Reflections on Audrey Watters

I've really been enjoying the Audrey Watters readings. She has a more negative lens about much of the modern educational technology than I do. However, I can't find any point she made that I can outright disagree with. She does a great job of articulating concerns that I have had about a variety of topics and does so in a way that gives me a bit of a chuckle. 

When she wrote about the "flipped classroom" she had me reflecting back on conferences that I went to a number of years ago that touted the benefits of this model of teaching. The presenters were all very convincing. It seems that it was at a similar time that I was hearing all the reasons why we should be moving away from homework. These were very similarly convincing arguments. I never was able to resolve the two points.

I was entertained by her criticism of "clickers".  I agree with her that the concept is not new. I have seen variations of it over the years. I am not sure that I agree with the statement "The greatest trick the ed-tech devil ever played was convincing people that clicking was “active learning.” I have been to many presentations in recent years in which I have been asked to take out my phone and respond to some survey in the middle of the presentation. I do think that it probably keeps me more engaged in the presentation than if I were just sitting and listening and trying not to let my mind wander. It isn't more engaging than a really good presenter though and I agree with her that it isn't really all that "fun" after you have done it once or twice before. 

Of course, I also appreciated her support for libraries. She recognized that libraries are still alive and well and actively working to make things more equitable by eliminating fines at many libraries. I also connected with her statement about technology making life more difficult for librarians in regards to protecting patrons privacy. My district made the decision to stop keeping a history of our patron checkouts for privacy reasons but our high school librarian has been using Sora for ebooks and audiobooks and hasn't been able to find any way to stop that from keeping a history of patron checkouts. 

Most of all, I found her posts informative and entertaining. Many of the updates that she provided in her 2019 post "The 100 Worst Ed-Tech Debacles of the Decade" referenced sites or technology that I was not familiar with. Slave Tetris? Really? If she were continuing to write about Ed-Tech, I would probably follow her because her posts are a entertaining way to keep up with what's out there. I would just take it all with a grain of salt, since she is more negative than I would like to be about much of the Ed-Tech world.