Cross-posted to Hack Education

Week in and week out, there are a litany of stories that, if I were paying attention to education technology, would prompt me to say “I told you so.” Why look, just in the last few days: coding bootcamps, pretty shady; Udemy, very shady. Google Notebook LLM in the classroom, totally and completely fucked up. But the industry's cheerleaders keep cheering.

I’ve spent the last few years trying my best to ignore all this stuff. After Isaiah’s death, I simply could not handle more grief. I’m not sure how else to describe the emotions that I feel about education -- this deep, deep sadness about about what feels like the surrender of any shared cultural belief in, any political commitment to, any financial investment in public education; a real despair about our handing teaching and learning over to the neoliberal elites, to the values of productivity, efficiency, individualism. I’d lost my son -- the future already felt dimmer for it. I didn’t have the energy to fight. I stepped away.

Since I’ve been gone, not much has changed -- other than I’ve been proven right about just about every startup and gadget I warned folks about. Not that that’s stopped anyone from hyping the latest snake oil -- it’s AI this time around (again) I guess. In the quest for data and “optimization,” we continue to drain the humanity from institutions that, frankly, were never that humane in the first place (despite all the teachers and students who populate these institutions and who do, I firmly believe, care deeply about one another).

I’ve flailed around since leaving Hack Education dormant, thinking I’d just do something else instead of being “ed-tech’s Cassandra.” I’ve become an athlete for the first time in my life, and I thought perhaps I could write a similar sort of tech criticism about fitness and health as I did about education. As hard as it is to become an athlete at 50+, let me just say, it’s just as hard to develop expertise in a new field of knowledge.

So for this and a million other reasons (and a couple of really specific reasons -- some dangerous dumb shit I've seen folks blog about recently, truth be told), I’m returning to education technology criticism -- it’s what I know. It’s what I’m good at. (Or at least some people tell me that.) I lost my son, but I’ll be damned if I’ll go quietly and let the techno-libertarian fantasies strip the future from the rest of us.

I have just started working on a book on artificial intelligence and education. A little bit of history -- we have been building “intelligent tutors” for decades now. Indeed what we consider “intelligence” is wrapped up in the history of education and testing (and eugenics -- probably worth pointing out). A little bit of science -- what do we know about how humans learn, and is this anything akin to “machine learning”? (Or has computer science shaped how we conceive of the mind?) A lot of technology criticism and literary analysis -- why are these stories about robot teachers so compelling? My plan right now is a collection of essays akin to the sorts of provocations that I’d once give as a speaker. Monsters of Ed-Tech: Back from the Dead. Or something.

I don’t plan to update Hack Education regularly. And since we’ve fucked up the Web, I don’t even know if folks will see this update or notice that anything has changed here. But if you stumble across this blog post, know that I do send out a newsletter, Second Breakfast, and there I’ll share some of my thoughts on AI and bodies and brains. (No, it's not free or "open" -- because that whole thing, as AI is showing us, is an absolute joke.)