I didn’t go to ISTE this year, and not just because it overlapped with ALA. Over the past few conference visits, I’ve been uncomfortable about the overall lack of depth of ideas. There seems to be a lot of cheerleading for the wonders of technology without also thinking about how, as a community of vendors and educators, we leverage that technology not just do educate differently but to improve overall learning. And the conference seems so costly despite so much corporate wallpapering everywhere … and educators are told such a conference is only possible, and only at this price point, due to vendors.
Now, I know a lot of library schools preach that librarians should not cultivate relationships with vendors. I would say, instead, that we should not cultivate relationships with unhelpful, heavy-handed, rigid, or manipulative vendors. But good vendors? Responsive vendors? The very best conversations come when I sit with vendors who have a uniquely broad view of education and/or librarianship and/or making and we mash that up with the narrower but deeper view of practitioners. By combing depth with breadth, good vendors can be one of our best allies.
And I’ve seen some very powerful vendor-educator interactions and conversations at SXSWedu (I know! I was surprised, too!). When vendors and educators come together to pool ideas, identify common barriers, and together brainstorm how we can improve the social, personal, or other lives of our students/patrons, then we can achieve a confluence of product and pedagogy.
Yet at ISTE, I’ve found that products often trump pedagogy, and often the brawny budgets and marketing of corporations seem to steer the agenda. Instead of engaging in the tough conversations of education — how do we juggle motivation with challenge? how do we really crack the code when it comes to disenfranchised students in underserved neighborhoods? how can technology jumpstart the achievement of the American Dream for all? — it’s nice swag and product reps and educators alike shilling for products. (Imagine a world where you create a product and educators pay hundreds of dollars — either taxpayer dollars or their own personal money — to travel to sell it to others! Amazing!)
Your experience may be different from mine. I get that. I see educators who are completely pumped up from the experience, cheering on the “just let the children loose and they will soar!” speakers and not giving themselves heartburn by inserting “middle-class, well-cared-for” in front of “children,” as I find myself wont to do. Darn those internal added appositive phrases.
So I was pleased? frustrated? disappointed? delighted? to find I wasn’t the only one. Writes Adam Rosensweig of Beyond 12 on Medium:
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I came to my first ISTE expecting to find educators sharing stories of inspiration and struggle , because ISTE is presumably a conference for teachers — and those are usually the kinds of things that teachers talk about. Sure, I expected to preview the latest gadgets and gizmos, and to navigate the … corporate sponsors. But I also expected to find at least a few critical conversations. Some attempt to deflate the mile-high rhetoric that implicitly ingrains the causal link between consumption and learning … I was disappointed…
ISTE is not an educational or reflective or collaborative environment. ISTE, more than anything, is a sales environment. I was ashamed of my naive expectations. Then sad that I might be wasting my time here. Then, finally, angry that nearly 15,000 educators might be wasting their time here, and that we were all potentially letting down the … students we represent…
This year, Jim Siegl earns highest literary praise for predicting the “edtech TurDuckEn” — inevitably some kind of VR-learn-to-code-wearable which can be 3D printed in social studies class…
Oh, this would be hilarious if only it didn’t seem so true…
… it was difficult to find conversations that didn’t center around discrete products. As a result, the prevalent mode of framing problems and solutions is to begin with a set of technical features and then seek or invent corresponding educational needs [emphasis added] …
What’s lost in a sales environment is the space for educators … to reflect on real problems and conceive independently the features that authentic solutions would have to offer in order to be good enough for their students. What’s lost in a sales environment is the cultural permission for skeptical but disempowered teachers to call out the endless parade of useless tech that threatens to consume their time, budgets, and energy. What’s lost is the opportunity to convene 15,000 professional educators to collaborate on evolving pedagogies in order to harness and drive (rather than be driven) by evolving tech.
Amen. Read the entire piece here for a reminder of what those of us who plan professional development need to be mindful of as we plan.