Thinking About Ed Tech
Jim Groom,
bavatuesdays,
Jun 17, 2022
This is a continuation of Jim Groom's thoughts about edtech (I could have combined them into one post I suppose, but I didn't). The term 'edtech' feels a lot like the term 'open', he says. "More recently when folks talk about edtech it's often associated with venture capital buy-outs, start-ups, and the broader LMS market," write Groom, "Edtech, on the other hand, was a brave new distributed community of bloggers that were narrating and sharing their practices for others to benefit from freely." But "To see the avant garde of that movement so willingly consign themselves to venture capital and the inevitable professional perdition that follows is a shame, but it's also a choice. There are a lot of edtechs, in the true sense of that word for me, that have willingly resisted the lure of exchanging cachet for cash (and embrace) edtech as an approach that is exploratory, experimental, and creative, not to mention generous and unbolted to the logic of licensing and litigation."
As someone who has spent some 30 or so years in the field, I can say that as you become successful (or if you start successful by graduating from some elite university) there's a lot of pressure, both internal and external, to become a 'success' by launching a startup, partnering with industry, signing a publishing deal, filing a patent, etc. But I also see is that this is also the end of that person's creative career; now they're just profit-taking. And it's a choice, and it's OK, but I douldn't look to them to define the field any longer. There's an old saying, "You can create change or get credit for it, but not both." I think it could be adapted to say "You can create change, or create profit, but not both." I know it looks like teach billionaires have created a lot of change, and they did, before they got rich, but they got rich by entrenching existing structures of power and wealth, not by challenging them.
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