very likely that someone will ask you about it, so you've even done the work, simply by removing it from your prepared remarks, of making it likely that someone will ask you about it.

Applied to teaching and technology, I found myself thinking less about avoiding the tedious time sucks (though those do, in fact, suck) and more about feature creep in a lot of edtech. Or, put differently, about how often it is that technology offers “solutions” to problems that can be solved or alleviated by subtracting something rather than adding a new tool or feature to a tool. I get this vibe all the time from “AI” marketing copy around edtech and too often from tools that seem to be suffering from feature creep or mission creep over the years (looking at you Tophat). It is endemic in LMS-es and their integrations, where I often have to ask myself whether what they're selling could be done with a simple document or video rather than a platform or piece of software. It is advice I would give to students when using tools too — not least of all when they want to do PowerPoint presentations and refuse to heed the advice about less text, more message.

More often though, it is habits around use that drive the “more”; there isn't always a feature that is the culprit.

The easiest example of this recently is with Zoom and its overuse this past year. How many meetings, particularly one on one, might be better with a simple phone call, removing the video and just sticking to the voice? Or how often is it helpful to remove one thing that you think you have to do online and put it in a simpler form. I think often about the simplicity of early Khan Academy videos. They could be effective with a piece of paper and a good explanation. You don't always need a digital whiteboard or an online tool when you can use paper, pencil, and conversation.

More specifically though, the process of subtraction seems something that could be a regular part of the toolkit for working with any educational technology. Sort of a line item in the process, where you stop and ask, ok, what could I remove to make this work better? It's the kind of exercise that contains within it the seeds of critical process. It forces a question: is this thing that I'm doing valuable?

More often than not, I find that the payoff for this sort of subtraction exercise isn't just in what is removed. It often helps reveal a better way forward through a clear-headed assessment of what you are doing out of inertia and obligation vs. what is of practical value. So, for example, a process like this had me rethink a lot of the way I gave comments on student writing. I found myself wasting a lot of time writing or recording via audio comments that students would never see. (I know they didn't see them because the edtech tool in this case tracked whether or not students have looked at the comments. Over the years it has been clear that only about 50% of students read comments, even when doing so is required for editing and revising.) So I started by removing that process, removing the tracking, forgetting about that whole way of doing things. Once all that was subtracted, then I could think through leaner ways of giving feedback that would be immediate and actionable and, crucially, unavoidable, for students while not feeling like I was wasting all my time and labor. The direction I went in is less relevant to subtraction, but it was essentially to replace technology with individual meetings, at a massive scale; though that might sound more involved, it was in fact less stuff going on, less hours, and less work for greater benefit and better outcomes. It was also, incredibly old-fashioned and non-technological.

I appreciated this article because it gave some context for why it is so hard to think in terms of subtracting as a path to solving problems. We have to force ourselves to think that way, to think through doing more through doing less. (And, to be fair, it's not a solution in all situations. Sometimes more is more.)

#minimalistedtech #edtech #edtechminimalism

I started writing this blog, about 6+ months ago, when I was headed in a professional direction that was a bit different than it is now. Let's say that my worldview was a bit more open source-ish and not particularly commercial or profit-minded. Since then I've moved into greater contact with the business of edtech, so to speak. One useful feature of writing in the current format and under the current heading of “minimalist” edtech is that it's given me a chance to think through the tension between my teacher brain, which tends to want to serve students and teachers, and the reality of various edtech business models and trends. I don't mean to imply that edtech companies are bad actors in relation to some sort of pedagogical purity that only teachers possess; it's not that at all. But there is a tension there, a difference in what stakeholders may value or may find compelling.

More specifically, if asked, “what's the value prop for x edtech product or y technology”, how far apart would teacher brain and business brain be?

A good analogue here is with RSS feeds. (And here I am picking up on this post by Kevin Drum.) There was a time, in the not distant past, where a whole lot of people consumed blogs via RSS. RSS is a venerable and useful system. (It is also a fairly minimalist kind of thing as well, giving you content without all the garbage bloating a webpage.) As a technology, it does a great job of getting content to you quickly. RSS readers were a great way for individuals to consume what they wanted to consume. (And, they still are, for content that is still available easily that way.) BUT, here's the problem, in Drum's words:

There's no way to monetize it, and it cannibalizes users away from platforms that want to be your sole hub for news aggregation. Google wanted its users on Google+, or at the very least finding the news via search, which generated ad revenue. Facebook wanted you to read a news feed full of ads within their walled garden. And Twitter wanted to be the place where news broke first—but only if you were actually on Twitter.

In other words, RSS was a threat to practically every platform that aggregates news since it allowed users to decide for themselves what news they wanted to see—and to see it without passing through a gatekeeper. The best way to eliminate this threat was to eliminate or reduce support for RSS, as Google, Facebook, and Twitter have all done.

I think about this in relation to edtech and it seems like we're in something of the same essential conundrum. It's not so obvious or simple perhaps, but it is this same tension between technologies that simply get a job done vs. technologies that allow some form of monetization or, equally important, locate control in ways that administrators or others can manage. Reducing support for RSS is a choice that big tech companies made about how to monetize content for maximum profit. So too a lot of the systems that we take for granted or as inevitable in edtech are designed for a certain kind of lock-in and perpetuation. (obvious, yes.) Again, I would emphasize that this isn't to imply a value judgement. Rather, how much are we as teachers aware of these kinds of choices that go into what gets funded in edtech development or in what gets made a certain way?

One of my constant targets of criticism are edtech marketers. I find it gently insulting to get marketing copy from edtech companies that claims to improve “engagement” or the like. Really? Are you saying I'm not an engaging teacher? Are you talking to me like I haven't been doing this for decades? When your twenty-something sales rep gets on the phone and starts walking me through this souped up social media garbage product, do you really think I'm going to listen to that (perfectly well-intentioned and blameless) young person who as far as I can tell knows nothing about the practice of education? ... Too much caffeine this morning. Sorry, got a little animated there. I'll collect myself before continuing.

[pause]

I suspect that most teachers don't take a look at market trends in edtech all that often. But we should, because it's not the case that administrators are making decisions on whims or passing fancy. There is of course a lot of money involved and that shapes much that we see most often at a more granular level in the classroom or in specific technologies. But the big picture is illuminating. HolonIQ is a go-to research shop for this and I highly recommend checking out their newsletters, at a minimum: https://www.holoniq.com/newsletter/

One area where I find this kind of research particularly revealing is in the way it characterizes trends into the future. So, for example, LMS-es are, generally speaking, imagined to continue gobbling up other companies as neeed and growing, much like the tech sector in general. That has some important repurcussions. Being an LMS critic as I am, I wonder why in the world we're stuck with this garbage that feels always like a glorified database interface hooked up to a file system built for the sole purpose of centralizing my content for someone else so that I don't have control over it. Oh, and LMS-es are also slow and bloated and badly designed and with crappy inflexible gradebooks and the like. And they smell bad. (apparently I've had far too much caffeine this morning...)

But put the criticism aside for a minute. That's a hard space in which to imagine competitiors to the LMS. Or perhaps, have the competitors been there all along? It's just not much of a product: the LMS alternative has been, for some time, abstention. It's all the teachers who opt-out and use the LMS as little as possible (at least until this past year, when many were forced to make more use of it.) Teachers don't have options, in part because the market forces at work are still those lingering from the 1990s, when centralizing systems and aggregating gatekeepers for a university-branded thing seemed like the way to go, at least to the people in charge of building such systems and making such choices. I am simplifying grossly, but my point here is that there are of course always tensions between various stakeholders. For education this is particularly complex, as the stakeholders range from all the people involved in building something to the admins, teachers, students, instructional designers, IT staff, 3rd party content developers, from big companies to small initatives in many cases. My teacher brain likes to imagine that from critique of edtech at a very individual level can emerge something better. But zooming out, at the level at which HolonIQ conducts its research and shows the trends that drive the business of edtech, I get all sorts of David v. Goliath vibes.

In the language of business, what is the value prop for a given edtech product? For a teacher, the value is often pedagogical, but also about things like ease of use, reallocating time by making certain tasks easier perhaps. It could be that edtech is fun or interesting or helps you think differently. Or it can help deliver content or make content accessible. Those are all teacher facing values — and I'm sure that list could go on for a long time. But the companies making this stuff do seem to have a different incentive system they labor under. (I am not blaming them for this. It is a structural issue, about rewards and constraints and what is in one's face in a particular role.) For a company making an edtech product, the value prop is about growth, money, profit. That only make sense, as there's no product if you can't sell it or make some money off it. There's no funding unless you can convince a VC that you'll generate a return on their investment. Ideally the road to profit and growth means building something that all the education stakeholders (teachers, students, admins, etc.) value. But in a landscape where — and here I'm drawing on HolonIQ — education is an under-technologized and under-funded industry relative to other industries, it would seem that teachers' or students' interests need only serve as pretext to the flood of money that is desperate to make further inroads into the education industry.

Which brings me finally back to minimalism. I value minimalism in teaching quite a lot, for reasons laid out across many of these posts. Ultimately though that needs to translate to a value prop that makes sense to companies or entrepreneurs in monetary terms. It has to be more profitable to make something that is minimalist in its design. I think this can be done but I don't think this is where most (if any) edtech ventures are right now. The trend is for more — more integrations to LMS-es, more products, more features, more online. Maybe I'm wrong. In fact, I would like to be very wrong about this. For now I'm stuck in a mode which too conveniently makes the idea of a more minimalist edtech gravitate towards an open source or at-the-margins kind of development; it's hard to see past a sort of dichotomy which feels non-profit vs. for-profit.

I'm not particularly happy about that. Can the value prop (in economic terms) for a more minimalist edtech work? Can a minimalist edtech be about growth and profit at the same time as it builds on teacher and student centered values?

Such are the thoughts floating around this morning. More coffee is needed. :coffee:

#introversion #introverted #minimalistedtech #edtechminimalism #zoom #edtech

In a physical classroom, some students are shouters, others are reserved, and all gradations in between. As teachers, we respond to that difference and the uniqueness of students in a variety of ways, ideally such that everyone has a voice and can join into the whole in a way that feels both comfortable and authentic.

Technology encodes values and edtech is no different. In too many ways, edtech today tends to encode and promote the particular ideals of extroversion, demanding that students act publicly, visibly, and loudly, as if this is the only way of doing things in the world.

As Susan Cain describes so well in her book Quiet, extroversion is an ideal in American life especially; it is inescapable at work or in popular culture. While there is plenty of work on teaching different kinds of students, there is not nearly enough attention and critical questioning of the way that educational technologies default to the extrovert ideal and pass that on to students. To take just a few examples to start:

1. Discussion boards: A staple of online education, it is pretty common for teachers to proscribe a set amount of posts and subsequent responses in order to get credit on discussion boards. Tools like packback and ment.io, both simply souped-up disussion boards, double down on all the bad features of social media (upvoting, junk analytics, constant rewarding of attention). Packback even has a “curiosity” score that is little more than a measure of optimal length for an assignment. Apparently if you write more (to a point) you are rewarded.
2. Scoreboards and Leaderboards: I'm actually a pretty big fan of kahoot and some other tools like it. I particularly appreciate that it can be used in a semi-anonymous way with pseudonyms. That said, gamefication in these forms does often result in a very public display of winners or top scorers or the like. My point here is not that this is a bad thing; in fact, I think gamefication in general can be highly effective and is one area where edtech often does pretty well. But it is still, strictly speaking, something which is by nature performative and encoding certain values of extroversion. (As an interesting point of contrast, note how the developers of the very cool app Sift used limited gamefication for mental health and calm in their design, rejecting leaderboards and the like: https://medium.all-turtles.com/startup-playbook-designing-a-product-e102a5546e25)
3. Zoom: This past year in the zoomified classroom has brought to the fore a particular problem with doing classes where everyone is appearing on screen. It is difficult for everyone to have to watch themselves, zoom fatigue is real, but there are a variety of reasons why this can be even more challenging for introverts. That everyone can feel zoom fatigue is, I think, an indicator of just how much that particular tool of video chat encodes an extreme form of the extrovert ideal. It's an always on, always visible, always ready to speak loudly and clearly and interrupt kind of technology. That said, one of the interesting features of Zoom class in practice has been, at times, a mitigation of differences, precisely because everyone is in the same situation.
4. Counting views, likes, upvotes, etc.: This is a feature of discussion boards but also tools like Flipgrid (again, one that I rather like and use frequently). Many edtech tools have become laden with the apparatus of social media. I suspect their creators and promoters think this is a good thing, that they are meeting the kids where they are and doing things in a way that speaks to young people. But as so much research increasingly shows, the negative consequences of social media are fairly severe. No small measure of that is because of the constant mechanisms of approval-seeking that are the bread and butter of social media. Encoding them in educational technologies is a terrible trend, albeit one that has been around for a bit now. Using views or likes or upvotes or peer feedback of that simple sort is simply a way of reinforcing the extrovert ideal in its worst form — not only that you must be constantly performing, but also that your performance must be approved by the jury of your peers. (There are many entry points into critique of social media. For one from just this week, see https://hedgehogreview.com/blog/thr/posts/opinion-fetishism; then make sure to read Jaron Lanier's Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now). Edtech built to emulate social media is fruit from a poisoned tree. More importantly, we should remember that upvotes, likes, and all the other mechanisms of social media are design choices, usually aimed at tweaking algorithms, not inevitabilities and not necessarily choices with any human interests as a goal.

Perhaps you can think of other examples in your own experience. It is by no means cut and dry and much depends on how a tool is used. But there is something about the nature of online tools, requiring constant visible expression, leaving constant digital traces on a platform, that reinforces in particular the public, constantly social nature of the extrovert ideal. Edtech marketing terms like “engagement”, though ostensibly a positive goal, twist the solid pedagogical principle of active learning into the mold of the extrovert ideal when baked in to technology. My favorite example of this is of course the rise of eye tracking and other surveillance abominations as part of platforms from the extreme cases of Proctorio to the seemingly more benign Class for Zoom. Looking at the camera counts as “engagement”; but we can recognize that that is true only in some faux extrovert sense, the same way that constantly speaking or posting a lot or being loud on twitter constitutes engagement. If you prefer to look away, or to do your thinking in quiet and speak once but with impact after a period of reflection, all of that is not picked up as being “engaged” or active to today's edtech.

Edtech can't recognize quiet. That's a technological failure and not a pedagogical model. Teachers can recognize the work of quiet or sensitive students. And while I think there's still probably too much of “drawing out” sensitive or shy students as some sort of ideal, the differentiation that happens in the classroom is rarely if ever built into educational technology. Quite the opposite: educational technologies double down on the extrovert ideal, demanding that students be vocal and public and constantly performative.

What would edtech for introverts look like? And how would it work? Is it out there already?

#minimalistedtech #edtechminimalism

I was working with someone else's computer code the other day. It was good code: clean, lean, and efficient. At the same time, because of the combination of a particular language (in this case typescript) with particular methods and clear logic, it was highly legible code. It was easy to parse and grasp what was going on.

This is common with computer code, that some languages are more easily legible than others, and would be even to developers without much experience in that specific language, or that some code has cleaner logic than other code. But it got me thinking about how this translates to the manifestations of code that we see in things like educational technologies. Not so much the question of whether code legibility translates, but rather, what might “legibility” mean in terms of interacting with edtech. Are some technologies more legible than others? Do some require you to be an expert or work with them multiple times over before you can figure out what the logic and structure is? Is legibility ever a value that is promoted in edtech?

I thought immediately of kahoot, in part because its use and its game-play, from both teacher and student perspectives, seems immediately legible. You don't need a manual to understand how this thing works. Despite the fact that the building interface can sometimes be a little busy (emphasizing a little), the functionality seems readily graspable. It strikes me as a highly legible sort of edtech.

On other hand, something like an LMS [insert most major LMS-es here] tends towards the barely legible, if only because the number of options and integrations makes the task of sorting through what is what something of a chore. You need to have a little bit of knowledge to know how exactly Assignments different from Modules and where to put in Rubrics, for example, in Canvas. You need a specialized vocabulary of sorts. And to use most gradebooks effectively you probably need at least a primer on idiosyncrasies. It's not obvious how to best use events or calendars in Schoology (to take one more example) and so some people put assignments for the day they're due, others for the day before or not on the calendar at all. LMS-es are of course a more complex sort of product, doing multiple things at once. That's their pitch for their value, as integrators and “management” platforms.

But what if they have become functionally illegible? I often grow annoyed with inordinate amounts of required clicking or so much busy-ness in software that it seems to be yelling at you. I wonder now whether what connects those various disgruntlements is a nagging sense that these technologies have slipped into a kind of illegibility. It's like looking at messy code. I can understand it, with a minor amount of effort; but it feels not quite right.

This past year has seen huge numbers of teachers engage with certain technologies on a near daily basis in ways that they may not have before. That engagement varies by level and context, but many teachers in higher ed in particular were compelled to use LMS-es where they had minimized their use before, or video chat where they would never have thought to do so in the past. Legibility helps explain in part why certain technologies worked better than others , for example why, even with lots of drawbacks and problems, something like Zoom might be readily adopted. It is a very legible product, even in comparison to its near competitors. Even more so, Class for Zoom is an immediately legible product, both to teachers and, as evidenced by the money going to that venture, it's immediately legible to investors

Those examples raise another take on that legibility too. A legible technology may be legible in part because it reinforces some idealized notions of the classroom, (for example, that professors are at the front and there's a hierarchy of TAs and then students.) In the case of Class for Zoom, it reads as a conventional sort of classroom, with things in their proper places (vs. vanilla Zoom, where there are only two options, both forms of a more professional meeting among a small number of equals or co-worker where all that matters is who has the floor to speak.) In that sense, legibility can be desirable but also a hint that perhaps something is legible because it is conventional.

In that sense, if legibility is a marker of conventionality and fidelity to what already exists, then perhaps legibility is not as clear cut a marker of quality as I might have thought.

A frequent pain point with technology in the classroom, for me at least, is not being able to see clearly what students see when they use an edtech tool. It's fairly standard that there is a teacher or control interface and then a student interface. Where I might, if I were in control of a server or most other services, be able to create/manipulate/pose as a user of another type, that functionality to masquerade as a student seems always curtailed and limited in edtech products.

There are technical reasons why there are two views and often two divergent interfaces, but I wonder how much of this is driven by design assumptions as well and, more crucially, how much those design assumptions from outside the classroom are at odds with good pedagogical practices. Whether it is in exposing a minimal amount of control directly to teachers or in the seemingly innocuous (but actually quite mistaken and problematic) assumption that students need a different user experience than teachers, the dichotomy between what teachers see and what students causes all manner of grief.

Those griefs might include not being able to see at a glance that something is missing in the student view (e.g. in Canvas, when a module hasn't been published even though all the assignments have nice green checks next to them; hence students can't work on the module). Or it might be when some element of a page renders for me but doesn't render for them. Sometimes it's the way the grade displays, as when my view puts a clear letter grade but theirs displays numbers first even though I set the damn thing to do it the other way. And don't even get started on what does or doesn't show up in calendars or through LTI integrations and 3rd party apps plugged into an LMS.

Again, there are technical reasons for the dichotomized view of a class through the lens of educational technologies. Nothing is perfect and labor is involved in making all these things work. But in the case of student view vs. teacher view, there's a set of design assumptions and value judgements too. Consider, by contrast, something like googledocs (or etherpad or hedgedocs or draftin — any sort of collaborative writing platform). One of the killer features of those tools is that you can work in real time and, crucially, see more or less the same thing. It feels like you are in a common space, a shared space for the most part where we are all having the same conversation. (Sidenote: there are of course features which fragment the common experience as well, e.g. individual chats that people might have in that platform.) In a classroom, the typical use case of presentation software or the like still revolves around something like a shared experience. Yes, the teacher might have notes in the slides and see a different set of things surrounding the slides, but knowing what students are seeing is both in my control and fairly clear as an instructor.

I think that I tend to like educational technology in direct proportion to the distance between student view and teacher view. That is, the easier it is to see a shared space, where what I can clearly visualize both what students see and maybe a little more that I need to see, the easier it is to use that technology effectively. The more divergence between the student view and the teacher view, the more I get uneasy, feeling like control rests in the software and in systems that are not entirely manageable. Even when it is possible to set up or use a 'test student' account, I am often surprised to see behaviors on the student side that were not predictable from the teacher side.

My biggest pet peeve are the various automatic grade calculations which you have to hunt through menus to turn off and kill, but it happens on most platforms that students will bring me their view of something and it invariably looks very different. Submission buttons that for me are at the bottom are now at the top. What I see first and sorted is now sorted differently for them. Selections possible on my side are not possible on theirs, and so forth.

This is before we get to the case of phone apps. Again, I recognize the technical problem here, having to serve multiple platforms and devices. There are important issues of accessibility that need to be addressed in design as well. This is not a simple problem.

But we can't have better edtech if the starting assumption is that student and teacher views are naturally divergent. Or that it just makes sense, by default, to have a sort of teacher control panel and then something that feeds out to students. This strikes me as a constant misreading of the classroom. Cynically and aggressively I might characterize it as a way that non-teachers, marketers or others who have only ever experienced a classroom as a student might remember the classroom: an intensely hierarchical space where what the teacher does is a form of control: mysterious, opaque, and wholly cut off from what students see. More charitably, I think there is some of the value system of admin/user being transposed from tech architecture, without much filter, to a classroom space.

But classrooms, in all their diversity, are shared spaces. Edtech that works against this ethic is edtech that cuts against the grain of good pedagogy.

I would really like to see more edtech that works or aims for a principle of a single space. This seems missing, as an orientation and philosophy of pedagogy baked into educational tech. There are some hints here and there, spurred in particular by the past year or so (e.g. some design choices in Class for Zoom seem to react against Zoom's inherent fracturing of views by reasserting a “classroom”-y format which resizes teacher, TAs, and students in some sort of hierarchy.) But there should be more awareness of this, and more clarity about why it is needed.

What to do in the meantime? Perhaps the easiest thing, where possible, is to seek out tools that right now do a better job of providing a single space for working together. Maybe it's just a preference for tools that don't make a huge distinction between a sort of teacher/administrator view and a user/student view. Most of that will be software built around the idea of teams or collaboration generally. File sharing, collaborative editing, wikis, and the like — I suppose that's all fairly old school (i.e. more than 5 years old) at the present time.

And maybe some awareness of these design choices can help. If it is nagging you why this tool feels “right” and something else just doesn't click, is it because of that distance between what you see and what the students experience? Have you entered different worlds of user experience and are you, in some sense, working in a separate classroom from your students?

#minimalistedtech #edtechminimalism #teacherrant

The case against surveillance edtech like Proctorio isn't really about privacy; in pedagogical terms, it's about automation and agency.

There's been a fair amount of press and twitter feather-ruffling about surveillance edtech this past year. Critics of these tools have rightly highlighted dubious data practices and the creepiness and invasiveness of tools like Proctorio, Honorlock and all the rest. (I wrote about it a few months ago here.) But I wonder whether framing it as a matter of privacy is, as an argument to admins, to the public at large, and to many teachers and students, not particularly persuasive, despite being the ethical high ground. After all, in the face of the ubiquitous tracking of Big Tech in general, most people are simply resigned to the fact that their privacy is not a given. Or, rather, the trade off is rendered socially acceptable. Convenience today beats the future and unknown danger of someone else having data or spying, so the thinking goes. Out of sight, out of mind. So long as that invasion of privacy doesn't actually cause a specific problem, then the trade off of privacy for convenience can be rationalized or simply ignored. In America in particular, privacy is an issue which many people react to with resigned passivity.

Now, for some (me included), that privacy argument is compelling. The ethical argument against surveillance edtech is also compelling: how could I promote and facilitate that kind of invasion of privacy to my students? It's just obviously the wrong direction and not worth the cost for the (purported) benefit.

But I think we need a more compelling pragmatic and pedagogical argument. The case against surveillance edtech needs to focus on the fact that we can teach better without that sort of software. The sales pitch of such software is that it solves a particular problem (e.g. cheating); it's a bit like home security services, relying on fear. Proctoring software depends on your fear as a teacher that students are doing something wrong such that you need this “solution” to protect yourself from being tricked.

But let's step back from their framing of the problem as one of cheating or verifying identity. What about the project of learning? Surveillance software is, on the contrary, highly counterproductive to the project of teaching and learning. It is not a “tool” or helper; it is a hindrance and unnecessary barrier. It doesn't actually help students learn or teachers teach.

That kind of argument requires us to reject the assumption that automation is an obvious good and focus instead on technology that promotes and requires the agency of teachers and students. We need not just a criticism of surveillance software as a platform on ethical terms, but also of the software on pedagogical terms. We need to foster classroom design that pushes back against the kinds of pedagogical assumptions underlying this sort of tool. That means, yes, rejecting the notion of “cop shit” in the classroom. It also means doubling down on mechanisms for promoting student and teacher agency. We need to talk about students as active publishers of their own content and we must reject entirely the idea that anyone in a classroom should be subject to passive data gathering in any way.

A distinction here from the everyday world of how we deal with digital files might be worth thinking about. A lot of programs will autosave your work. Word processors, google docs and its imitators, spreadsheets, databases — any number of programs will save a copy of what you are working on it while you work. This is a convenient feature in that context, but it is also one that, subtly, makes us just a bit passive about versions or drafts of our work. On the other hand, if you work with code then you likely use some sort of versioning system like git. Git, whether it's github or a self-hosted alternative, works by forcing a lot of steps on you (at least it will seem that way at first). You have to mark what files you've updated (git add), add a bit saying what's changed and signal your intention to really really add this to the changes being tracked (git commit), and then you might give a command to move the files from your computer to an online folder (git push). There's something very intentional about all of that. It requires just a bit more agency in the process of saving a file.

Now, on the specifics, there are obviously ways to do version control in a more automated way and, conversely, ways to make word processors and all the like less automatic in their updating. My point isn't about those kinds of programs in their details. My point is that we have a choice to adjust the degree of automation and control we want to exert. What most edtech does, and surveillance edtech in particular, is remove or obscure much of that choice and control over automation. Take any platform you use regularly for teaching or in the classroom. How much control do you have over the data it collects? How obvious is it when it is tracking something and when it isn't?

This can be different. Automation is not necessarily the enemy of good pedagogy, but it does require careful thought and design. In the case of materials that students submit to a class or their actions in a class, constant surveillance, whether through proctoring software or, for synchronous classes, with the constant lens of Zoom or its ilk, robs students of a certain degree of agency. (This is in part why, when given the choice, students may be so eager to turn off their phones or give you a view that is not all that great. It is, like anything, a small exertion of control with a system that is not entirely under their control.)

What would it look like if the majority of edtech were data neutral and forgetful by default? What if we only used technologies that not only did not track or store data (hence, ethically “private”), but went a step further so as to be, by default, anonymous until a student or teacher chooses to make something public? Maybe that seems unthinkable, as the default mode for edtech is essentially a list of students, authenticated and identified so that they can be tracked as they submit assignments or complete activities or the like. Indeed, for many edtech products, integrating sign-on is one of the thornier problems to navigate (i.e. does it integrate with an LMS, is it SSO, etc.). Put another way, you have to opt-in, with most platforms, to find ways of allowing students to be anonymous. You can, for example, have a survey in an LMS that might not be graded. Or you might have a wiki that students can collaborate on and not look at the names. Or you might hide names when grading. Or you likely just need to use a different platform (but then we run into FERPA issues of course, because you as a teacher are held to a standard of data sharing that the big tech companies can negotiate their way around.). Edtech is designed so that the identity of students is front and center. It is designed with passive surveillance already primary.

What if students had to “push” their commits? What if every edtech product made student activities, by default, private and self-destructing or forgettable? The difference here is between publishing and surveillance. Students have to publish to an audience they define — the teacher, their class, etc.

This would of course mean very different things at different levels. But in principle what I'm getting at is that we already have ways of thinking about how students “participate” in a class. That is our pedagogical paradigm that needs to stand up against the imposition of a surveillance paradigm.

One other point here. This is ultimately all about grades. Why do we need so desperately to pin down identity and live in fear of cheating? It's about the evaluation and assessment, about the stakes for grading. That's a topic for another post, but so long as we are wedded to outmoded grading patterns as ways to assess learning, then we're stuck with systems that trend towards invasive tracking when it comes to technology.

Finally, could we separate out process and product? Is part of an approach to confronting surveillance tech investing in tools that foster students' working more anonymously or without surveillance as part of the process? Students can work on process knowing that that material is only shared with their intention and permission. They can have multiple products — some failed perhaps, and commit the best one.

There are, currently, some platforms that can be adapted for this sort of anti-surveillance kind of work. I imagine this as one possible use for something like write.as, e.g. create your own blog that is kept private and then submit assignments from that as you work up material. Most tools though are not aimed at educational markets. And many would require self-hosting in some form and so are not really turnkey for educators. Any sort of document sharing or file sharing utilities that require students to opt-in might be useful; so too shared whiteboards or peertube or discourse. Setting up something with cloudron or yunohost might be one sort of way to go.

As with most privacy-related things, right now the solutions would seem to fall on the shoulders of the user and require setting up some sort of shadow IT or secondary infrastructure. That's not a great solution, but until anonymity-first is part of the thinking behind edtech, we're going to struggle with issues of privacy where the surveillors are probably going to have the momentum.

#minimalistedtech #edtech #proctorio #surveillance #edtechminimalism

The ability to shift from content creation mode to editing mode mirrors for me the writing advice I often give students: you can't have your foot on the accelerator and the brake at the same time. Modal editors force you to think about editing and content generation as separate steps. A lot of young writers might benefit from this simple tool. (Admittedly, this also might qualify as cruel and unusual punishment. But I'm going to run with it.)

My own decades-long history of trying various writing platforms simmers underneath my previous post about the ubiquity of MS Word and Google Docs in the technological mindset of many students. I tend to use text editors for most everything nowadays: Vim, its variants, tools which have some sort of vim mode or tools which are based around some variety or species of markdown (write.as, hedgedoc, draftin, sublimetext, neovim, leanpub (markua), etc.). At first I thought maybe that was just contrarian affectation fter years in an academic community that takes writing seriously but also doesn't think all that critically about the technologies used for writing. But now I recognize that the inclination towards both modal editors and minimalist (or “distraction-free”) text tools is mostly about something more fundamental. It is about aligning tools with process.

One of the most common problems I see in student writers comes out in their written work as a sort of stiltedness or formality. Sometimes they aren't clear. Sometimes it seems like they're holding back. The symptoms can be many. But, upon discussing their process with them, how they arrived at this not-quite-right bit of prose, they usually say some variant of the same thing. They describe a back and forth, constantly trying to say something but then worrying about whether that was the right thing to say, whether it was formatted properly, whether they had their details right. It's the typical writer's dilemma, weighed down by the pressure of doing something for a class, where the stakes seem both higher and, in other ways, trivial and unconnected to their lives. (I note in passing that this is often a misconception. They are used to writing what the teacher wants and so have a bit of a mental block until freed of their assumption that writing in a class is for the teacher more than it is for them.)

There are many remedies and aids to help students who are stalling out their writing by trying to push forward while at the same time cutting back, braking and accelerating in fits and starts. Peter Elbow is a good starting point and I have used his freewriting exercises in many classes over the years. There are technology aids with distraction free writing or “typewriter”/“hemingway” modes that prevent erasing. And there are plenty of methods to walk students through structured steps of writing and editing. Recently, for example, as design thinking has vied for widespread applicability, there is the inevitable application to writing (one example of many: https://medium.com/8px-magazine/design-thinking-through-the-writing-process-9075d56db517). What design thinking offers, like any method, is a clear plan for sequestering the idea-making and creation (“ideating” and “prototyping” in DT-speak) from the editing step (aka “testing”).

Like these approaches, modal text editing offers a scaffolding which can separate steps of writing, putting the mind at ease that one does not have to do everything right now. The distinction between an editing mode and an insert mode reinforces the distinction that many students could use between generating content and editing that content.

Fairly high bar perhaps? The learning curve for vim is notoriously “high”:

But there are in fact only a few commands that one needs to do the kind of editing that most students do to their writing. Cut/paste and moving around are the basics. There are some good learing aids too, for example https://www.openvim.com/ and https://vim-adventures.com/, and many, many tutorials (e.g. https://danielmiessler.com/study/vim/). There are plenty of folks who use things like vim for writing more than just code. Writers have adopted vim in various ways. See, e.g. https://hackernoon.com/vim-for-writers-ee15d2a8f512 and https://www.naperwrimo.org/wiki/index.php?title=Vim_for_Writers via NaNoWriMo.

So I'm a big fan of Vim and its descendants. But I'm an even bigger fan of vim-mode in various other applications. Tools with built-in vim bindings or vim-mode are, I think, the easiest on ramp for using modal editing to help think about how one writes. One of my favorite ways to use vim bindings is with the browser, including with vimium, most likely the easiest way to get vim bindings into the hands of students right away. I appreciate too tools like hedgedoc, where a vim mode is built in (just switch the selector at the bottom of the editor pane).

I recognize that this may not be for a lot of folks. But I think with certain students it might resonate with them and help them think about the particular issue they are having. At a minimum, it can help make cutting and pasting stand out in the editing process. It can also help isolate rearrangement as a part of the process (For student writing, often a lot can be gained simply by taking the last paragraph or sentence and moving that to the front of a paper. It is a semi magical trick to them, usually with good results.)

And if modal editing is too much work, well then I suppose we can always just remove the backspace key to get the point across.

#vim #minimalistedtech #edtechminimalism #writing #writingtools

Constraints expose the workings of technology. Errors and failures are invitations for critical assessment. Even if the technology does not work perfectly, the ways in which it failed, the exposing of invisible constraints, can prove successful.

I have a perverse love of technological constraint. Constraint can give rise to innovation, inspiration, and, in the aesthetic of minimalist computing more generally, elegant solutions. But there are plenty of times where technology has constraints that we can't see. A lot of edtech is like this, from the user side, because the marketing is almost always about automating and making things easier. Edtech marketers constantly hide the constraints of their products from users.

This is a mistake and a missed learning opportunity.

All technologies have constraints. This isn't surprising; nor should it be something to run away from. The humble pencil cannot make indelible marks on every surface; but it can offer a portable and cheap writing system widely available. The pencil can't stay sharp indefinitely; but it can be renewed easily with the proper equipment. We take it for granted that we can see, transparently, some of the limitations of humble technologies while at the same time being well in control of addressing those constraints appropriately.

When edtech is a black box, the job of examining constraints and understanding constraints is made more difficult. The myth of the frictionless, automated mechanical aids — more the ever-shifting goalposts of the future than any real vision for the present — skews our view of edtech in ways that make it seem both more fail-able and more powerful than it is. Particularly where we are prevented from seeing constraints, it can be surprising and frustrating to find barriers and walls where they might not have been expected.

One common place to find unseen (and unexepected) constraints are in LMS gradebooks. The gradebook in Canvas has for many years looked, on the outside, like a spreadsheet. But under the hood it is not in fact a spreadsheet of any sort that might be familiar as a stand-alone program. There's logic and routines running behind the scenes and constraints on what you can enter in what otherwise appear to be cells. There are sound reasons for this system, but also many unexpected behaviors. For example, I had at one point set up my grading to involve negative points (for perverse reasons which need not be elaborated here). But there are strange behaviors below 0, as negative points in Canvas would round unexpectedly and also could only go to a maximum of -1. (So far as I recall. It may have been -10, but it certainly wasn't a full spread. One thread on this is here). So I couldn't do my grading system in Canvas in any easy way. I ran into similar problems with anything that was “non-standard” as a grading system, particularly when I tried to do various sorts of completion or spec grading. I learned quickly that under the hood there were of course various constraints that resulted from the way Canvas was set up. It was not only not a spreadsheet (which was fairly clear before) but also a system that would change values in ways that were necessary for the various automatic calculations and totals that the system was set up to prepare for you automatically.

One could surely tell such tales of other LMS-es. (Blackboard, when I used that for many years, was most certainly prone to various unseen and unforeseen constraints in the gradebook.)

This is not just a matter of transparency in code or in documentation. Rather, I think we should approach edtech attuned to the inevitability of invisible and hidden constraints. Further, when we find them, we should expose them and integrate those constraints into our teaching whenever illustrative.

Any time a program or platform won't allow you to do something, that's a cause for reflection. Why is it that this expected behavior is not there? Don't just change to do it the way they say to do it. Why is it that you are being directed in this way? How is the platform modifying your behavior and actions?

Constraints expose the workings of technology. Errors and failures are invitations for critical assessment. Even if the technology does not work perfectly, the ways in which it failed, the exposing of invisible constraints, can prove successful.

In a large class I taught using a multi-platform clicker-like system, it worked well some time; but then we started having a lot of problems with people's devices not logging in. The culprit was well beyond my control, in the wifi coverage of a very large lecture hall. This particular hall had an analogous problem with acoustics. Though beautiful as a space, it was crap for teaching. In the corners of the room students could barely hear much of anything, even with the full room sound system. The high ceilings made everything echo-y and hollow for most students past the 3rd row, and the distance between the lecture area and the rows of seats were significant. In short, the space was simply too large and spacious. Both failures were, in part, a source of frustration and I had to adjust my teaching accordingly. More small groups, more of me moving around the room. Both of those were positive exercises and made for dynamic lessons in many ways. But it was also a prompt for discussing and examining space, at both a human and a technological level. We didn't spend long on it, but it became a tangible illustration of big ideas from the course. And it framed the technological problems in a meaningful way so that we could move one quickly and not get hung up on the fact that we were constrained in particular ways.

There's a purely pragmatic advantage too. At any level, if you frame tech failure as cause for reflection rather than frustration, then you will always look (and likely feel) more technologically adept in a classroom. You will seem to be transmuting lemons to lemonade. Where technology breaks your well-planned lesson, you assert your will again. Transparency about technological errors, and a spirit of troubleshooting and problem-solving, can model for students both how to work with technologies and how to work with failure. (All educational technology will, let me stress, always fail for x percent of a class y percent of the time, where x and y are both non-zero positive numbers.)

Hidden constraints are out there. Our job is to expose them.

#minimalistedtech #edtechminimalism #minimalistcomputing #lms #canvas

Interrupting my otherwise pleasant pre-New Years holiday, I made the mistake of reading this piece, headlined “More info is available about which college majors pay off, but students aren’t using it”. The gist is that data tying specific majors to earning potential is now available but (sacre bleu!) students aren't using this data in order to select majors as much as the people making said data think they should.

I have a lot of objections to this piece, including the way that it jams together quotations in ways that demolish all nuance. But the biggest problem is in the way it makes you think that it somehow makes sense for students to see education solely as a pathway to a job and, further, that that job should be measured on the singular metric of salary.

I've taught thousands of students at this point. I can tell you why they don't just use this data and flock to majors that pay more. It's because they're not automatons whose sole concern is how much money they'll make down the road. It's because they have pressures and wants, desires, or needs that vary from person to person and at different times in their education. It's because a job is not a career is not a life and, for the most part, students have some awareness and even a touch of wisdom about this. Most of them have some pressure from parents, from themselves, from communities at large to have a “viable” career path. Some make that a priority; others not so much. Some balance needs and wants in complex ways with multiple majors or delayed gratification. Some may want to rebel from what people expect (that was me, though in the very nerdy sort of rebellion which involves a Ph.D. in an unexpected subject). Some of them think that there are rewards that aren't just monetary. And maybe some of them just make choices that make sense to them at the time but don't prove great in the long run (shocking! shocking that people would not always make the most rational data-driven choices for their life based on data given to them by someone else...).

There are some things which aggregate data like that being peddled in this piece can actively obscure, particularly when the story is likely to be one about lots of individual variation.

The article is really sloppy in its quest to find a clean narrative here:

“Consumer preferences have changed considerably since covid,” said Carol D’Amico, an executive vice president at Strada and former assistant U.S. secretary of education. Now more than in the past, she said, education “has to be relevant to a career path.”

Even before this year, D’Amico said, people were changing the way they viewed college. A few years ago, “no one was even talking about students as consumers. Consumer information wasn’t part of the lingo. It has moved a lot.”

Not sure if this is being presented as a good thing or not so good thing. I strongly suspect this was a much more subtle point in that quotation before it went through the wash of becoming an article:

Two years after the groundbreaking collaboration began, however, students haven’t seemed to alter course, said David Troutman, the system’s associate vice chancellor, who oversees the project.

“What we find is that they’re not changing their majors,” Troutman said. “They’re following their passions.”

He and other advocates stress that they want students to continue following their passions. But they also want them to be aware that earnings vary widely among graduates, even when they have identical majors, from different universities and colleges, affecting not only their quality of life but their ability to repay their student loans.

That's a pretty artful use of quotation to lead into a bunch of other quotes where the line seems to be all about how there's an obvious choice of choosing a better major.

Debate over the language of students as consumers is of course nothing new. It's one cornerstone of the construction and subsequent critique of the neoliberal university, among other things. And there are plenty of folks advocating for the good of treating students as consumers or stating, correctly, the ways in which education is a market and should be treated as such. I get all that.

But the issue here isn't data or in fact whether students are consumers. It's what happens when you characterize students as consumers. I suspect that students themselves, at some level, both embrace and, at times, push back about being identified as consumers. For that reason, because it is as much about identity as anything else — whether students identify with being consumers or not — I think the data-driven outcome will never come to pass as this article presupposes it, inevitably, must.

#consumerism #minimalistedtech #edtechminimalism #teacherrant

I wrote about this a bit with a slightly different perspective a month or so ago: https://minimalistedtech.com/students-consumers-and-growth.