Audrey Watters describes herself as a Cassandra of educational technology, but the comparison is only partially apt.
Like the Greek prophet, Ms. Watters tells people things they often don’t want to hear. Unlike Cassandra, though, her clear-eyed analyses do find an audience. Her Twitter feed has more than 28,000 followers. Her blog, weekly newsletter, and year-end roundups of top tech trends are must-reads for many in higher education and the tech world. She’s in demand as a conference speaker. (She recently published a collection, Monsters of Education Technology, which features 14 of the talks she gave in 2014.)
A self-employed writer, Ms. Watters, 43, speaks with an independent voice. She doesn’t run ads on her site or take money from sponsors. Beholden to no institutions or companies, she’s free to critique them. She supports herself through her writing and speaking and through donations that readers make to her blog, Hack Education.
Animating her work is a conviction that technology needs to be not just used but questioned, its power structures and exclusions challenged, its makers’ narratives not taken for granted. She explained why this matters in a recent talk, “Men (Still) Explain Technology to Me,” also posted as an essay on her blog. It’s a tech-infused riff on the phenomenon of “mansplaining” identified by the writer Rebecca Solnit. But Ms. Watters looks beyond gender to explain why the trend is a serious social problem.
“The problem isn’t just that men explain technology to me,” she says in the essay. “It isn’t just that a handful of men explain technology to the rest of us. It’s that this explanation tends to foreclose questions we might have about the shape of things.”
That matters, she says, “because the tech sector has an increasingly powerful reach in how we live and work and communicate and learn.”
Speaking your mind about the powerful, male-dominated tech world can come at a cost, especially if you’re a female commentator. Ms. Watters is no stranger to online harassment. “It’s an issue that’s magnified by the architecture of the technology we use,” she says, with platforms like Twitter making it too easy for harassers to do what they do. “It’s been really difficult, and it’s made me rethink a lot of the things about how I work online.” She blocks offenders, uses online-security strategies, and calls for anti-harassment policies at conferences and elsewhere. She pushes on.
Ms. Watters brings a rare and necessary skepticism to the omnipresent innovation-and-disruption boosterism that plagues ed tech, says Jim Groom. He’s director of the division of teaching-and-learning technologies at the University of Mary Washington. He calls Ms. Watters “the cultural critic that ed tech has needed for a decade.”
“She’s doing a lot of the hard work that a lot of the people in ed tech haven’t,” Mr. Groom says. “It’s hard to go up against MOOCs and Silicon Valley.”
MOOCs loomed large in Ms. Watters’s 2012 overview of tech trends, which featured a “forgotten history” of the phenomenon’s origins and questioned what kind of future MOOCs would really deliver: “With MOOCs, power might shift to the learner; it’s just as likely that power shifts to the venture capitalists.”
Now, in 2015, even as MOOC fever has cooled, she remains skeptical. “Part of the crisis of higher education is that we’ve followed this story that innovation has to come from the private sector,” she says. “MOOCs are a great example of that — so much ink spilled over something that’s really not that exciting at all.”
Her own eclectic schooling shaped her thinking about education, Ms. Watters says. The child of an American father and an English mother, she went to public school in Wyoming and spent two years in an English boarding school. “It radicalized me in all kinds of ways,” she says. “It was very clear to some people there who belonged and who didn’t belong and who had status.”
She went to the Johns Hopkins University, dropped out, followed the Grateful Dead, moved home with a child in tow, took traditional and distance-ed courses to earn a B.A. from the University of Wyoming, married an artist, and moved to Oregon in the mid-90s. A job at the University of Oregon led her to graduate school there; she earned a master’s degree in folklore and was working on a dissertation in comparative literature when her husband died of cancer. The lack of support she and her family received from the campus community, she says, along with her sense that higher education in general was mired in bureaucracy and politics, contributed to her decision to quit graduate school.
Ms. Watters, who considers herself a recovering academic, brings the intellectual rigor of a highly trained cultural critic to her work now. She’s completing a book project called “Teaching Machines,” a history of learning technologies and a corrective to the ahistorical narrative that now prevails. (The title comes from B.F. Skinner’s attempts, in the 1950s, to create a system of machine-enabled, programmed-learning classrooms.)
“It’s partially a response to what I feel is a dominant ideology out of Silicon Valley — that the past is irrelevant, somehow decadent and useless and needs to be swept aside, and the future is all that matters,” she says. “I’ve been struck by how many people in ed tech speak as though the day they decided to do a start-up was the day ed tech began.”
Another book project, “Reclaim Your Domain,” focuses on more of Ms. Watters’s urgent concerns: data privacy and users’ control (or lack thereof) over the content they create, whether they’re students enrolled in a class, faculty members teaching and publishing online, or tech-using members of the general public.
Tech boosters argue that data collection can deliver a better learning experience as well as deter terrorism and solve health-care problems.
But Ms. Watters points out that too often users don’t know what’s at risk or aren’t given a choice about whether to share their data. For instance, universities need to make sure they’re not signing away the intellectual property of students and faculty members who use a learning-management system, she says. And what happens to users’ data when a start-up folds or gets bought?
“There are lots of places where the battle has to be fought,” Ms. Watters says. “The stakes feel pretty high to me right now.”
Jennifer Howard writes about research in the humanities, publishing, and other topics. Follow her on Twitter @JenHoward, or email her at jennifer.howard@chronicle.com.