My latest: Luddite pedagogy, in the CHE

This morning I have an “advice” essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education called “Luddite Pedagogy: It’s OK to Ignore AI in Your Teaching.” From the middle of the piece:

Although I’ve had, over the years, a handful of mild objections to my classroom tech principles, my students rarely if ever complain. They don’t negotiate or beg for relief. A few years back, they even voted me Teacher of the Year. Far from coming at me with pitchforks, in fact, a majority of my students thank me for my “strict” rules. Why? Because they’re well aware of the effects the ambient techno-pedagogical infrastructure produces in them.

Take an online grade sheet. It’s perpetually accessible and constantly changing, with every update generating an automatic notification to a student’s phone. That doesn’t relieve anxiety — it exacerbates it. As for the classroom itself, my students know and hate that they can’t concentrate in a typical screen-populated course. They are distracted by their own phone or laptop, and even when they find the will to turn it off, their eyes drift to a classmate’s device.

Put it this way: If we set out to design an environment that would undermine educational success — to interfere with listening, thinking, and conversing, and disrupt sustained focus and rapt attention — we would invent the contemporary college classroom. Why must we accept it as given?

Click here to read the whole thing.

I first described “Luddite pedagogy” here on the blog back in 2018. I see now that Audrey Watters (my ed-tech-critic hero) used the same phrase in 2020, drawing on a 2014 essay by Torn Halves. Haven’t read either yet, but hoping to get to them soon.

I’m in Comment on ed tech

This morning Comment published my review essay of Audrey Watters’ latest book Teaching Machines. The title of the essay is “Unlearning Machines.” Here’s how it opens:

Audrey Watters is a prophet. Prophets aren’t fortune tellers, however. The main business of prophets, even in the Bible, isn’t the future. It’s the present. Better to say: it’s the set of possible futures that are liable to follow from crucial choices made in the present. Israel’s prophets brought a word from God to the people of God, and that word was—as it always is for prophets, including Jesus—repent. To repent means to turn, to veer right rather than left, to take this branch on the decision tree, not that one, to see the fork in the road for what it is: an opportunity, probably the last, to avoid disaster. Because disaster is what awaits if you continue on the current path.

True, Watters is a secular prophet. She doesn’t speak on God’s behalf or for the sake of a chosen people. But like Amos, she brings a word of judgment to the powers that be. Those powers she calls Ed Tech. And like the nations against which Amos railed, Ed Tech is a bastion of avarice and injustice. It grinds the faces of the poor into the dust.

Ed Tech is short for education technology. Think Zoom, “learning management systems,” online anti-cheating software. At first glance those might seem harmless enough. Allow Watters to dissuade you. She has a decade’s worth of work with which to do so. Sometimes it seems she has the beat all to herself, a one-woman journalistic gadfly buzzing around the behemoths and motherships of Silicon Valley. Unswattable, she maintains a blog, Hack Education, and has self-published several collections of talks and essays. In August MIT Press published her latest book, Teaching Machines: The History of Personalized Learning, which she wrote as part of a fellowship at Columbia University.

Click here to read the rest. Let me add for the record that editor Brian Dijkema is a mensch. He’s edited me three times now for Comment and every time both the substance of the piece and its style is vastly improved. (“Plain English, Brad, plain English!”) Also, if you read the whole thing you’ll have the pleasure of stumbling upon a sentence that contains “some kind of Burkean phlegm,” which I trust is a phrase I’m the first to have used. I certainly enjoyed writing it.