The Problem With Education Technology ─ Hint: It's Not the Technology

Education is in crisis—at least, so we hear. And at the center of this crisis is technology. New technologies like computer-based classroom instruction, online K–12 schools, MOOCs (massive open online courses), and automated essay scoring may be our last great hope—or the greatest threat we have ever faced.

In The Problem with Education Technology, Ben Fink and Robin Brown look behind the hype to explain the problems—and potential—of these technologies. Focusing on the case of automated essay scoring, they explain the technology, how it works, and what it does and doesn’t do. They explain its origins, its evolution (both in the classroom and in our culture), and the controversy that surrounds it. Most significantly, they expose the real problem—the complicity of teachers and curriculum-builders in creating an education system so mechanical that machines can in fact often replace humans—and how teachers, students, and other citizens can work together to solve it.

Offering a new perspective on the change that educators can hope, organize, and lobby for,The Problem with Education Technology challenges teachers and activists on “our side,” even as it provides new evidence to counter the profit-making, labor-saving logics that drive the current push for technology in the classroom.

Ben Fink taught writing at the University of Minnesota and now directs theater, writing, and community engagement programs at Appel Farm Arts and Music Center in rural southern New Jersey. He is an active participant in the Imagining America network, a national organization of artists and humanists in public life.

Robin Brown is Morse-Alumni Distinguished Professor at the University of Minnesota. His career has focused on the multiple interrelationships of rhetoric, science, technology, politics, and identity and an ongoing theoretical and practical investigation into how humane academic cultures might be structured and managed.