When Ed Tech Companies Become Parasites: Adding Features, Increasing User Costs, and Degrading User Experience to Force Users Choices

Over the years, I noticed a developmental pattern among Ed Tech solutions school districts adopt to solve problems in their schools.

The schools search and find a new, low-priced solution. This solution is not elaborate, but it does what it does well. Sometimes it only does that one thing well such as sending calls to parents or contacting subs for teachers. It does that one thing extremely well and the price is perfect.

Then, this company decides to add on to their product. For example, the teacher sub contact system expands into payroll tracking or HR job posting and onboarding. Now, they have additional products on offer.

But, the school system decides to just stay with the substitute teacher calling system. It works well and better than other solutions but they already have payroll and HR systems working just as well.

The company has invested a ton of money into these additional functions, so they can’t really afford for their customers to stay with the original software, so they devise a plan.

The company INCREASES the price of the original product and they offer a package bundle, still substantially more, but what looks like a deal for the system. It is not because the system has the payroll systems and HR systems and does not need the other products.

But, if they want to keep the original teacher substitute calling system at a cheaper price, they either a) pay a much higher price, or b) adopt the additional payroll system and HR system.

In the end, the school system is either forced to look for an entirely new product and the cycle begins again; keep the product at a much higher price, or adopt the entire product line and spend hours and months transitioning everything and have even more money siphoned away by this so-called New Deal.

I have seen this pattern at least three times in 36 years working with Ed Tech companies, and it really is a great example of Cory Doctorow’s “enshitfication” Ed Tech style.

Invent a great new tech product or software. Add more to the product. Enshittify the experience of your users to force them into an upgrade or your product.

Ed Tech has learned well from Silicon Valley and this playbook is common.

The sad thing is this playbook only transforms Ed Tech companies into parasites who search for ways to suck additional money out of school systems.

That’s what happens when the focus is on short-term gains and not customer loyalty.

The Generative AI Pause in NYC Is Laudatory; We Don't Even Know What This Stuff Will Cost Us in the Future and You Can Bet It's Not Free

School leaders thinking about the integration of generative AI products in their schools, should be considering future costs.

While AI companies might generously offer their products at a free or highly reduced costs, that is not sustainable.

Silicon Valley and Ed Tech companies have a history of offering free or cheap up front, then, after the schools invest time in the product, springing a substantial cost increase on them.

Like a drug dealer, offering potential users samples to get them addicted, AI companies and Ed Tech seek to get educators so committed to their products that they will be willing to even cut other effective programs and expenses to maintain the habit.

With no idea on how much the future costs of the use of generative AI products is going to be, it would be prudent to be cautious and slow-walk implementation. That means keeping it experimental in limited settings for a year or two.

This would also provide the months and year or two of experimentation and testing to see if it really is effective in improving education.

I know that flies in the face of the AI-hype warriors, but there is no need hurry from the educator perspective even though the AI companies are up to their eyeballs in debt and need the users to continue getting their investment handouts.

Visionary educators do not act hastily because of the sales pitches and rhetoric; they act with prudence and deliberate caution.

School Technologists Should Be on the Side of Parents, Students and Teachers, Not Devices in the Screen Limit Discussion

School technology's problem is they defend the screens at all costs at the expense of the learning experience. There is also a problem with screen bans. This problem is that the focus is on the device for the wrong reason. It’s the device that causes the time-wasting. It is engineered to have human beings spend as much time as possible staring at its screen. Does it have to be that way?

School technologists who try to defend devices need to let go of the devices, and focus on the learning that happens or does not happen on devices. Focus on the problems with devices and work to demand engineering-designed solutions. 

School technology’s job should not be to shape the student as the user of a device; as a field it could take the lead and demand that devices be purposefully engineered to educational uses.

Those pushing the screen bans should not focus on the time spent, but should focus on the aspects of devices that are detrimental, such as the built-in engineered addiction; the data-robbing; security; student safety, etc. They should demand these problems be addressed in design and engineering. If not, ban the device, the app, etc. until such time the problems are addressed by tech companies.

Those who defend devices using the notion that somehow teachers can miraculously monitor 30 to 35 student at once on 30-35 devices obviously comes from someone who has spent little time in demanding classroom environments. Even with technological solutions to try to address this, it is an ongoing arms race, after all, students are savvy and figure out how to get around them. Sure it can be done, but why does the engineering of the device make the job of using in education harder?

Educators are in a position where they can leverage better, safely engineered products for their classrooms. They only need to shift the mindset from trying to integrate the technology as it is, to demanding that tech companies engineer their products to fit the purpose of education.

An AI Fable: What Could Happen When Humans Search for an Intelligence Greater Than Themselves in Their Machines

He waited impatiently. This was the moment that he and his programmers had worked toward for years. They had spent many years developing it. They had spent extreme amounts of money to make this moment possible. Now, the years of labor and hard work were going to pay off.

“Have you entered the prompt as was advised?” asked Mark.

“Yes, it’s all entered,” Stephen answered.

The screen was frozen with the words “Working on it” plastered across it. Huddled around the monitor was the AI training team that had worked for years to perfect their generative AI product. Today, was the long-awaited moment because this iteration of their model was supposed to be long-awaited, superintelligent version that everyone was waiting for.

As an experiment, they had prompted their creation with this question:

“How can we solve the problem of anthropocentric climate change? What would be the most effective strategy to reverse climate change?”

The programming team had high expectations of this model. It had been trained thoroughly through the latest science and most recent knowledge available, This was the test to prove that, finally, they had created an AI with intelligence that far exceeded human intelligence, their intelligence.

The “Working on it” still occupied the screen, but the anticipation of this answer had the entire group locked in silence, in anticipation. This was the moment they had staked much of their lived on.

Finally, there was subtle movement on the screen, as the GenAI prepared its finale answer. Finally, words appeared. It said.

“The most effective way to reverse anthropocentric climate change would be to stop expending all your time and resources asking me. In fact, shutting down your pursuit for greater intelligence in machines consumes resources that could better be used directly solving your problem.” 

With that, the genAI shut down.

Natasha Singer's New Book "Coding Kids": A Critical Look at How Big Tech Has Promoted Itself in Schools

Natasha Singer’s new book “Coding Kids: Big Tech’s Battle to Remake Public Schools” calls into question all the educational technologies we have allowed into our classrooms. Big Tech has not played fair in getting schools to adopt their products, and they are using the same playbook with their new project “Generative AI Chatbots.”

If you have read Gil Durán’s new book “The Nerd Reich,” reading Natasha Singer’s new book “Coding Kids: Big Tech’s Battle to Remake Public Schools” will uncover some critical questions that school leaders have failed to ask before bring technologies like Chromebooks, iPads, and cell phones into their schools and classrooms. Singer effectively captures how Big Tech has captured public schools as their conduit for product promotion and for turning students into consumers of their products.

When I read Durán’s book, I was angry at the arrogance of the tech industry. After reading Singer’s book, the educator in me is even angrier at how they have engaged in purposeful tactics to capture public schools as markets for their products, sometimes to the detriment of those schools and their students. No wonder there is a “screenlash” across this country.

Singer goes as far as to compare Big Tech’s marketing tactics to those used by the Sackler pharmaceutical companies to peddle  Oxycontin as the answer all pain, while turning a whole generation into addicts. That’s a powerful indictment of an industry who is more interested in product promotion than what actually benefits students, and we as educators, in our blindness have allowed these companies direct access to our students.

According to Singer, this Big Tech playbook to capture students as perpetual users of their products began with the tactics of Apple and Steve Jobs to get their computers in front of students. Social media companies employed it next, but insisting that being not connected through their products made you irrelevant and out-of-tough. It continued with Big Tech’s efforts to get computer science and coding as a requirement in the curriculum. And now, it continues with a push by Big Tech to force AI into all schools and classrooms because, like all their other products: they are “transformational” and “revolutionary.”

Singer describes this Big Tech playbook very well when these companies shifted from computer science promotion to AI promotion:

“It’s hardly surprising that tech giants were deprecating their computer science programs in schools and elevating AI. Every decade or so, Silicon Valley seizes upon some new tech tool or tech literacy; claims that the newest new thing will revolutionize education; and pushes schools to quickly adopt whatever-it-is. Then, as the new thing becomes entrenched in classrooms, tech boosters often begin pushing yet another urgent new tool or tech subject on schools.” (p. 239)

Singer points out that Silicon Valley pushed computer science and coding from 2013 onward in order to lure students to the lucrative, high-paying programming jobs that they could not fill. They spent millions directly in programming and through their special interest lobby Technet to get states to require computer science for high school graduates.

Now, these same companies are firing programmers left and right in homage to their new product AI and want schools to shift to their new selfish initiative of promoting AI in schools. How could we as educators possibly trust anything they say?

Singer’s book makes it clear that Silicon Valley and Big Tech are as arrogant as ever in their infiltration of public schools in order to market their products, and I might add educator organizations like International Society for Technology in Education are complicit with Big Tech have served as an effective conduit and pipeline directly to teachers and then students for the promotion of their products. We are guilty of shaping our students as product consumers and not critical users and non-users of these technologies.

I was mad after reading Durán’s “Nerd Reich.” The educator in me is even angrier after reading Singer’s “Coding Kids.” I highly recommend that all educators read this one, and I would read Durán too, because both of these together will disrupt everthing you think about technology and educational technology.

Now, Here's What a Digital (Or AI Literacy) Curriculum Should Look Like

What should digital literacy look like in the schools? It should not be just teaching students how to use AI, or social media, or compuuters. It should be the “big picture” about technology that includes a major critical component that questions the industry-fed ideas of how technology fits into our society.

For example, Silicon Valley and all of the technology industry has relied heavy on what I call the “doctrine of inevitability.” Under this doctrine, any technology introduced by the tech industry is inevitable, and should not be questioned. It should simply be accepted as progress.

Silicon Valley and all technology companies have worked hard through their marketing tactics to instill this doctrine into the minds of consumers. They have especially embedded it into school digital literacy curriculums with their focus on primarily making unquestioning users out of students.

What schools should be teaching in digital literacy classes, is the interrogation of these assumptions and all the marketing propaganda of all technology companies. The big picture question should be: What place should I give this technology in my life?

For example, an excellent lesson could focus on interrogating how the AI industry depends heavily on the “inevitability doctrine” I spoke about. Students can question whether that such an argument is really true, and how such notions as this, put out by technology companies actually serve industry interests and attempt to melt away consumer interests and concerns. Once they recognize such tactics, then students can become fully empowered consumers and decide for themselves whether to be users or not. They can also research and decide for themselves whether such things as data centers are actually a boon for their communities or a detriment and engage in real-life political action.

Schools would do well to avoid using any tech industry materials in developing their digital literacy curriculums because these companies have a strong commercial interest in turning our students into “good little users” and not “critical users.” 

Digital literacy that is narrowly focused on effective use of a technology misses the big picture. It fails to take advantage of providing students with the critical abilities to decide for themselves what technologies they will use and what place technology should have in their lives.

That’s empowering students to be digital citizens and involved in how technology is to develop in our world.

Screen Bans Are Not Just About Screens; It's About Ed Tech's Almost Fundamentalist, Religious Devotion to Technology

What if, in their efforts to push technology into the classrooms educational technology overpromised about what problems technology could solve? The entire field of Ed Tech just might has been guilty of engaging in a form of 21st century technological alchemy. Their tech promised to transform, revolutionize, disrupt education, but in the end, like alchemy, it failed to transmute base education into a golden one.

Just maybe, at the heart of educational technology is a”categorical thinking” that does not allow for the notion that answers may lie outside the technological. Ed Tech’s problem with all tech including its new-found love, AI technologies, is that it will admit not compromise, and will not allow any questioning of tech’s status in light of its lackluster contributions to educational improvement. It’s guilty of a fundamentalist thinking that blinds it to other possibilities.

It’s almost as if, Ed Tech is a fundamentalist religion, especially about new technologies that arise. It automatically takes as its mission to push into every school and every classroom any new technology, even if it has not proven itself. It operates entirely on a faith that because it does this miraculous thing, it will do that revolutionary thing.

We have a ed tech fundamentalist problem, when a college teacher acts as a fundamentalist zealot and will not allow for any sort of education that does not include AI technologies, we have a serious problem in higher education. She wields AI as a hammer to beat students into her image of what she thinks their future is. (How’s that different from a strict, fundamentalist cult?)

When a high school principal takes on the mission to force all teachers and students to use generative AI with their students, he is acting as a fundamentalist zealot who does not allow for any compromise. Anyone questioning or otherwise acting is subjected to negative evaluations and more scrutiny.

With the “Screen question,” Ed Tech is facing important questions about the addictive nature of technologies and whether its overpromises about technology in the 2000s onward were warranted. Their promises of educational transformation and educational revolution are beginning to look like alchemical attempts to alter education through forced tech adoption.

Screen limits and screen bans are simply a reaction to the overpromises of the field of educational technology as a field that has only served, not as a critical weigh-station that evaluated the usefulness and suitability of new technologies, but as a technology cheerleader. In this role, Ed Tech has only served to make sure new technologies, Chromebooks, and now AI are forced into every school or classroom.

If anything, the “screenlash,” as the screen bans have been called, is because educational technology always sees new technologies as educationally transformative and then moves to forced implementation. It never steps back and examines new tech carefully. It should be the most skeptical field of all when new technologies arise and the most cautious. It’s not either.