Selected Essays
Audrey Watters
All Hack Education Articles
(Marketing) Virtual Reality in Education: A History
Virtual reality is not new. What's being sold to schools right now as VR is perhaps not even virtual reality. Rather it's stereoscopy with a more expensive device. It's the Android strapped to your forehead. The arguments for this technology echo those made at the turn of the 20th century for using films in class....
Coding Bootcamps and the New For-Profit Higher Ed
In October 2015, the Obama Administration announced a new initiative that would allow coding bootcamps, MOOCs, and other ed-tech experiments to be eligible for federal financial aid. It's a bit odd, perhaps, that it would do this while also saying it's interested in cracking down on for-profit higher education. Here's a history to link this all together....
No, Sesame Street Was Not the First MOOC
Research arguing that Sesame Street is just as good as preschool has been making the rounds lately. One of the arguments: Sesame Street is the first MOOC. Nope. It wasn't. Indeed, Sesame Street is the opposite of what's become popularized as MOOCs. Because Sesame Street is actually based on research....
The Invented History of 'The Factory Model of Education'
The "factory model of education" is invoked to describe our current system of schooling, one that is -- like factories, I suppose -- outmoded. But the history of the "factory model," as told by Alvin Toffler and Salman Khan, is an invented one, not so much about education's past as its future....
How Steve Jobs Brought the Apple II to the Classroom
How did Apple come to dominate the education computing market in the 1980s? In part through a legislative push from Steve Jobs, who lobbied for a bill that would have made donating computers to schools a tax write-off. He failed at the federal level, but he succeeded in California....