By Audrey Watters. It’s time once again for my annual review of the dominant trends in education technology. This is the fifth year that I’ve done this. It’s a massive undertaking, aided in part by the weekly roundups of all the education-related news that I write every week. It’s a project that I both dread – I mean, this is how I will spend December – and adore. I learn so much about the politics, industry, implementation, ideology, business, and bullshit by scrutinizing the year's occurences so closely. More...

By Audrey Watters. I was supposed to spend 2014 finishing my first book Teaching Machines. But that didn’t happen. It didn’t happen for a lot of reasons, many of which have to do with the economic realities of being a woman outside of academia, outside of mainstream journalism writing about ed-tech. Strangely, I don’t get offered big book deals.
Instead I spent much of 2014 on the road, traveling and speaking extensively about ed-tech’s histories, ideologies, and mythologies. People will pay you to keynote, I’ve learned, (or at least, they'll pay your travel expenses) even if you insist that you're a writer, not a speaker. More...

By Audrey Watters. MOOCs and UnMOOCs
JetBlue announced a number of measures to improve its profitability this week: charging for checked bags, for example. But hey! Look! It’s partnered with Coursera to offer MOOCs as part of the “in-flight entertainment” system. Sounds like the future of ed-tech to me. More...