Some good thoughts here about the relation between scale and edtech. "Access is a problem of scale at one level and I am committed to working on that but I increasingly hear reductive views of digital learning limited to students navigating personalised pathways through high-end content and teachers interpreting that learning through analytics. This seems devoid of any kind of good relations and community." She continues, "I remember a time when I got excited about generative and liberating uses of technology... I think this is still possible, and I think work around open practices, open pedagogies, ethics of care, and decolonisation point the way towards how to do it in today's dogpile of an internet." I agree.
But why is it this way? Ben Werdmuller points to the cause. "The need for high scale is a crater that has been dug in the fabric of civic life. For a startup to be venture fundable, it must demonstrate that it is scalable: in other words, it can plausibly grow to be a billion dollar company without linearly increasing the size of its team." This, he says, is the startupification of education. "Venture funding isn't the only way to fund a startup, but it's certainly the way that's caught the public's and the industry's imagination, and the result is that the notion of scalability has, too."
The difference between education based on conversations and relationships and education based on data and analytics is that in the former, but not the latter, each connection is unique. It occurs in a specific context, with specific people, with distinct backgrounds, perspectives, goals and values. It's not something that can be mass produced; it requires mass participation, but not of each person doing the same thing, but of each person doing different things. Datafication and analytics produce abstractions, reproducibility, and scale, but at the cost of sterility and meaninglessness. They produce action without responsibility, content without provenance, requirements without justification. The only meaningful metric is volume, and this subsumes all other measures of value and consideration.
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