The tech press is responsible in part for a large portion of our techno-utopianism. They wore rose colored glasses and didn't ask the more probative questions they should have been asking until it was too late?

Where was our tech Cassandra?

Read [[Audrey Watters]] in Leaving Substack (Again)

https://www.civicsoftechnology.org/blog/whose-interests-do-teaching-machines-serve

And isn't this what everyone should really be doing anyway so that they own their own work and words?

http://hackeducation.com/2022/01/03/next

Good to see Audrey back in the fray!

As I've heard in the Indieweb chat: "Silos gonna silo."

Does the script Audrey Watters is using really stop people from annotating her site directly?

Based on my quick test, one can still (carefully) use Hypothes.is to highlight and annotate her site, but the script at least prevents Hypothes.is from showing that annotation. When visiting her site with Hypothes.is' Chrome browser extension on, it does show that there is one annotation on the page. It then requires some hunting to find this comment.

I’ve spent some time thinking about this type of blocking in the past and written about a potential solution. Kevin Marks had created a script to help prevent this type of abuse as well; his solution and some additional variants are freely available. — {cja}

I see her argument as an extension of Tim O'Reilly's essay "The Architecture of Participation" . And I see it as a Marxist way of viewing political and economic agency as a function of some idea substructure. Although I find it intriguing that Watters uses a mesh metaphor at the end of the post. We are enmeshed in rather than standing upon political and philosphical assumptions and axioms.

I cannot begin to say what "future-facing" means. I am reminded of an old George Carlin routine where he notes that a plastic Jesus in one's car is probably facing the wrong way. If Jesus is helping you, then he ought to be looking at the damned road, right, not you. I don't think we need to project onto the future a roadmap (template) especially one that is as waste-ridden and futile as 'school'. Talk about a manifestion of Eliot's wasteland. Rather I think we need to feedforward from the future. We need to imagine what we mean by content and context delivery and connected learning and the programmable web. Then we need to allow ourselves to be drawn toward that future as we live in the present. And we need to allow ourselves to modify that future present like a feedback loop.

learning as a process that develops the __.

You fill in the blank with your own expertise NOT HERS or any others. If this all about power and control then the ends and means must be about that as well, even to the point of arguing individually for the idea that content is king.

You MUST control what you share and know and are. What makes this dictum any different than programmed learning where you must mast this set of content. Just Watters telling us what we must do as opposed to Skinner.

Watters and the history of the future of education.