Hot Takes Blaming EdTech Lack Nuance

Correlation isn’t causation, as Jared Cooney Horvath, a neuroscientist and author of The Digital Delusion, tells us, when it comes to education technology. Yet despite that caveat, he’s pretty sure that technology writ large is causing us as a society to get dumber. And state legislators are lining up behind his work to ban technology in schools with the blunt axe of one-size-fits-all policy.

Even though Horvath seems occasionally to forget that correlation and causation aren’t the same as he makes his own points and irresponsibly lumps in averages across a wide range of studies looking at vastly different programs, I still readily agree with him on a few things.

Is there too much edtech in traditional schools? Absolutely.

Is there too little coherence in traditional schools? In general, yes—and edtech largely hasn’t helped.

Is layering edtech into the traditional education system ever going to produce great outcomes? No, absolutely not, as I’ve argued since 2008.

Are there, however, some really good edtech products that don’t fall in the narrow categories that Horvath endorses that have strong research behind them and, if used in discrete ways within a coherent blended-learning model, can get great results? Absolutely. Look at the research behind programs like Amira Learning, just to take one example.

What’s interesting to me is that some of the edtech products out there actually require students to do many of the things that Horvath says students should do—for example, taking notes on paper by hand.