By Audrey Watters. MOOCs and UnMOOCs*
“Where Ebola Has Closed Schools, A Radio Program Provides A Faint Signal Of Hope” by NPR’s Ofeibea Quist-Arcton.
From Daniel Lemire: “MOOCs are closed platforms… and probably doomed.”
* I am hoping that I can retire this category in 2015. More...

By Audrey Watters. As part of his graduate work, B. F. Skinner invented what’s now known as “the Skinner Box.” His “operant conditioning chamber” was used to study and to train animals to perform certain tasks. Do the task correctly; get a reward (namely food).
Skinner was hardly the first to use animals in psychological experiments that sought to understand how the learning process works. More...

By Audrey Watters. As part of my work as an education writer, I research a number of topics in-depth. Below, you'll find links to various projects - past and present.
I am available for paid research projects. (Email me for more information.) Or, alternately, you can fund my research through a donation.
Ongoing Projects
Teaching Machines: My forthcoming book on the cultural history of ed-tech and the long-running drive to automate teaching and learning.
Ed-Tech Trends: My annual review of the 10 most significant trends in education technology.
Ed-Tech Funding: An open data initiative to track education technology companies that receive angel and venture capital investment.
Ed-Tech Guide: What should educators and technologists know about ed-tech. More...

By Audrey Watters. Here is the transcript of my talk tonight at Pepperdine University. Many thanks to Linda Polin for inviting me to speak to her students.
When people ask me how I ended up becoming an education technology writer, I’m never quite sure how to answer. I don’t have a degree in “education” or “technology” or even “writing.” I sometimes joke that I took an aptitude test in junior high that gave me one career option — freelance writer — a result that, truth be told, caused me to panic a bit and dismiss the idea altogether. More...

By Audrey Watters. Here are the notes and the slides from my talk today with Justin Reich's HGSE class "The Future of Learning at Scale." Between the jetlag (I got home from England late last night) and the fact that I've got way more to say about teaching machines than can fit into a 20 minutes talk, I'm not sure I was super coherent. But the students had great questions at the end (I've storified some of their tweets). More...

By Audrey Watters. I spent much of 2014 on the road, traveling and speaking extensively about education technology’s histories, ideologies, and mythologies. The Monsters of Education Technology is a collection of fourteen of those talks on topics ranging from teaching machines to convivial tools, from ed-tech mansplaining to information justice. For more information, visit the book website. More...

By Audrey Watters. I'm spending the holidays updating all my sites. It isn't simply a matter of a new template or a new look. I'm moving everything out of my current CMS and onto Jekyll. My apologies if things are broken, particularly when it comes to the RSS feed. Send me an email if you find specific problems. Or better yet, since this is all on Github, file an issue. More...