Information and digital literacy in education via the digital path

What are the key questions that educators should ask when assessing new edtech?

One of the great myths the edtech industry tries to sell us is that it invented personalised learning.

Edtech companies trumpet the promise of using computers to teach, with students able to move at their own pace through the material in an individualised way, seeing exactly the content that they need to learn at precisely the right level for them, at just the moment they need to see it. 

The problem is, it’s not new – and it’s not really personalised.  

As in previous years, it would be quite easy to fill a whole article in this series on “data insecurity,” on the data breaches and cyberattacks that continue to plague education – both schools and software. The issue extends well beyond education technology, of course, and in 2017 we witnessed yet again a number of high profile incidents (including some corporate admissions of breaches that had happened in years past): that over 140 million Social Security Numbers and other personal data had been stolen in a data breach at Equifax, for starters; that every single account at Yahoo – some 3 billion in all – had been affected in its 2013 breach.

Audrey Watters answers the question whether we’re ‘addicted’ to technology:

I am hesitant to make any clinical diagnosis about technology and addiction – I’m not a medical professional. But I’ll readily make some cultural observations, first and foremost, about how our notions of “addiction” have changed over time. “Addiction” is medical concept but it’s also a cultural one, and it’s long been one tied up in condemning addicts for some sort of moral failure. That is to say, we have labeled certain behaviors as “addictive” when they’ve involve things society doesn’t condone. Watching TV. Using opium.