This post first appeared on aud.life

I’m supposed to run a workshop next week in Sun City, and I really have no idea what I’m going to say or what we’re going to do. The title is something about the hype and hope and history of ed-tech. Not sure how to “workshop” that.

One idea I had, which I am not certain is going to work for an international audience, would be to write imagined futures of education – design fiction for ed-tech. Or specifically ed-tech as D&D.

I often invoke Bruce Sterling’s 2013 talk on “fantasy prototypes and real disruption” as he talks there about dragons – in this case, tech startups’ dragons: part of a

tacit allegiance between the hackerspace favelas of the startups and offshore capital in tax-avoidance money-laundering, building a globalized networked society. …We’re all auto-colonialized by the austerity. That’s your big dragon. That’s your actual dragon. And as long as you are making the rich guys richer you are not disrupting the austerity. You are one of its top facilitators.

And so I think this a lot: what are education’s dragons? What are education technology’s dragons? How is ed-tech actually a facilitator for education's biggest dragon?

Slaying that dragon – that’s an epic tale, right? It’s fantasy, sure. It is also, as Sterling suggests, the basis for a fantasy prototype, where we can use tales to think about the future that we’re working towards (or the future that we’re working against).

Let’s imagine, in a D&D sort of framework, if we “roll” a character: Charisma. Intelligence. Wisdom. Strength. Grit (LOL), I mean Constitution. Dexterity. Choose a Class. (Oh – you get to choose a Class in D&D.) Choose a Race. (Mhmmm. Yeah. Choose that.) Choose an Alignment. Pick your Gender. (Pick! Roll!) Imagine your backstory.

Then, how would we, in a D&D framework, move that character through the “dungeons” of education? What are the obstacles, traps, monsters, rewards? (What are the technological obstacles, traps, monsters, rewards?)

Anyway, it’s not a fully fleshed out workshop by any means, but I’d sure love to be a Dungeon Master and eventually walk a group through an adventure like this…

I'd love to stew some more with more folks on ed-tech's dragons. On who gets to be ed-tech's heroes. What are the narratives we write for them? What are the maps someone (the dungeon master -- who is that again?) has ordained for adventurers to walk through? How do we go off map? How do we write a different tale?

How do we slay this dragon?