The recent piece by Vauhini Vara, “How Chatbots and AI Are Already Transforming Kid’s Classrooms” is important reading for the week, and there’s much in it to infuriate. It’s good.
But there’s one paragraph, arguably featuring the least enraging material, that I paused over because it’s a testament to how successful the tech industry has been in ensuring that the favorable language they use to frame and retail their products is the language we all use to describe them.
Vara writes
The outreach from Silicon Valley seems to follow a playbook developed during a decades-long attempt to turn public education into a market for private products. That effort has seen some high-profile failures: for instance, massive open online courses, which were supposed to expand access through web-based classes, and personalized learning regimes, which were supposed to use software to perfectly match students with material at their level. It has also included the enormously successful diffusion of screen-based education platforms such as Google Classroom. One lesson learned along the way is that school technologies rarely catch on without buy-in from teachers.
It’s deeply gratifying to read a journalist recalling the most recent colossal failure of the tech industry to “disrupt” education. That’s excellent. But it’s that bit I put in bold that we need to put pressure on, and only then can we start to become better advocates for ourselves as educators and (for those who aren’t educators) citizens who have a stake in all this, because our future depends upon the competencies and compassions of today’s students. And the tech industry is doing everything in its power to diminish that.
And so. That phrase I bolded: MOOCs "were supposed to expand access through web-based classes.” Sure, that’s one way of putting it. That’s certainly how they were sold. Another would be to say that their value proposition was for universities looking for new revenue streams. In that case, MOOCs weren’t about access. They were about expanding the market for education past what the physical structure of a university campus could accommodate and what the university was willing to pay for increasing the number of faculty to do the education. More students without the need for more classrooms, without the need for more professors.
No university went wild for MOOCs because they were excited about bringing ArtHist 101: Introduction to Art History to students in faraway places. They went wild because MOOCs were supposed to make them money, and for a fraction of the overheads.
That’s not “expanding access.” That’s creating and capturing a new market.
When vendors feed you language, it’s in the hopes that you’ll regurgitate it to sell their product for them. Like using an LLM to write for you, it’s easier than thinking for yourself.
Vara’s piece is good journalism and she’s obviously thinking for herself. My point is that all of us do this, all of us slip into canned phrases from time to time. The best we can do is audit those phrases, try to avoid them, and stay alert to the work that they do.