DHMS: Teaching Machines with Audrey Watters

[Music] hi everybody my name is alexis boylan um i am the director of academic affairs here at uchi um and i welcome you before we get started i wanted to say in this moment where many of us are working in different places and meeting remotely we acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which we are gathered and of the lands where remote participants are currently working and we recognize their continued connection to land waters and culture we pay our respects to their elders past present and emerging we have an excellent event for you today featuring audrey waters in her latest book teaching machines the history of personalized learning um with the best cover ever we were having a conversation about it before it's really fantastic um this is co-sponsored by the center for excellence in teaching and learning and the niag school of education to make sure that you always know what we have planned at the institute you can follow us on social media or subscribe to our listserv and monthly newsletter you can find all of these links at the footer on our website of our website and our address is humanities.uconn.edu audrey waters is a writer and independent scholar who focuses on educational technology education technology its politics and its pedagogical implications although she was two chapters into her comparative literature dissertation she decided to abandon academia and now happily fulfills the one job recommended to her by a junior high aptitude test a freelance writer she has written for the baffler the atlantic vice hybrid pedagogy inside higher ed and the school library journal and elsewhere across the web but she is best known for the work on her website hack education audrey has given keynotes and presentations on education technology around the world and is the author of several books including the monsters of education technology the revenge of the monsters of techno of education technology the curse of the monsters of education technology the masters of education technology 4 and claim your domain her latest book teaching machines mit press examines the pre-history of quote personalized learning audrey was a recipient of the spencer education journalism fellowship at columbia university for the 2017-18 academic year elizabeth della zelizaria is a historian of modern europe and a postdoctoral research universe associate at the humanities institute her scholarship focuses on how ideas move on the ground how their method of transmission and dissemination affects the ideas themselves with a particular emphasis on the intellectual history of material text and urban environments in revolutionary and post-revolutionary france and with that i am going to hand over um uh the proceedings to elizabeth and audrey thanks so much alexis so um well just to give everyone a sense of what we're going to do audrey's going to give a talk um and then we're going to reconvene for q a so please feel free to submit your questions while she's speaking and then we'll all come back together to answer those questions andre take it away great thank you so much for inviting me to to speak to you yeah i'll confess i suppose at the at the outset you know i expense i've spent over a decade now um writing about education technology i've published books on a topic but i always kind of feel like a bit of an imposter when i speak at universities particularly when i speak to departments of education and departments of psychology um i've never taken a class on on either of those topics and so it's i have to say it's a huge relief to be here speaking um with my people my humanities people um my yeah my formal academic background for what it's worth is in folklore and literature uh the closest thing i think to that sort of formal academic expertise um and what i do nowadays comes probably from all of that graduate level coursework i did in psychoanalytic theory for what it's worth i wrote my master's thesis in folklore on political pranks and i drew i drew largely on freud's work on jokes in their relation to the unconscious so credentials for tease or not i i don't think it's a stretch right to argue that freud was you know one of the most influential theorists of the 20th century um again i can say that to a room of humanists um i don't know if i would actually utter that out loud to a room of psychology professors pardon me if there are any um on zoom um you know it's a colored my uh so a decade ago i think i would have said that um freud was the most important most influential but as you can tell by the book and if you can tell probably by my work i've spent the last couple of years deeply immersed in another psychologist in the work of b.f skinner um i've read books by him i read all the books by him i've read books about him i spent a week going through his archives at harvard pouring through his letters some of the minutia i think that you can see that fits into the book as well as other correspondence that had nothing to do with the book that was just incredibly juicy to read through someone's letters and i think it you know it's definitely colored my assessment spending that much time with him but i am like this kid from the sixth sense insofar as instead of dead people i see behaviorism everywhere um you know i think skinner's cultural impact might not be as widely recognized as freud's but i i just don't think his importance can be dismissed he was one of the best known public scholars of his day right he appeared on television on the cover of popular magazines it's this wasn't just a name that was known in academic circles he wasn't just speaking at academic conferences or publishing in academic journals he was a bestseller best-selling author he was really a household name in education technology circles what what i'm concerned with he's best known for his work developing teaching machines hence the name of my book it was an idea he came up with um in 1953 when he visited his daughter's fourth grade classroom and observed the teachers and the students with dismay the students were seated at their desks working on arithmetic problems written on the blackboard as the teacher walked up and down the rows of desks looking at the student's work pointing out mistakes that she that she saw you know he reported that some of the students finished the work very quickly and they squirmed in their seats with impatience waiting for for the next set of instructions and other students squirmed in their seats with frustration because they were struggling to finish the assignment at all and eventually the lesson was over the teacher collected all of the the work she took the papers home she would grade them and she would give them back to the class the next day i realized that something must be done he wrote in his autobiography and this classroom practice violated two key principles of his behaviorist theory of learning students were not told immediately whether they had the answer right or wrong right a graded paper returned the next day didn't offer the kind of immediate positive reinforcement that skinner believed was necessary for learning and number two the students were all forced to proceed at the same pace through the lesson regardless of their ability or their understanding and this sort of method of classroom instruction provided the wrong sort of reinforcement negative reinforcement which skinner argued penalized the students who could move more quickly as well as the students who were struggling to to keep up and this story right this narrative should sound very familiar right it's a story that it still gets told today it's a narrative that edtech advocates today tell i mean if skinner were to deliver a ted talk this would be his ted talk right so he went home and he developed a prototype of a mechanical device that he believed would solve these problems and not just solve them for his daughter's classroom right but for the entire education system his teaching machine he argued would enable students to move through exercises that were perfectly suited to his or her level of skill knowledge that would assess their understanding of the concept immediately giving positive feedback and encouragement along the way he patented several versions of this device and along with several other many other competitors he sought to capitalize on what became quite a popular subfield in education psychology in the 1950s and 60s programmed instruction the teaching machine wasn't the first time that b.f skinner made headlines and he made a lot of headlines from this invention in part because the press linked his ideas about teaching children as skinner did himself do his research on training pigeons can people be taught like pigeons fortune magazine asked in 1960 skinner's work training a rat named pliny had led to a story in life magazine in 1937 and in 1951 there were a flurry of stories about his work um on pigeons he moved harvard at that time of course as we know research out of harvard tends to tends to generate headlines and i love the headlines because many of them say things like smart pigeons attend harvard and harvard pigeons are superior birds um sort of you can just anyway you can just see the harvard narrative even when it comes to the animals in in the psychology lab and like many psychologists of his time skinner worked with with animals um at first with rats briefly with squirrels it didn't work out so well and then i think famously famously with pigeons in order to develop his techniques to shape and control behavior and for skinner behavior equals learning right and using a system of reinforcements food primarily he was able to condition his lab animals to perform certain tasks right pliny the rat his famous rat worked a slot machine for the for a living that's what life magazine said um it would put a marble in a tube in order to get food his pigeons could play the piano they could play ping pong on ostensibly guide a missile towards a target that's that's a whole other that's a whole other keynote on missile guide um pigeon guided missiles um in graduate school skinner had designed an operant conditioning chamber for training animals it became known as the skinner box and that ch that chamber typically contains some sort of mechanism for the animal to operate right something to peck something to a lever to move and that would result in a shoot releasing a pellet of food so it is perhaps unfortunate that when skinner wrote an article for ladies home journal in 1945 describing a temperature controlled fully enclosed crib that he'd invented for he and his wife's second child the same child that whose classroom he visited that the magazine ran with the title baby in a box the the title that skinner had given his piece was baby care can be modernized but we all know that writers don't get to choose the headlines right but it was a nod from the editors to the skinner box perhaps i mean witty for those in the know i'm not sure if the journal's readership were in the know but the crib was quite literally a box so skipper's wife had complained to him about the toll that all the chores of a newborn had taken with their first child and as he wrote in the article quote i felt it was time to apply a little labor-saving invention and design to the problem of the nursery so skinner's air crib as this crib became uh eventually came to be called allowed the baby to go without clothing um except for a diaper no blankets um except for feeding and diaper changing and playtime the baby was kept in the crib the whole time um skinner argued that by controlling the environment by making the crib soundproof um and germ free the baby would be healthier and and happier quote it takes about one and a half hours each day to feed change and otherwise care for the baby he wrote this includes everything except washing diapers and preparing formula we are not interested in reducing the time any further as the baby grows older it needs a certain amount of social stimulation and after all when unnecessary chores have been eliminated taking care of a baby is fun as you can probably imagine responses to ken skinner's article in the ladies home journal fell largely into two cans right and there were a lot of letters in skinner's archives um from magazine readers there were those who thought for this idea of the baby in a box bordered on child abuse or child neglect at the very least but they were those who really loved the idea remember this is 19 this is um post-war america right this is um they loved the idea of mechanizing um of mechanizing the home and it was really part of this growing desire after world war ii to introduce all sorts of gadgets into the home right into the home into the workplace and and into the school and as history of psychology professor alexander rutherford argues what skinner developed with the crib and with his other work were these technologies of behavior the error crib the teaching machine these inventions represented in miniature the applications of the principles that skinner hoped would drive the design of the entire culture right and he imagined this in his novel um utopian novel i i guess it's a utopian novel walden too he imagined a community that would be socially and environmentally engineered to reinforce good behavior to reinforce survival and good behavior but this really wasn't just fiction for skinner he designed technologies that he believed would improve human behavior in an attempt really to re-engineer the entire social order in order to make the world a better place the most important thing i can do skinner famously said is to develop the social infrastructure to give people the power to build a global community that works for all of us adding that he intended to develop the social infrastructure for community for supporting us for keeping us safe for informing us for civil civic engagement for inclusion of everyone okay i lied that that actually wasn't yet skinner that was mark zuckerberg my dad you know did you know that mark zuckerberg was a psychology major at harvard i i digress um it's too easy i think to say that skinner's ideas are no longer relevant right that psychology has has sort of advanced so far in the last half century and behaviorism has been proven wrong right i i don't think that's true actually i don't i don't think that that's necessarily even true for freud or for skin or blood bless their hearts like many people right like many people i got a dog during the pandemic and i have spent a lot of time um in the last couple in the last year or so engaged in operant conditioning right in reinforcing good behavior and i will say it works and i have i have the best behaved dog in the apartment building of course um poppy is a dog poppy isn't a baby in in the box one of the stories that gets told a lot is that um after the linguist noam chomsky published two particularly brutal reviews of skinner's books right a review of his book verbal behavior in 1959 and a review of beyond freedom and dignity in 1971 sort of somehow everyone realized that behaviorism was wrong not just scientifically wrong but somehow politically wrong morally ethically wrong and behaviorism was kind of tossed aside for cognitive science and i think certainly cognitive science did become more popular in psychology departments in the 1960s and 1970s but i think the reason that people turned away from behaviorism was a lot more complicated than just that noam chomsky wrote some book reviews and certainly outside of academic circles right i think there were lots of factors that finally started to diminish what was skinner's really incredible popularity in the in the in the 1950s and in the early 1960s um so the film of clockwork orange for example probably did much more i think to shape public opinion about behavior modern behavior modification than anything else he said i spent quite a bit of time in the book on this and i think that these are the sorts of cultural influences they're really key to understanding changes in technology often more than the tech itself we get so caught up in telling the stories of gadgets as though the gadgets are what moves history forward that we often neglect to tell the story of the so the social side of the story and this probably makes me a cultural studies person he went to grad school in the 90s but that's again i i digress so let me just read you a quick excerpt from the book as as one gets to do during a book talk um by many accounts both behaviorism and skinner found themselves largely discredited following the publication of beyond freedom and dignity thanks in no small part to chomsky's book review in psychology departments around the country cognitive science had become the dominant approach but the academic debates were probably not the ones that came to shape the public's opinion of either behaviorism or skinner most people would not have read chomsky's book review the public however did flock to watch a movie released in new york city in the closing days of 1971 stanley kubrick's the clockwork orange to be fair the film based on anthony burgess's 1963 novel did not depict awkward conditioning skinner had always argued that positive behavioral reinforcement was far more effective than aversion therapy than the fictional budovico technique that a clockwork orange portrays in a futuristic britain alex played by malcolm mcdowell is the leader of a gang of drugs who engage in a series of acts of ultraviolence assault rape eventually murder alex is caught and sentenced to prison for 14 years two years into his sentence he volunteers for an experimental treatment proposed by the minister of the interior which promises to rehabilitate criminals after just two weeks this treatment is the ludovico technique alex is drive out to a chair his eyes are clamped open he's injected with nausea inducing drugs he's forced to watch violent and sexually explicit films while the music of his favorite composer ludwig von beethoven blares in the background he's conditioned the drugs the music the graphic depictions make him sick after two weeks of treatment the minister of the interior demonstrates alec's progress to a group of officials alex is provoked with physical violence and a naked woman his only response is nausea the minister is triumphant but the prison chaplain protests that this experiment has robbed alex of his free will the boy has no real choice the chaplain complains he ceases to be a creature of moral choice the minister his name uh his middle name is his name is frederick which is a nod i think to skinner's middle name frederick insists that alex's mental processes are irrelevant we are not concerned with motive with the higher ethics he reports we are concerned only with cutting down crime only concerned with behavior the education common columnist for the new york times fred heckinger someone who had a decade earlier earlier written quite favorably about skinner's teaching machines castigated kubrick and the film any liberal with brains should hate clockwork not as a matter of artistic criticism but for the trend the film represents an alert liberal should recognize the voice of fascism both kubrick and mcdowell responded furiously with letters to the newspaper charging that heckinger not typically a film critic had completely misconstrued the film and its underlying ideas the movie did not celebrate fascism kubrick asserted it condemned the new psychedelic fascism the eye-popping multimedia quadrusonic drug-oriented conditioning of human beings by other human beings mr heckinger is no doubt a well-educated man kubrick included the tone of his peace strikes me also that of a well-conditioned man who responds to what he expects to find who has been told or has read about rather than to what he actually proceeds a clockwork orange to be maybe he should deposit his grab bag of conditioned reflexes outside and go in and see it again this time exercising a little choice a decade after the publication of the novel two years after the release of the film anthony burgess wrote a lengthy essay about a clockwork orange his thoughts on crime and punishment and behavior modification with particular attention to the connections that his novel of his novel to skinner's book beyond freedom and dignity what i was trying to say burgess wrote was it's better to be bad of one's own free will than to be good through scientific brainwashing skinner wanted to demonstrate that the latter conditioning at least was necessary and could be benevolent but burgess continued our world is in a bad way said skinner what were the problems of war pollution in the environment civic violence the population expo explosion human behavior must change that much he says is self-evident and few would disagree and in order to do this we need a technology of behavior skinner had called for technology of behavior of the right sort it is burgess admitted in the schenerian argument conditioning of the wrong sort that turns the hero of clockwork orange into a vomiting paragon of non-aggression but burgess rejected that argument altogether he did not believe there could be the right sort of behavioral conditioning he believed he said in people's freedom to make bad decisions he believed in their rights in their dignity and thanks to his catholic upbringing in the possibility of their redemption fascism in europe burgess contended had been a kind of a clockwork condition a zestless ticking of the human machine skinner's machinery of behavior behaviorism was poised to resurrect this during the nazi occupation of france or just argued people were at their least free but paradoxically they were at least free to recover a sense of dignity of human freedom there was the resistance there was the final and irreducible freedom to say no to evil this is a right not available in a society concerned with reinforcing behavior that a man might be willing to suffer torture and death for the sake of a principle as a kind of mad perversity that makes little sense in a behaviorist laboratory and skinner had said as much himself his technology behavior and that included the teaching machine was not interested in or committed to freedom and that right there to me is the problem with edtech i think in a nutshell right particularly as it was construed by skinner and i think often as it is built and constructed still today in so many ways it is antithetical to freedom it is so deeply concerned with shaping our behavior yet it is antithetical to our freedom and i think to be clear you know there were other reasons why again why skinner why skinner became less popular but i think it's important to recognize that behaviorism did not go away right um it didn't go away not because the science of the cognitive science somehow triumphed but also it didn't go away because it's really part of the technologies of behavior that have persisted to this day um there's a passage that i like to repeat from an article by an education historian ellen convert legoman she says i've often argued the students only in part to be perverse that one cannot understand the history of education in the united states during the 20th century unless one realizes that edward l thornbike won and john dewey lost i'm i'm guessing many of you know who these two men are i'll give a quick biography nonetheless um thorndyke was an education psychology professor at columbia um and who in the early 20th century developed his theory of learning like many of his men did based on animal behavior um he gave us the concept of the learning curve right that is the time it takes for animals to escape a puzzle box after multiple tribes and john dewey on the other hand was a philosopher whose work at the university of chicago's lab school i think was deeply connected to other social reformers in chicago at the time jane adams full house for example dewey was committed to educational inquiry as part of the democratic practices of community thorndike on the other hand was really worked in a lab and he was his work helped me stimulate the sort of growing science and business of surveying quantifying measuring and testing students right and so you can think of this victory that um conflict flagman talks about in part as the triumph of multiple choice testing over project-based inquiry thorndik one do we lost you can't understand the history of education without recognizing this and i don't think you can understand the history of education technology without recognizing this either and i would add one other piece to this you can't understand the history of education technology in the united states during the 20th century unless you realize that bf skinner won and seemed more peppered lost again a quick biographical sketch here pepper was a mathematician computer science he was a student of jean piaget another key figure in education psychology paper was one of the founders of constructionism which builds on piaget's theory of constructivism that is learning can occurs through the reconstruction of knowledge rather than through the transmission of knowledge and in constructionism in paprik's theory learning is most effective when the learner constructs or builds something meaningful so skinner one paperwork lost thorndike one do we lost behaviorism one it really bothers people when i say this like it's not aspirational or something um or maybe it sounds like we've surrendered i don't think i don't think we should surrender um and i think that we've inherited this idea which i tried really hard in my book not to reinscribe we've inherited this idea that skinner is a villain right and i think that people also like to point to things like maker safe spaces um and argue that progressive education is thriving but i would say that you know even in the face of all of this learn to code brouhaha that's happened over the last 10 years or so that multiple choice testing still has triumphed in this country really over democratically oriented inquiry um and indeed when you hear technologists coding it's often about jobs it's really not about a pathway to any other kind of anything else other than employment and when we hear technologists champion personalized learning it's far more likely to draw on skinner's ideas i think than it is on dewey's hence the subtitle of my book i want to draw a line from the kind of things that skinner was talking about to the personalized learning today now one of the places i think that skinnerism really thrives today are in social technologies um despite the field's insistence that it's moved on to cognitive science right despite this cognitive turn i do think that behaviorism is everywhere you know there's bj fogg in his persuasive technology lab at stanford for example he's one of these innovators in this new practice of building hooks and nudges into technology these books these folks like to point out what's been dubbed as the the facebook class the class that fog taught that had um students like kevin systrom and mike krieger the founders of instagram um near isle the author of the book hooked they studied and developed techniques to make our apps and gadgets addictive wired said these technologies of behavior i think we can trace back to skinner even if the technologists themselves don't do so i think that we can see skinners continued and you know i think we can see skinner's work continue to appear in these technologies behavioral management remains a staple really of child wearing of pet training but often of education as well it's at the core of one of the most popular pieces of education technology today class dojo behavior under behaviorism really underscores this idea that how we behave the data that we reveal when we behave when we when we click on things can give engineers insights into what we think into what we know and how they can alter their software in order to better train us to certain ends interestingly michael horn who co-authored a number of books with clayton christensen about education disruption and when he reviewed my book he didn't like it no big surprise he said that my analysis was flawed because he said that we all know that nudges don't work we all know that behaviorism doesn't work no one in edtech uses behaviorism no one does this in any way ed tech contrary to what i argue ed tech is really all about freedom um i think we call that gas lighting trying to convince us right that when kids spend all day in cubicles pre-cube at pre-covet or online on zoom um today using sort of algorithmically enhanced software that what we are seeing aren't we aren't seeing conditioning we aren't seeing attempts to control um i don't think he would admit that skinner won um of course when folks like him insist that edtech is about freedom they are using that word i think in the milton friedman sense of freedom of the market and not so much in any kind of liberatory potential of technology so if we look broadly um and i think skinner did um technologies of behavior really aren't just about trying to train individuals trying to condition individuals they are really part of a broader attempt to re-engineer society this is what skinner wanted and i think that this is this is a goal of many technologists today right it's for your own good the engineers will tell us the entrepreneurs will tell us um education reformers like like michael horn say you know for the sake of the children we want to engineer a better society for the sake of it global community educational psychologist technologist philanthropist psychologist uh mark zuckerberg would like to tell us you know and i think that's worth thinking about what does it mean if what does it mean for us um if indeed so much of edtech so much of the technology that we are compelled to use is really about conditioning and control thanks so much audrey that was that was excellent and gave me tons of things to think about um to get us started um maybe i'll ask uh you know just a tiny question uh if um that was a lie um if edtech is not the future if we if it's not the future that we want for education which i think we can all agree on as humanists then do you think that there are models for what we should be looking at that you know if we're if the models are not the teaching machines what are the historical models we should be looking to for the future yeah this is such a great question i mean i'll answer this in a couple in a couple of different ways one is i'm i'm often accused of being a luddite and um and i like to say hell yeah um i'm a luddite because of course i think the luddites were um i think the when i think when i say that i don't mean that i'm anti-technology i mean i'm i'm wearing glasses um i i'm a big fan of technology um you're currently on zoom i'm currently on zoom we use i mean my room that i'm in has lovely windows really appreciate the innovations that allow sunlight to get through there are technologies that education technologies um that i like the window is probably my favorite education technology for those of us who've ever taught or been in a classroom without windows we know windows are great when i say i'm a luddite though you know the lights also used technology the luddites were not weaving by hand the luddites were using looms what they were opposed to were the looms that were mechanized and owned by someone else they were opposed to this idea that they would no longer have control over their labor and that the the material that they made would be extracted from them in exchange for wages so it was about it was about resisting this sort of extraction and economic exploitation it wasn't just loons are bad um and i think that that's what i like that's what i like to think of with technology right with its digital technologies today like can we think about ways in which we use technologies digital technologies even that aren't that based on this extractive um process that aren't interested in shaping our behaviors ones in which we have a power to influence and shape for me i think some of this comes back to the original idea um of the web um which is a flaw which is definitely flawed um in its own way but the idea of the web as being a place that the exchange of scholarly work can happen and that one can one can participate on the web as a scholar um by posting ones by posting one's work online on one on ones on one's own website um and i think i'm i really support the idea of students um having their own website i'm really keen to see students and this doesn't have to just be college students i think students of of any age really are are able to be scholars are able to participate in scholarly in scholarly in inquiry and able to develop and engage in scholarly in scholarly ideas one gets better at it ideally in college one gets even better at it in graduate school but i think that there are many ways in which we could we could recognize students as being contributors of um to inquiry rather than just being fillers out of worksheets which is what so much of education technology sees us sees it as and as as an addition is really interested in extracting from students their data in in and shaping students behavior and to me i think this we have to think about other models other ways in which we have students have more abilities to not just be shaped by the technology but have a say how to say in their own in their own inquiry yeah that's great and we have a follow-up question from michael lint our director on this topic he says do you think that much education technology carries with it a conception of knowledge that sees knowledge as largely passive if as a largely a passive if rapid acquisition of accurate information as opposed to a more creative grasp or understanding oh absolutely absolutely i mean i think that that's you know i think that that's a pretty common idea of of of education and of course i think that that's one of the things that that many engineers sort of glob onto and then say what we need to do now is to make this more efficient um and by efficient i think they mean faster and of course asterisks cheaper as well i mean this was this is sort of the promise of a lot a lot so many education technologies so many of the things that um that get banned about in headlines right is that i remember being in a classroom or in a meeting with um sebastian thrun the artificial intelligence professor from stanford flash google who who founded the mooc startup udacity and his idea was sort of imagine if we could you could learn french in a weekend it's the sort of matrix idea like imagine if you could just get the you know get this sort of in thing thing in the back of your brain stem and you know kung fu like neo does and to me my response not to the neo part desperate the response to trin was imagine if we actually had a imagine if we cared enough to say you have a lifetime to understand these things rather than saying you have you know we want we want everything to be done efficient efficiency is such a weird it's such a weird metric um for something like learning if you're genuinely interested and curious you want to spend the rest of your life um you want to spend the rest of your life doing it it's not necessarily something that you need to sort of cram into a long weekend um it's just it's just a different model and i think that that model of transmission this idea of efficiency um certain this idea you know and and standardization and automation are the sort of engineers model that then really shapes the way in which these the software the software gets built yeah yeah one of the things that i think you do a really good job of demonstrating in the book is that these the sort of initial impetus in this timeline you're talking about is a kind of uh is sort of about scale right like as public education gets bigger and bigger and there are more and more students we now have this problem where you know a teacher doesn't have a classroom of you know maybe 15 kids they have 30 kids and they have 30 kids in six blocks a day or whatever and so some of the the desire to have this technology seems like a desire to solve the problem of scale when the problem when it seems like the problem of scale would be better solved by more teachers yeah and it's solve the problem of scale right it's it's this i mean it's such an american thing too like so we have this institution of public education you know you you still hear this language today it gets it gets decorated as mass education this fear that somehow because where we expect students um all students to move through our public education system that it's standardized and somehow you know somehow the big fear is that we will lose our individuality and so how do how do we reconcile how do we reconcile moving everybody through the same education and making sure that everyone's individuality is is individual needs are met but also encouraged and it seems counterintuitive in some ways but the answer for engineers the answer for educational psychologists is in order to personalize education what we have to do is automate it um we have to sort of we'll have we'll standardize it um and then we can sort of get get these little standardized pieces to you in precisely precisely the right time and precisely the right dosage at the level with the skill that you need so there's so the personalized learning personalized education i think sounds really good it definitely appeals to americans like hell yeah it's all about me um but i think that that's what it means it doesn't it doesn't mean oh you get to study butterflies and you get to study astronomy and you get to spend your time you know reading novels it just it means we've got a standardized curriculum and we're going to deliver to we're going to automate the delivery to you in the way that sort of dialed in um based on the data that we know about you and we've been collecting data and interested in that project which what i think what my book shows for over a century technologists today like to say that you know we're in the era of big data we have all this data that we've never had before about students and some of that's true but also we have education psychologists have been very interested in collecting huge amounts and crunching huge amounts of data about students for over a century and so this idea of personalization through big data again it's it's not it's not a new idea it's it's it's quite old and we've layered we've layered practices we've learned educational practices our testing regime and we've developed our education technology on top of i think this desire to automate um through big data and and individualized through the collection of data yeah it strikes me that the only thing that these teaching machines personalize is the rate at which you learn not anything else about the learning just the rate at which you go through those pretty much yeah i you know because when i was writing the book i thought i got i gotta get my hands and figure out like what this experience was like because it's it's so much like the reporting that you see today um in which everything is sunshiny and like every time you know i think back to when ipads came out every article that came out was like oh my god these are so amazing and children are so happy they're dancing in the hallways because they have ipads what a you know what a joy what a joy it is for everyone to have an ipad and now you know if you have if you know students who who spend a lot of time like it's just worksheets i'm just doing worksheets on my ipad so i wanted to get my hands on um on a teaching machine from the 1960s um and in case anyone's interested in sort of any sort of old technology the place that one goes to do this of course sadly is ebay um there were a lot of uh of teaching machines these sort of plastic devices that were part of the encyclopedia sales folks would go door-to-door if you buy a set of encyclopedias they'd throw any teaching machine so i got my hands on a teaching machine made by tmi teaching machines inc and their coursework on it was intro to electricity um big fat thing that you sort of moved through and again this is very schinary and skinner only wanted positive reinforcement so each each each little bit of knowledge is very small because you want the student to only get the right answer you don't want negative getting the wrong answer is negative so you only want positive behavioral reinforcement so you only want the right answer and so it moves through the content so slowly um it's like 800 pages and i think i made it through like four questions of of this but it's it's so tough it's so dull um but it's so reminiscent i think of the kind of busy work that still gets you know that we still see today um this sort of view that yeah i get to move through my own pace through the intro to electricity course yay but that that my own pace is pretty much never gonna finish it because it is so so dull that's like the stats you hear about like the number of people who finish any given mooc right of the percentage of people who sign up and it's you know some tiny tiny percentage of people who actually finish any given course because yeah and i think it's you know it is the thing too where you know when when these technologies came into the into the classroom in the in the early 1960s students were excited it was cool it was cool to be part of a pilot program in which you got to you know you got to do your work on a machine like that seems cool and even cooler was when you discovered that because you were moving at your own pace you didn't there was less interaction with a teacher and so if you could move really quickly you know you could move through the algebra work and you didn't you didn't have to wait for anybody um there was no homework also a bonus i mean ask a student to sign up for a pilot program in which there's no algebra homework and tell me how you you know and so students students were really pleased for the first year or so the pilot program and then it doesn't it's you know it's it's less endearing after a while yeah one of the things uh you point out in the book is that people often blame teachers for not wanting to take on these technologies then you've often and you found that often it's more that there's way there's a sort of a myriad of forces working against the adoption of these technologies but do you have a sense of what teachers if students only liked it for a little while in these pilot programs do you have some feedback from teachers and what they thought of these pilot programs it was so interesting i mean again like i said so much of the media that i discovered really reminded me of the way in which education technology and technology reporting um happens still today you could tell that there were a couple of corporations that were really good about when a reporter was working on a story saying you should talk to this teacher you should talk to this principal this superintendent and those that teacher that superintendent that principal were quoted in almost all of the magazine articles almost all of the newspaper articles with glowing reviews of of the technology i mean if you look closely you can sort of see often um in ed search for example it's like the same handful of teachers that that reporters turned to again and again about about these stories and so um there were some studies and there were there were they were often sort of um frustrating to say that there were a couple of teachers who weren't on board with this new technology there were definitely teachers that didn't that just um didn't want to rethink uh didn't want to incorporate the technology into the classroom there weren't teachers that that that found it to be useful with the way in which they taught but by and large i think the mainstream story was teachers you know the innovative teachers teachers who are on the cutting edge um want to use these new technologies and do then again you know most teachers i mean this wasn't really a technology that was widely adopted by schools and i think that others you know we've seen that time and time again where a principal will get really excited a superintendent will get really excited invest invest a ton of money on new technologies these technologies um you know and some some teachers do end up incorporating them but after a while after a year or two they end up you know in the closet you can see this with interactive white boards for example which i think you know were a technology that was supposed to once again revolutionize education um a lot of a lot of money was invested in this and teachers wrote yeah okay whatever um but they weren't they weren't necessarily transformative and now by and large well particularly with the pandemic i mean interactive whiteboards just aren't really a thing any longer unless you still have one in your classroom and they can't afford to replace it yeah yeah i mean but even then it's not necessarily you know you it's not certainly used in a transformative kind of way like you know it's lost yeah yeah i mean they're not that different from when my teachers in high school would write on transparencies on an overhead projector it's functionally the same thing just fancier um we have a couple of questions from the audience i'm going to start with this question from eric berg who says on the topic of automation with recommendation algorithms in charge of feeding the next video or post to users of platforms do you think there's a potential of shaping not only what people learn see but also what people want to learn or want to see a reinforcing feedback loop so to speak yeah absolutely i mean i think that one of the places that we actually see this already in in education is with guidance counseling so of course um because of budget cuts many public schools most public schools even do not have guidance counselors or do not have a sufficient number of guidance counselors for the number of students so guidance counselors might have you know three to five hundred students per guidance counselor and so increasingly these are guidance counselors and career counseling and college counseling relying on algorithms to help students decide where to go to college um and what to major in um or what to indicate on on college applications what they what they should major in and these absolutely do influence on the kinds of decisions that colleges or the students make at college some schools have also adopted um software that recommends courses for students to take and this unfortunately so much of this software is black boxed we don't we don't actually know what goes into the algorithms that that feed it so we can't you know you can't necessarily pinpoint and and say um it's making it's making a decision based on you know um we can't actually sort of see how the decision gets how the decision gets made but students are certainly being steered away from particular degrees students are being steered away from particular schools and no surprise that often does have implications along race gender students of color for example steered towards community colleges for example away from ivy leagues schools students of color steered away from engineering majors towards um majors that are seen as easier um like business i don't know like psychology maybe sorry um but yeah i i i do think i do think that it's not just it's not just in the kind of algorithm the the youtube algorithms that we've definitely seen in the last five years or so steer us towards um um refusing to believe that people landed on the moon um that in vaccinations it's not just sort of knowledge at that level but even within school even within schooling i think that we're definitely starting to see students being steered away from certain classes students being steered away from certain applying to certain universities yeah wow uh we have one additional question um this is from yohei garagi our director of digital humanities and media studies and he says a question not from a jock but from someone who doesn't mind learning stuff online he says there are some similarities between learning a subject and learning a physical activity i wonder what you would say about sports which might be a domain where there are clear residues of scenery and conditioning in the process of learning repetition positive or negative reinforcement etc i suppose athletic training of this kind is behaviorist but isn't it also somewhat effective i mean i think that this is this is all with the this is i think the dilemma of of behaviorism for me um one and one of the realism realizations that i had as i was sort of finishing up the book and working with my working with my dog and i think that is that it is really effective um behaviorism you know i think that if if you look at the ways in which a lot of um a lot of education programs work as well ways in which a lot of teachers teachers understand behaviors and parents understand behaviorism i mean i think that they're you know i think that it is it is incredibly it is incredibly effective i think that the the problem is i think the problems are are multiple i think that we can but one of the problems i think is that when when these things get hard-coded into technology it's a bit like the black box algorithm it's much harder for us to unpack it or make changes or give you know give the um give our subject give our pigeon a chance to express um their freedom um because we we actually don't have a full understanding we don't have full insight into the way in which their behavior is being is being shaped um but yeah i think that i mean i do think that we know that behaviorism isn't is incredibly effective but i think that that that should give us that probably should give us pause um and not just steamroll forward um uh with it but yeah i mean i think that i i think that one of the things i often talk about is the learning management system or even actually something like zoom right you know when you think about the the infrastructure of the classroom um there are things that we well there are the classrooms that we all decide when we find that we've been assigned to teach in them or us we have a classroom a class in them right the classrooms without windows for example or but particularly the ones where the chairs are nailed down because i think we've we understand that even though the classrooms have many classrooms still have rows of desks in them um particularly us humanists we do like to rearrange the classroom so that everyone's sitting in a circle we understand that the power dynamics are different in the circle that different things happen with discussion um there's a different there's just a different way of both teaching and learning when the space has been rearranged but we can't rearrange the furniture if you will of the learning management system we can't rearrange the furniture of zoom we don't have access we don't have access to the code um even if we did have access to the code many of us don't have the skills to to rearrange rearrange the architecture of the technology and i think that that's one of the challenges that we face with so many of these technologies is that um that means then that we are really stuck with the pedagogies that the creators of the technology design the the kinds of teaching that they imagine to happen the kinds of learning that they imagine to happen um they that there there isn't a way that we can sort of you know and then it's the kind of teaching and learning that happened that um that that happened in classrooms where the desks you know there's a way in which the university imagined teaching and learning with the roads of desks right with the giant auditoriums that but there are ways in which we can resist that and we can work around that it just gets much harder i think with with technology to do that it gets much harder it gets much harder for us to sort of help our students sort of resist resist the kinds of pedagogies that are more dictatorial that are more authoritarian that are more extractive and so i think that that's i think that that's one of the challenges that that we face yeah yeah i've definitely been stuck in a classroom that didn't have desks that moved and had to either request a new classroom or reimagine the way i was organizing the entire class because it required desks that move yeah yeah i mean these things these technology technologies they do shape constrain our pedagogy right and i think that you know when we think about what is the pedagogy that silicon valley for example use the shorthand that technologists education technologists imagine teaching and learning we know this we know they imagine teaching and learning to look a certain way um their their vision of the of of good teaching and learning looks a certain way and that's how these these things get designed or or also they don't think at all about teaching and learning which is another problem but but yeah i mean i think that we are then stuck in the classroom without the movable chairs so often with edtech we're sort of stuck with what their vision their vision of efficient organized automated algorithmic education transmission of knowledge yeah yeah that's great um i have i have one more question and we have one more in the q a do you think we have time for two more let's do it okay so uh jonathan martinez says um can you talk more about the concept of skinner having won but the fact that we shouldn't lose hope even though skinner has won he says is it in a more unified and expanded theory of critical digital pedagogy perhaps so good question so i have a talk coming up of this so i'm known as edtex cassandra which i did not choose that name for myself because i know what happened to cassandra man i don't i don't want that um that said i do tend to be the person who says hey let's not wheel that shiny horse into the university because that's going to be a bad idea um so i get it so i'm not known as the person with like the sunny happy everything's gonna be amazing technology is wonderful that is not me that's not my thing so i'm giving a talk in a couple of weeks and about the future and about hope because i do think hope um is really important and i i am hopeful one of the reasons that i am hopeful is because i know history and i think that there is the way in which amnesia right this sort of edtech amnesia and it's an amnesia that the tech industry really has embraced the tech industry does not believe in understanding history does not want to know about history they only want to talk about the future i think we have to know history i think that but i think that i find hope in history because i know looking back at the history of teaching machines even that there was resistance there was always resistance people have always refused and said no this is a terrible idea um we aren't alone in our refusal that technology hasn't been triumphant it never has been triumphant right that despite you know um thomas edison who said you know you know we're gonna get in a few years we'll get rid of textbooks and they'll be replaced by replaced by film like he wasn't literally invested in that future right it's just not happened it's about all of these predictions that the future was going to be more and more technological that we should just hand over the reins to public education to engineers and entrepreneurs it just hasn't happened right so i think we can look to the past and understand that resistance is possible um and that resistance is is is not futile right i think that we i think that's incredibly important so that's one of the reasons that's one of the reasons why i have hope and i also know that these things are not natural right the the way in which the education system is um and it's pretty screwed up right i mean i think it's as much as i am a critic of the technology industry it's impossible to be a defender of the university for example is the way in which the institute the institutions own history in a way which is manifested today i think it's i think it's um it's not good but these are man these are sort of human-made institutions right we did not sort of inherit um these immutable institutions people who say schools haven't changed in hundreds of years schools have changed a lot schools change all the time change is possible right and so we aren't stuck with these if you know ursula le guin said like if if humans made this right and it is incumbent upon us to dismantle it and i think that we absolutely can so that's that's where i have hope that's great thank you um uh jonathan wonders if y

2022-06-10 07:17

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