Hack Education

In case it's not clear from the timeline, this is part of a larger project by Audrey Watters, writer of the fantastic Hack Education blog (http://hackeducation.com/). Teaching Machines is the title of her forthcoming book, to be published by MIT Press.

Audrey Watters has really good insights on what she calls "The History of the Future of Education Technology" Her Hack Education blog, while on hiatus right now, has a lot of supporting info. https://hackeducation.com/

If you're interested in an ongoing critical look at technology in education, Audrey Watters is a great person to follow [0]. She helps keep me honest as someone working in this space. She put out a really long and interesting post, The 100 Worst Ed-Tech Debacles of the Decade [1]. [0] https://twitter.com/audreywatters [1] http://hackeducation.com/2019/12/31/what-a-shitshow

Depends on the style, which is why it's worthwhile to look into it. These links might also be interesting: http://hackeducation.com/archives https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvgbvtxYRX4

That's great! I said nothing about the US? No worries! I recently read this article: http://hackeducation.com/2017/07/22/bootcamp-bust I know quite a few people that went through boot camps personally. Some did great and some really struggled. It sounds like you have it sorted, so I hope it's successful and I wish you the best!

If you liked this essay (which I did), you are probably going to be interested in Audrey Watters's Hack Education blog. [0] In particular there is a big difference between the kinds of Papert-inspired computatiinal environments that provide microworlds for learning and a lot of what is being produced today (which Watters rightly calls out as a rediscovery of Skinner behaviorism and teaching machines). She has a lot of content and a couple of essay collections. 0: http://hackeducation.com/

Yes, and I wrote that to point out that emteycz's comment about "compulsory daily school attendance", which wasn't true in colonial MA, still isn't true now in the US, so if that's the key point for what the Prussian model means, then we don't have it. > they do follow an industrial model that teaches conformity I earlier pointed to http://hackeducation.com/2015/04/25/factory-model and its objections to that characterization of the history of US education. See the section starting "Sal Khan is hardly the only one who tells a story of “the factory of model of education” that posits the United States adopted Prussia’s school system in order to create a compliant populace. It’s a story cited by homeschoolers and by libertarians ... the history of schools doesn’t map so neatly onto the history of factories (and visa versa). As education historian Sherman Dorn has argued, “it makes no sense to talk about either ‘the industrial era’ or the development of public school systems as a single, coherent phase of national history.”" I'll ask you - what do you mean by "conformity" and "obedience to authority"? As an example to test an extreme case, if your children decided to set fire to the house, to see what would happen, would you prevent them? If so, is that enforcing obedience to authority or conformity? We can look back to colonial MA to see that part of "conformity" and "obedience to authority" was that children should be taught religions beliefs and the laws of the colony.…

As a founder working in edtech, I'm glad to see a light shined on these practices, which are surprisingly pervasive. My company has received mass emails from teacher-bloggers asking if we want to submit our products for reviews or find out about sponsored posts. When I replied to inquire about product reviews, they responded with information about how I could sponsor a post. As it turns out, their entire site is a bunch of sponsored posts, masquerading as an unbiased source of information and reviews. I'm not saying this doesn't happen in other industries. But it is frustrating to see so much of it in education — to the point where I have asked myself: is this just how all the successful companies became successful? Is this just the way the game is played? Hopefully articles like this one will help set a trend toward better behavior. It sounds like teachers could get in a bit of trouble, both ethically and legally, if they're promoting products without appropriate disclosure. But they probably just figure that anything that companies ask them to do is ok for them to do. Now parties on both sides are on notice that much of what is going on is not legal. For anyone interested in reading more about the dark-ish underbelly of edtech, check out http://www.hackeducation.com. No affiliation — just a fan.

Half-correct in a completely incorrect way. Who’s more indoctrinated: someone who lives off the land and has all the free-mind time in the world since he does manual work all day? Or someone who went through over a decade of Prussian-inspired conformity/workplace training (schooling)? And gets information-saturated from all free angles throughout the day? It's inaccurate to think of Prussian school as a system of conformity. Rather that's the opposite intention.[1] 1. http://hackeducation.com/2015/04/25/factory-model

> We've seen this before: use hype and techno-optimism to sell a bill of goods. Yep, after reading a piece on ed-tech failures of the decade 2010-2020[0] here on HN[1], I've become pretty convinced that big-scale education is hard (if not impossible) to solve with IT might only. Sure, one person alone can learn something through Wikipedia, Coursera, YouTube, Khan Academy or tutorials, but that can't replace structured environments if your missiob is to educate lots of people. [0] http://hackeducation.com/2019/12/31/what-a-shitshow [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21948132

Mine, too. In a rural area in the Midwest in the 80s. http://hackeducation.com/2015/02/25/kids-cant-wait-apple

Southern California, I think they gave 2 to every elementary school in California iirc. -- EDIT: so, I guess it was not till the 80s they gave them out to all the schools. I thought we got them in the second grade, but maybe it was 4th grade. http://hackeducation.com/2015/02/25/kids-cant-wait-apple

Interesting link, thanks for sharing. I read it and I think there's some miscommunication going on. The author is criticizing Sal Khan and like for suggesting that there was a deliberate, cohesive factory model (designed in order to..) whereas the commenter recounting Foucault here talks about the effects of the model, not its intention (designed in a way that...) Indeed there is no mention of Foucault in that article. I read through her blog more and this is the first one I found that mentions the book in question http://hackeducation.com/2020/07/20/surveillance (also an interesting read)

Sigh. Technology is #3 on the list. If you're reading this, and you're nodding in agreement, please, please read this first: http://hackeducation.com/2019/12/31/what-a-shitshow Technology really is not a top 3 problem in the US (and I'd wager, not in any country). Vendors, politicians, and institutions have been using it as a silver bullet to address the more profound problems though. Maybe that's what they meant? It seems you actually have to spend $10 to learn any more, and I'm not inclined...

As Wikipedia notes, this is kind of just a myth - http://hackeducation.com/2015/04/25/factory-model

I find arguments like this difficult to argue with since there are so many unfounded assumptions and so little evidence. But the author of this article took the time to address the rhetoric systematically. http://hackeducation.com/2015/04/25/factory-model

Probably referring to articles like this: http://hackeducation.com/2017/07/22/bootcamp-bust

It's almost as if school was designed to create labour for factory work. Although this is interesting: http://hackeducation.com/2015/04/25/factory-model

Conversely, we need an 'education for hackers' type site. The closest are these resources from hackeducation: http://hackeducation.com/2012/03/17/what-every-techie-should-know-abou… http://guide.hackeducation.com/techies.php http://edtechhandbook.com/

So I have been teaching Computer technology to kids in schools and also to non-techies as a hobby for a while. I urge you to NOT start with technology. From her interests, identify something that can be augmented with programming first. [for example, she wants to share her hobby via a blog]. Just show her what is possible in that instance with knowledge of coding. From there work backwards to show what she needs to learn to achieve this goal. You will find her lot more motivated. I talked about this with Hack Education's Audrey just yesterday. Some more thoughts captured by her here: http://www.hackeducation.com/2012/03/06/harry-shah/

This problem has been around for a long time. Like many other HN users, years ago in primary school I became a problem for my teachers because the curriculum was too easy for me. The school dealt with it by sitting me in front of a big box of color-coded dossiers called the SRA Reading Laboratory [1, 2] and telling me "read these at your own pace". The boxes looked just like this: https://sites.google.com/view/objects-of-school-days-past/sra-reading-… The school may well have had them kicking around since the 1960s. The trouble was that "at your own pace" was code for leaving me alone in front of a box. I don't recall the reading being either interesting or particularly hard. It solved the problem for my teachers, since I wasn't the type to act out in class. But the real lessons I got out of it were lessons in isolation and drudgery. Look back, what I clearly and badly needed was contact with an adult who could teach me things. That didn't happen, and in fact happened very little in my later school years as well. Was it the schools' fault? They simply didn't have the resources to give me the human contact I needed. Surely all agree that children need human contact, empathy, connection, meaningful teaching. But let's not use those principles to avoid facing how resource-constrained this problem is. What happens in practice is that many children end up with nothing, or next to nothing, as happened to me long ago. My point with this anecdote is this: I don't think I…

> I just dont understand how did we end up here The push to get children familiar with appliance computers as opposed to general purpose computers goes at least as far back as the 1980s with Apple. So how we ended up here is basically nearly half a century of lobbying from computer manufacturers to promote proprietary computation appliances that children have limited or no control over. > we studied the law and it turned out that there was a law already on the books... that said that if you donated a piece of scientific instrumentation or computer to a university for educational and research purposes you can take an extra tax deduction.... We thought that if we could apply that law, enhance it a little bit to extend it down to K through 8 and remove the research requirements so it was just educational, then we could give a hundred thousand computers away, one to each school in America. Steve Jobs, quoted in https://hackeducation.com/2015/02/25/kids-cant-wait-apple

Communities of convergence, aggregation...students and educators communicating more effectively, more foreign language translations of content, sharing & combining what's been mentioned here as well as Khan Academy + Bittorrent http://www.hackeducation.com/2011/02/11/khan-academy-and-bittorrent-pa… Gaming: http://www.phibetaiota.net/2010/09/video-visions-of-the-gamepocalypse-… + http://web.cs.wpi.edu/~rich/courses/imgd404x-c11/playable.html http://hackety-hack.com http://cnx.org http://www.writework.com http://www.fhsst.org http://www.unclasses.org http://www.coursehero.com http://www.varsitynotes.com http://www.livemocha.com (language) http://openstudy.com Connecting educators & students to communicate more effectively using these and more: http://edublogs.org http://www.connectedprincipals.com http://www.edweek.org/ew/section/blogs/index.html http://piratepad.net http://primarypad.com http://typewith.me http://sync.in http://sketchpad.cc