This post first appeared on aud.life
I remember attending an “big data” event a couple of years ago where one panel debated the future of expertise. Thanks to algorithms and “the unreasonable effectiveness of data,” one panelist insisted, we’ll soon see the end of expertise as well as the end of theory.
The argument struck me then and now as utterly wrong, in no small part because it ignores the importance of lived experience and embodied knowledge – features that artificial intelligence cannot boast. It also ignores that expertise isn’t always about knowing; it’s about performing an assuredness of know-how. In other words, it’s about status and privilege and power.
I’d like to keep track of who gets cited in education technology articles as “the expert.”
Who gets asked to contribute as an “analyst”?
Who’s asked to moderate the panel? Who’s asked to be a panelist?
Who gets the byline? Who gets believed?
“Everyone’s an expert on education.” You hear that a lot – often lodged as a complaint that politicians or businesspeople are making policy and products without a deep understanding of the institution, of pedagogy and practice, of cognition, and the like. Most of us have had some experience as a student, true, but we’re often cautioned that we should not confuse that experience with expertise.
But what do we accept as expertise in education? What do we accept as expertise in education technology?
Who do we find believable? Who’s persuasive? What gives us pause? What makes us recognize that we need to be much more critical, much more skeptical about experts’ (and non-experts’) claims?
Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward – reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
Why do you believe what you hear about ed-tech? When do you scrutinize some stories, and then turn the page and are convinced by the accuracy of the next one?