![]() Just this week, I saw a story that pointed to Stanford professor Patrick Suppes as the “intellectual father of personalized education.” Suppes began work in the 1960s on computer-assisted instruction – early “drill-and-kill” programs. ![]() And that isn’t simply because the promises were too grandiose it is also because the history of education technology is systematically being forgotten, if not re-written. But in practice, education technology has never been able to live up to all the hype. It promises a lot of things – good marketing campaigns always do. ![]() I think that this purposeful mis-remembering and mis-telling of the history of education technology reveal great flaws in the project of ed-tech writ large, not to mention flaws in the stories we tell about the supposed future of teaching and learning.Įducation technology promises access and efficiency. I want to talk to you today about the history of education technology, not just to point out that “OMG! He got the date totally wrong!” (2001 is totally wrong. I’ve heard education technology entrepreneurs claim, for example, that education has not changed in hundreds of years that before MOOCs, the last piece of technology introduced into the classroom was the blackboard that education has been utterly “untouched” by computers that the first time someone in education used the Internet for teaching was 2001. Ideologically if not geographically centered in California – the land of gold and opportunity, and of course, Hollywood – Silicon Valley, one of the major forces behind these narratives, likes to carefully craft, re-invent, and mythologize its past. In particular there’s an outright erasure if not retelling of the history of education and the history of education technology. I’m fascinated and frustrated by these narratives as by and large they tend to utterly ignore the present and the past. I’m particularly pleased to be at a Center for Teaching and Learning, since I spend a lot of time muttering angrily about the powerful narratives I notice in circulation these days, narratives readily promoted by politicians and business people, by education reformers and education entrepreneurs, that teaching and learning somehow aren’t actually of interest to educators (professors care only about their personal research, so the story goes) and that learning does not really happen in formal educational institutions these days – neither sufficiently nor efficiently. Thank you for inviting me to speak to you today. This talk was delivered today at Davidson College at its Annual Teaching Showcase
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