My greatest objection to being tagged like livestock was that it would only be a short matter of time before some bonehead referred to the fantabulous “Smart Badges” as educational technology. When I mentioned this to my friend Chris Lehmann, he told me that it already had.

Q: Why is ISTE using smart badges?
A: ISTE recognizes the value of personalized learning and wants to do all we can to create custom and individualized educational experiences for each of our attendees. Smart badges will allow us to provide you with your own “ISTE 2018 Journey” post conference. The journey will detail the sessions you attended and the resources you collected. It’s like taking notes with your feet! Additionally, this data will allow the ISTE team to further personalize the conference experience now and in the future. This aggregate data, combined with registration information, will provide more comprehensive insights into attendee patterns and activities.

Therein lies the problem. Tracking students legs, bums, or corneas is not education. It is not personalization, a fantasy that after decades has produced little more than dispensing a multiple-choice question based on how well you answered another multiple-choice question. Personalized learning is at best machine-based testing. It has little to do with teaching beyond automation and nothing to do with learning. Yet, ISTE’s largest corporate sponsors profit greatly by this hideous handful of magic beans.

The greatest threat of the ISTE “Smart Badges” is the denaturing of educational computing’s powerful potential and the organization’s misanthropic service of corporate sponsors, often in ways detrimental to its members – the ones who justify its tax-exempt status.

Source: ISTE’s Dopey Dystopia : Stager-to-Go