REBOOT Chapter 4: School-Age Childhood
What are the benefits and drawbacks of 'EdTech' (educational tech) in schools?
Today’s the day — the hardback edition of Reboot hits shelves in the United Kingdom!
In honour of publication day, here’s the fourth of ten special podcasts corresponding to the chapters in Reboot: Reclaiming Your Life in a Tech-Obsessed World. In chapter 4, I grapple with what it might be like for growing kids to live under a (usually) benevolent surveillance state, comprised of both their parents/carers and their educational institutions. In this episode, I take a deep dive on the school side of things.
First, I speak with ‘Laura,’ a primary-school head teacher in London, and report on a conversation I had with a few children about the kinds of classroom biases that are being captured on platforms like ClassDojo.
Second, I chat with former educator and now journalist/writer Ant Heald, who was an early adopter of EdTech and who holds his hand up to having not always used it in the fairest way.
As a bonus, there’s a little cameo from last episode’s guest Amelia Tait, UK-based journalist who featured in the Chapter 3 episode. Here, she’s talking about teachers on TikTok.
And finally, I sit down with one of the top privacy lawyers in the US, Al Gidari (now retired-ish). He has a unique perspective, having represented and consulted with a lot of the companies who develop the EdTech commonly used in schools today. Al gives us an overview of the current landscape and a peek into some possibly quite dystopian futures.
Full-length interviews with both Amelia Tait, Al Gidari, and Ant Heald, complete with transcripts, will go behind the paywall for paid subscribers to Life on Tech.
Stay tuned — later this week I’ll be posting the episode on Adolescence!
Some UK and European order links are shown below. US readers, stay tuned for more information for when and how you can read/hear REBOOT in the United States. The buttons below say ‘pre-order,’ but of course as of today it’s just ‘ORDER’!