Is Ed Tech Dead?

This morning I met online with three different ed tech founders. I was the shark in the tank, and they were making their pitches. All three seemed like good human beings, the kind of people I’d want to get to know over a longer conversation.

But I found myself getting impatient with their “value propositions”: I’d heard it all before. 

Going all the way back to the Skinner Box, proponents of gadgets, machines, and all sorts of hardware and software contraptions have promised that their gizmos will influence behavior, raise test scores, improve attendance, and wash your cat. When I attended the ASU+GSV Summit last year in San Diego, and listened to every founder enthusiastically overpromise, I couldn’t get Tom Waits’ “Step Right Up” out of my head.

Surely there is a place for technology in learning. I’ve used plenty of it in my own teaching. I’m using more of it still as a lead learner in the consulting wild. 

The thing is, as long as businesses persist in cynically viewing schools and their constituents as markets or consumers, they will continue to fail, because every good product or service is rooted in empathy.

Business is defined by outcomes. Learning is defined by processes. Therefore these two endeavors have grown apart: Different (but not mutually exclusive) languages, organizational cultures, and even types of people. I don’t know too many assistant principals who would last a day as a project manager, and I don’t know a single CEO who would last a day in an urban high school classroom. (Plenty would argue the point with me, but this is my newsletter and I know better. I’ve seen a couple try. They sucked.) 

What technology do you use for learning, whether it’s in a school context, or at work, or on your own? Do you use it for research, or productivity, or brainstorming, or organization, or collaboration, or something else that’s so cool the rest of us don’t even know about it yet? Drop me a line and tell me about it. I’m curious.

Curiosity is worth practicing. That’s how we get better at it. When it’s done particularly well, curiosity can be elevated to an art form. Curiosity makes life worth living. I am literally Curious AF. And now you can be too! Click HERE to unlock your free membership subscription. 

Here is a taste of what I’m reading, watching, and thinking about.

You wouldn’t know it by the weather – it’s still 114 degrees in the Coachella Valley as I type – but it is October, and that means Major League Baseball playoffs are underway. The players are mostly gazillionaires, and there are a thousand reasons not to spend time this way, but I still find myself checking the scores and watching highlights because it transports me back to being 10 years old and going to games with my dad. Which reminds me of this exchange from the movie City Slickers:

Phil Berquist: So, what do you and your friends talk about out there?

Bonnie Rayburn: Well, real life. Relationships. Are they working? Are they not? Who's she seeing? Is that working?

Ed Furillo: No contest. We win.

Bonnie Rayburn: Why?

Ed Furillo: Honey, if that were as interesting as baseball, they'd have cards for it and sell it with gum.

I produce a podcast called LIT AF, where I read through the classics like you’ve never heard them before. Each season of this podcast is an audiobook with a twist – I comment as I go, to give you the stories between the lines.

As we run up to Halloween, I've been reading and thinking about Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.

In this chapter, it's the inciting incident of inciting incidents: MURDER. Viktor's little brother William is dead. We don't know who did it, but there's thunder, lightning, a monster on the loose, and a young woman who will stand trial in hours – has she been falsely accused?

I grew up in Los Angeles in the 1970s and 1980s, so country music wasn’t front and center like rock, punk, or rap. But a(nother) great thing about growing up in LA was that I met all kinds of people and made all kinds of friends, some of whom worked at the Palomino Club. That’s where I learned to love old school country artists who lived what they wrote and performed. With all that in mind, RIP Kris Kristofferson. Here’s a list of his 20 essential songs as curated by Rolling Stone. 

Television is the way it is because people tend to be really similar in their vulgar and prurient and stupid interests and wildly different in their refined and moral and intelligent interests.

– David Foster Wallace

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Best,

Know someone who is also Curious AF? Please share this edition with them!

David Preston

Educator & Author

​https://davidpreston.net​

Latest book: ACADEMY OF ONE

Header image: An exhibit showing the costs of an elementary classroom via floridamemory.com