Audrey Watters

Hack Education Hack Education Weekly News “It’s Like Amazon, But for Preschool” (I’m particularly proud of the URL here) Writing Here and Elsewhere HEWN, No. 283 via substack.com Back to the Archives on teachingmachin.es I wrote the foreword for Sean Michael Morris and Jesse Stommel’s new book, An Urgency of...

Family and Friends I’m spending the week with my mum in Scotland. (This is her XXth birthday present.) We met up with my uncle and aunt and explored the Highlands together. It’s been an incredibly meaningful trip (and my god, so beautiful), revisiting places they haven’t been in decades: Durness,...

I was a guest on Episode 10 of the So We’ve Been Thinking podcast, where I chatted with hosts Shawn McCusker and Greg Kulowiec on the history of education technology. We also chatted about behaviorism, surveillance, labor, the promise of automation, and the continued insistence that students do ridiculously pointless...

Hack Education Hack Education Weekly News Writing Here and Elsewhere HEWN, No. 281 via hewn.substack.com Once a Month on audreywatters.com Robot Predictions on audreywatters.com Adventures in Pickled Ginger on audreywatters.com The Business of Ed-Tech Funding: August 2018 Data on funding.hackeducation.com Character on teachingmachin.es Teaching Machines I’m still researching B. F....

I love pickled ginger. I mean I love it. When I eat sushi, I shove the whole little pile of it in my mouth all at once before eyeing my dining companions’ plates to see if they want theirs. I try to always keep some in my refrigerator and eat...

The Information has an “exclusive” today about the problems with Waymo’s “big ambitions.” (Sorry. Paywall.) Waymo is the subsidiary of Alphabet (formerly Google) that runs the company’s autonomous vehicle development. The article chronicles the myriad of problems that the cars, currently being tested in Phoenix, are having navigating the city’s...

A couple of years ago, my eye doctor asked me a pretty standard question during my eye exam: “How long have you been wearing this pair of contacts?” I said that I didn’t know, and he frowned. “You have disposable lenses. You throw them out once-a-month and put in new...

Hack Education Hack Education Weekly News Writing Here and Elsewhere HEWN, No. 280 via tinyletter.com Blogging and the Online Review on audreywatters.com Academia and Abuse on audreywatters.com The Yellow Sofa on audreywatters.com Teaching Machines I wrote about the differences in some of my characters’ obituaries, as well as about a...

The IKEA furniture finally arrived last night. When we were moving into this apartment, my niece asked me if we still had our old couch, a giant thing that wrapped around the living room in our old Hermosa Beach apartment. It was red. Red red, not some subtler shade softened...

I have stories. I think most people I know who went to graduate school do. Stories of abuse and predation of grad students by professors. And what’s always been deeply troubling to me – I mean, beyond the pervasiveness of the harassment, of course – is that many of the...