Prohibiting students from cheating on traditional assessments using expensive tech tools to perform very basic 20th century tasks is the new transformation.

EdTech as we currently know it is dead, it’s over. We should retire the phrase right now. If education is to be the target of an industry that has grown increasingly obsessed with standardization, control, automation, and delivery efficiencies, then we must opt out. This is not to say that we should abandon digital tools in the classroom. Far from it. I am very much an advocate for learning environments that provide learners with opportunities to do things that will enhance deep learning and provide students with the potential to do real, meaningful work, not simply mimic it. But this approach to learning needs to reside with the individual learner in mind, not with an industrial mindset that is driven by a desire to impose efficiency and control solutions on all. This is what EdTech has increasingly become now and it’s dead to me after ISTE. Let’s imagine what learning can be, not how we can run it to scale with organizational and industry needs driving the agenda.

Forget EdTech. Learning is about learners and this includes learning with digital and other possibilities, not solutions. Learning should be by design, not product. Learners first.

Source: Google, ISTE, and the Death of EdTech – maelstrom