Audrey Watters talks about her book ‘Teaching Machines’ (repeat from 2020)

0:00Welcome to Education, Technology, Society, a podcast about education in the digital age. Hello and welcome back to season 4 of Education, Technology, Society. Now one of the things that we wanted to do for this season of ETS is to occasionally go back and revisit some classic interviews from a precursor to this podcast. A previous podcast I did that I guess most people wouldn't have heard of called Meet the Education researcher. Now meet the education researcher around from 2018 to the end of 2024. I'm a picture of general education audience, although I occasionally try to smuggle in some critical, ed tech voices. So I thought it'd be really cool to rescue some of these chats for posterity for the ETS audience and who better to start off with than replaying an interview from 2020 with Audrey Waters. Now most people listening to ETS will be well aware of Audrey's work. She's a legendary critical voice in the world of education and technology.

1:00And she does all of this while operating as an independent scholar and freelance journalist. So my excuse for catching up with Audrey in 2020 was to talk about the then impending 2021 book with MIT press around the automation of learning. This is the book that I'm sure lots of people are well aware of, teaching machines, the history of personalized learning. We go through all of that in this chat and some of the fascinating characters that she owns in on during the book. But before we talked about the book, I was first also really interested in finding a little bit more out about how Audrey got working as an independent scholar in the education and technology scene. So I started the interview off by asking Audrey exactly how she would describe her job. Yeah, how would I describe it? I would say it first and foremost, I think of myself as a writer. But I do think of myself as a scholar and as a journalist. I mean it's important, I think all of those. I think that I've been interested in education technology for, I mean since I was in graduate school,

2:09partially with sort of the compulsion in the compulsion to use the learning management system, sort of got me thinking and even before then as an undergraduate, I got my degree via the time distance ed. And so I've just had a lot of experiences that have made me think about education technology. And as I started, after I dropped out of graduate school and started looking for a new career, I wanted to write. And I wanted to write about education technology. And I found that people, a lot of mainstream publications weren't really into it. A lot of tech publications weren't particularly into it either, into the education port. So I started my own website and I've really been covering, I think covering education technology as a journalist would, writing about what's new, what's happening. But then also I think taking some of the skills that I learned in university and really trying to uncover the theory and the history of the industry and the practices as well.

3:19But got your PhD was in folklore, was it? I have a master's degree in folklore. I was working on a PhD in comparative literature. So for someone who has a kind of literary background writing about technology and education and technology, sounds quite dry. So for me, I think one of the flaws of how we approach technology is that too many people, and I think that your work is sort of different from this as well. You are a poachist as a sociologist, but so many people approach technology as this just about the tech. And so I find that when we're talking about education technology, people get so obsessed with that, with the product that they really aren't thinking about the context in which it was built or funded or implemented or some of the other, to me, much more interesting pieces. So I feel like the tech in some ways is like a red herring, you know, or it's just something that we focus on that makes us not pay attention to the things that we really should be.

4:26This moves us on to the book that's coming out soon, teaching machines, a history of the automation of education. I mean, what's the 30 second elevator pitch for the book? It's a book about the history of personalized learning and personalized learning via technology. And I think it's important for me to talk about the ways in which this is not something that saw Khan invented, you know, with Khan Academy. This isn't something that just we can not just now unlock because of the power of computers. This has really been a century long project by educational, educational psychologists, by business. And really, I think that's how we've ended up with our education technology today is this long history of teaching machines, of personalizing education through automation, which sounds incongruous. But that's how it works. But it's the classic question of how did things come to be this way?

5:26Exactly. Exactly. So let's go through a couple of the main characters in the book, Sydney Pressy, who is Sydney Pressy, and why are we still talking about him in 2020? Well, this is hard. Sydney Pressy was an Ohio State University education psychologist. And like many of the men, overwhelmingly men, working at the time in psychology, which was itself a fairly new field, right? He had worked for, or his mentoring college at Harvard was Robert Yerkes, who of course helped develop the Army Alpha Intelligence Test that was administered to US soldiers in World War I. He was the first massive standardized testing project. And so I think it's important to sort of think about how standardized testing has, is really constitutive of this idea of personalizing an automating education. So Sydney Pressy made a lot of standardized tests.

6:29He was making a lot of money selling schools, standardized testing in the 1920s. He was already a huge business. And he got this great idea of what if we made a machine that could grade the tests automatically, or even better teach the students automatically. And so he tried, he first demoted in 1924 his teaching machine at the American Psychological Association Annual Meeting. And tried very hard to bring it to market, to make it a business. But this little event called the Great Depression happened. And so Sydney Pressy was not terribly, not terribly lucky. He stayed really involved in teaching machines. Of course, more famously, a few decades later, BF Skinner invented a teaching machine. And of course, BF Skinner became much more well-known, and teaching machines are much more associated with Skinner.

7:34Skinner's going to be much more familiar to most of our listeners. But what was he doing specifically in the mid-20th century that can be traced through to the edtech of today? So Skinner is such a fascinating person, and fascinating slash sort of terrifying person. I've spent the last couple of years sort of spending way too much time thinking about behaviorism, thinking about Skinner's influence. But I think that he is truly the most influential person in the development of education technology. And I think other people would like it to be someone like Seymour Pappert. They'd like to say that education technologies origins are constructionist. But I think that really they are behaviorists. And of course, Sydney Pressy was a behaviorist too. Most education psychologists at the time were behaviorists. That is, you know, to study learning, you studied behavior.

8:34And for Skinner, famously, he worked with pigeons in order to do something called operant conditioning, which was sort of training pigeons by giving them rewards in order to elicit certain behaviors from them. So the pigeons learned through rewards. And Skinner had this brilliant idea of what if we build a machine that offers rewards to students so that we can shape their behavior, just like we shape the behavior of pigeons. And so in the 1950s, he also tried to commercialize a teaching machine project of product that was, he tried sales IBM, tried to get a different manufacturer to make it. And for some time in the 60s, it was an incredibly popular idea. Door to door and cyclopedia salesmen sold teaching machines as well. But that really is foundational on the Skinner notion of operant conditioning rewards for behavior, shaping behavior, shaping behavior through machines.

9:43And I think we see that in tech, right? We don't just see that in ed tech. But we see that in tech as well, right? So Shoshana Zuboff wrote the book Surveillance Capitalism a year or two ago. And really that was her argument was this sort of behavioral engineering, a lobby of Skinner is really fundamental to how technologies like Facebook and Google, not just the education technologies that we use. Yeah, but it can be catched in terms of behavioral economics and nudging people. Because you say it's fundamentally about getting individuals to make the right decisions and do the right things. Yes, the right decisions with air quotes, right? Yeah, absolutely. Now, I mean, one of the things you mentioned there about Skinner was him kind of co-zing up with IBM. And I mean, one of the other themes of the book is when corporations get involved in educational technology. So I mean, how did that work out in the mid 20th century? I don't remember IBM's teaching machines kind of revolutionizing schools. So one of the things, you know, working on this book that was so interesting to me is we hear these stories.

10:45And in fact, Skinner and Presley told these stories too that the reason the teaching machines weren't successful is that teachers were luttites. The teachers didn't want them, that schools refused to change. I mean, this story, we hear it today. We hear it all the time, that education technology fails because of teachers. But it's really much more of an interesting story. And of course, a lot of businesses were also, were so instrumental in sort of styming and undermining. Because they had, I mean, obviously, they sold you today. They had just a different set of priorities than did, you know, two professors, right? You know, a professor from Harvard, a professor from Ohio State University thought that they had created a science that they had a science. And that science would have a technology and that technology set science and form technology would improve education.

11:48And corporations were like, can I sell, you know, can I sell a million of these? Yes, no. And I think that they were both, both Presley and Skinner were really adamant that their machines were, that their machines were scientific. They were incredibly controlling and were not willing to sort of hand it off to a manufacturer. And so they were, I mean, they just were the biggest pains in the ass, I think, for these companies, for these companies to work with. Because they were just so, they were just so adamant that the machines looked a certain way and functioned a certain way, because otherwise they weren't scientifically valid. In terms of big tech involvement in public education in the 2020s, I mean, where have Google and Microsoft gone, gone right? What's, what's changed now to make the kind of the corporation, the dominant partner in all of this? Yeah, I mean, I think that, I think there are a number of reasons. I mean, I think that some of it just has to do with this idea that's gone right.

12:50This idea that's been, that has been going on for a long time, that this is a huge market, that there's a huge market opportunity. And there were stories about this in the 1960s, in which, you know, people crowed that, you know, that about how, you know, about the amazing opportunity that this was to, to make it just a ton of money off of the education market. I think that, I think that what we've seen in the meantime as well though, is a lot of shift of power and of course money from public institutions into corporations. And so I do think that the rise of, the rise of a lot of these companies in education is deeply intertwined with sort of, with sort of neoliberalism. Right, because I think that rather than schools, universities or school districts, sort of building things internally themselves, the new motivation is always sort of, is always profit. And I think that, the, you know, the pressures have turned outside to for profit companies, to vendors, to build a supply, things rather than building capacity internally is just incredibly powerful.

14:03And I think it's hard to, I don't think that you can sort of separate the rise of the computer in the classroom from, from these other, from these other trends as well. And I think that that's what's, you know, you have to me about my work, or I think that that's what's so important to, to always remember as, again, it's not just the tech, it's the, it's the historical context, it's the, the other, the political context in which these things happen. Well, I was going to say it's great that you mentioned the great depression, but I mean, in this period, I'm thinking about the Cold War, the space race, Vietnam, civil rights. I mean, how was the rise and fall of teaching machines entwined with these broader kind of societal, political, cultural shifts? So that's almost one of the things that, one of the reasons why I found myself sort of spending so much time with, with Skinner in particular, because of course, Skinner, I would say, was probably the most well known public intellectual. Certainly the best known psychologist in, in the US, globally, had a huge reputation. I mean, he was, he wrote a bunch of academic articles, sure, but he was also writing for the popular press.

15:10He was, you know, a guest on some of the nightly chat shows, he was on television quite a bit. People knew who Skinner, who Skinner was, and I think that he, for a while following, you know, following World War II, I think that Americans were really, committed to sort of, gadgetizing their world. And his ideas about sort of using technology for child rearing, using technology in education, they were somewhat controversial, but they really, they were really part of the whole sort of, of what was, what Americans thought the future was going to be like. But if the future was inevitably going to be more technological, more machines doing things in the kitchen, in the classroom, as Skinner would say, you know, if you can, if you can automate the kitchen, you can automate the classroom. So again, some very gendered, very gendered expectations for a long time in edtech. But then of course, I think as Skinner, and Skinner wrote a novel, like many academics who try their hand at writing knowledge,

16:16by their hand at writing novels, it's not great. And it's called Walden 2, about a whole society that was sort of engineered with his, designed with his behavior of engineering ideas. And then he wrote, and that was published very early in his career before he was famous, but it became quite popular in the 1960s. And then he wrote a book that came out in the 1971, I believe, beyond freedom and dignity, in which he talked about the ways in which freedom and dignity free will were not real. And that it was quite a shocking, quite a shocking argument. And I think it was a lot of people started to sort of, maybe ask more questions about Skinner. But at the same time, you ask about the civil rights, you know, there are the other things going on. There was, in the 1960s, in the 1963, the Mississippi Freedom Summer, a lot of activists,

17:22and the Mississippi Black folks, and Mississippi, to do literacy campaigns, so that they could gain the right to vote. Because, of course, Mississippi had, egregiously racist policies blocking black people from voting, literacy tests at the polls. So they did a campaign for literacy, and they thought one of the leaders of SNCC, Robert Moses, thought maybe we should, maybe we'll use teaching machines. He was a psychologist, he had been a student of some of the psychologists at Hamilton College, actually where Skinner had actually graduated himself. And he thought that it might be an efficient way to help get people up to speed adults in Mississippi up to speed with literacy. But the programed instruction, the way in which the teaching machines work, ran headfirst into beliefs about freedom, beliefs about agency and pedagogy,

18:31and the other kinds of things that some of these activists were doing, including the freedom schools. And so you can sort of see the conflict in the 1960s. People, this was before Apollo Ferries' work was translated into English, but people who started to see that education was absolutely needed to be a practice of freedom, versus someone like Skinner who was like education should be a practice of engineering. And those two really started to clash in the 1960s, and you could sort of see the student movements really start to resist, not just the teaching machines, the idea of programmed instruction, but all of the other machines that they felt were dominating their lives as well, IBM. Mario Savio's famous speech on the steps of Sproul Hall about throwing your bodies against the gears and the machines, this idea that life was becoming more and more mechanized, more and more standardized, more and more automated. And so I think a lot of activists in the 1960s really rejected the vision that Skinner had for education.

19:40So history tells us that Ed Tech has politics, that Ed Tech is ideological. I mean, clearly we need a historical approach to Ed Tech, but I mean, how do you get education and technology audiences to engage with this history? I mean, education and technology seems so relentlessly fixated on either the present or the near future. No one really wants to look back and talk about this stuff. But they don't. And I think that what's frustrating is that at the same time that they don't, they have these past stories about the past that always get invoked, right? That education hasn't changed in hundreds of years. You hear that one a lot, that education, that we have an industrial model of education, that we have a Prussian model of education. So they do cherry pick from history often incorrectly in order to make arguments that now is the moment for change. And so that's why I really wanted to write a book that looked at the people who were making those very same articles or arguments 100 years ago, that education hasn't changed.

20:43Well, they didn't say hundreds of years, the decades they said, but this idea that education is stagnant, static, unchanging. These are, you know, you hear Tech folks say this, but you hear the Secretary of Education in the US. She says this too. It's a pretty common story. And so I wanted to be able to tell, fill in the blanks in my book with more context. And I also wanted to tell a story that wasn't about computers. I wanted to say, my book actually doesn't talk about computers. I mean, maybe I mentioned them in the conclusion, but like, it's not a book about computing. I wanted to make it very clear that these ideas, personalized learning, and individualized instruction through technology are really old. And that's worth, you know, that's what we're thinking about too. So despite the idea that everything's on the internet these days, and you just have to go to a computer to find things out, you actually did quite a lot of proper old school archival research for this book.

21:44I mean, what research did you do and was it worth the effort? I did. I went to Sydney Pressies papers, which were at Ohio State, be it Skinners papers, which are at Harvard. I went to the Educational Testing Service in New Jersey to get person named Ben Woods papers. He was actually helped work with, he was successful working with IBM in developing a test scoring machine. So you said you didn't know about IBM's teaching machine. They never built one, but they did build a test scoring machine. And again, sort of this close proximity between standardized testing and the rise of ed tech was something I really wanted to talk about as well. So yeah, I did a lot of archival work. It was great. I loved it. I mean, it was it was fascinating. It was fascinating to go through the letters, the correspondence that many of these scholars wrote to one another.

22:44So BS Skinner was writing letters to Sydney Pressie. Sydney Pressie was writing letters to Ben Wood. They would get Skinner in particular would get letters from all sorts of people. So people that you wouldn't expect were correspondence. And of course, it was just, you know, thinking again about our contemporary practices of sort of what is it? What is the archival, what will archival work look like, you know, essentially from now? What efforts do we want to make in retaining stuff? I've become a big deleter. And so it's, you know, it's, we're thinking about what do you do with what do you do with your email? Do you delete them? Or do you save them for, you know, the hopes that 100 years from now someone's going to want to raise story. I was just thinking that as you're explaining that, I mean, the idea of kind of putting all my correspondence in a box and locking it in a vault is just not going to happen. So what's being lost now? And it is really really a question.

23:49And also, I mean, to help write the book, you actually also bought an original machine from eBay to inspire you. So I mean, how did the physical presence of that machine actually influence your writing? I mean, for me it was, you know, you read these, you read the correspondence of someone like Skinner and Pressy who are so excited and so enthusiastic that this was going to be, and you hear this, you hear this sort of rhetoric today, students are going to love this, they're going to be amazed by it. And, you know, I think for maybe 30 seconds, students are amazed by it even today. But anyone, any student who's done of, you know, Khan Academy exercises or even the fanciest, jazziest, snazziest iPad app to learn fractions knows after a while, it's just not that intriguing. It's still fractions, you know, it's still a worksheet. It's just not fun. And so I wanted to actually use one and see what it was like. And I was, this is just the process of sort of going through the program instruction against Skinner was really adamant.

24:59Skinner was really adamant that you take content down to the smallest possible objects. Of course, a tech thinks you do this today now to take it down to the smallest possible content object. And then because you only want to reward positive behavior, you want to make it so that students don't make any mistakes. Mistakes are aversive. So you want this sort of positive reinforcement. So going through these teaching machine is so laborious. I mean, I thought that I thought I would never make it through MOOC content, but like the idea, I would much rather go through an MIT class on electrical engineering than the teaching machine was, it was pretty dull. It was, it was incredibly dull. Academics talk a lot now about the affect and the kind of emotion of engaging with these things. And that's you're not going to get that unless you actually do it. That's really, really interesting. I mean, finally, you said you didn't want the book to be an angry book. You wanted it to be an interesting and honest one. How did that work out?

25:59It was funny, actually, that I think I turned in my first draft and my editors at MIT press. It wasn't what they were expecting. I think they were expecting an angry book. And I think that they were surprised. I think a lot of people actually who know my work are probably going to be a little bit surprised at what the book is. I mean, it's a story. It's a story. It's not a book of analysis. Although, I think as one does with the genre of nonfiction, there is an introduction and a conclusion and those contain analysis. Don't worry. But yeah, I wanted to tell, I wanted to show that there was a really interesting history, a really interesting history here. And I feel like in some ways, a tech is sort of the worst for not knowing its history, the worst for not knowing the theoretical underpinnings, the worst for not really thinking about, thinking about itself as not simply this amazing new innovative practice.

27:07But something that people have been doing for a very long time. And so I wanted to fill in some of those gaps with what I think is really an interesting story. I mean, and BS Skinner is, if nothing else, of an incredibly interesting person. Yeah, so it's not dull.