Stephen Downes

Somewhere in all of this is a good point, and that's what I would like to focus on. The good point is this: "part of the problem of ed tech is that the industry always wants a General application. They have been raised on a diet of 'Disruption' blather, and 'Revolution' nonsense. For disruption to occur it has to impact across the sector." But in education, says Martin Weller, "we're more often concerned with specific applications." All that is true. The rest of the analysis, however, that characterizes specific technologies as 'specific' or 'general', is confused and mostly wrong. XR can be general or specific. AI can be general or specific. What makes a technology - any technology - general rather than specific is that it seeks to standardize on something. Even then, that can be OK: syntactic generalization is great; we want our tools to be interoperable. Semantic generalization, where we want people to all learn the same thing, believe the same thing, follow the same learning path - that is where generalization becomes problematic, no matter what technology you use.