Bill Gates wouldn’t let his kids have cellphones. Steve Jobs wouldn’t let his kids have iPads. "Rich People’s Kids Don’t Use Tech" (and Other Stories about the Silicon Valley Elite) (It’s not that paying for a piece of technology will treat you any better, mind you.) 98. Or it will raise a bunch of venture capital to support its “free” offering for a while, and then the company will get acquired and the product will go away. Or the company will have to start charging for the software. Without revenue the company will go away. It works well, that is, if you disregard student data privacy and security.Īnd “free” doesn’t last. It works well too for teachers wanting to bypass the procurement bureaucracy. That being said, if you’re using a piece of technology that’s free, it’s likely that your personal data is being sold to advertisers or at the very least hoarded as a potential asset (and used, for example, to develop some sort of feature or algorithm).Ĭertainly “free” works well for cash-strapped schools.
The phrase “if you’re not paying for the product, you are the product” gets bandied about a lot - despite, according to Slate’s Will Oremus, it being rather an inaccurate, if not dangerous, slogan. The Consortium for School Networking, CoSN, has taken up the mantle for the K-12 version. EDUCAUSE purchased many of NMC’s assets, and it says it will continue to publish the higher ed version of the Horizon Report. ( Predictions that were consistently wrong.) But as the ed-tech sector is never willing to let a bad idea die, the report will live on. In 2017, just a week before Christmas, the New Media Consortium abruptly announced its immediate closure “because of apparent errors and omissions by its former Controller and Chief Financial Officer.” The organization, which was founded in 1994, was best known for its annual Horizon Report, its list of predictions about the near-future of education technology. The 100 Worst Ed-Tech Debacles of the Decade.
(And honestly, it’s probably not your job either.) Oh yes, I’m sure you can come up with some rousing successes and some triumphant moments that made you thrilled about the 2010s and that give you hope for “the future of education.” Good for you. I thought for a good long while about how best to summarize this decade, and inspired by the folks at The Verge, who published a list of “ The 84 biggest flops, fails, and dead dreams of the decade in tech,” I decided to do something similar: chronicle for you a decade of ed-tech failures and fuck-ups and flawed ideas. I think it is worthwhile, as the decade draws to a close, to review those stories and to see how much (or how little) things have changed. For the past ten years, I have written a lengthy year-end series, documenting some of the dominant narratives and trends in education technology.
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