EdTech: The Perils of Bad Data in Higher Ed

In this episode we dive into how data, educational technologies (or “EdTech”), and other technological forces are shaping and sometimes harming higher education. The guests  are Martha Fay Burtis, an associate director of the Open Learning and Teaching Collaborative at Plymouth State University, and Jesse Stommel, a faculty member in the writing program at the University of Denver and cofounder of Hybrid Pedagogy: The Journal of Critical Digital Pedagogy.

In a recent article for the AAUP's Academe magazine, Burtis and Stommel explain how “increasingly, technology companies are treating educational institutions as conglomerations of data, reducing the human teachers, staff, and students to bits and binary. Too many of these companies are more interested in selling solutions to problems of data than they are in genuinely supporting the people represented by those data.” Listen for more.

Links:

• "Bad Data Are Not Better Than No Data,  Academe
• "Counter-friction to Stop the Machine: The Endgame for Instructional Design", Hybrid Pedagogy  
• "Undoing the Grade: Why We Grade and How to Stop,'" Hybrid Pedagogy 
• Design Forward faculty development program