Audrey Watters's "Teaching Machines"

Audrey Watters is a writer on education and technology. She is the creator of the popular blog Hack Education and the author of widely
read annual reviews of educational technology news and products.

Watters applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Teaching Machines: The History of Personalized Learning, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Teaching Machines: A History of Personalized Learning finds one of the book’s main protagonists, the psychologist B. F. Skinner, frustrated with negotiations with several major companies – IBM, Harcourt Brace, Lockheed Martin, Comptometer – that he was trying to convince to manufacture his teaching machine and the “programmed instruction” materials that accompanied them.

Skinner’s attempts to commercialize his invention – a machine whose design was based on his behaviorist theories and one he claimed would teach students far more effectively and individually than human instructors – were largely a failure. (Spoiler alert.) Nonetheless, his struggle to convince corporate interests in the potential – financial and educational – comprise much of my book. While the events on page 99 do not capture all of Skinner’s endeavors (or all of the history that I tell), they do underscore one crucial theme to Teaching Machines – one that most other books about educational technology (and perhaps even technology in general) do not examine: the role of business in dictating what comes to market. It’s not the best technology – in the case of education, the technology that helps students learn better, faster – that determines what gets built and used; it’s not the best science – much to the chagrin of a scientist like Skinner. Education itself is an incredibly complex system, of course, but the promise of a quick and easy technological fix doesn’t just run headfirst into the traditional practices of teachers or expectations of parents and students, as we’re so often told is the reason why, supposedly, schooling remains unchanged and technologies unused. It’s often business itself that snubs “innovation” that does not fit into its demand for profitability or into its vision of what the future (or at least future product catalog) should look like.

Teaching machines are often depicted as a flash-in-the-pan – briefly popular in the 1950s and 1960s and then supplanted by the development of computer technologies. Personalized learning is often talked about as a brand-new idea, made possible by these very devices and the penchant for big data. My book tells a much different story, demonstrating how the underlying theories and practices of programmed instruction and personalized learning became a foundational part of educational technology almost a century ago and remain so to this day – despite the failure of Skinner himself, as page 99 reveals, to commercialize his own teaching machine.

Visit Audrey Watters's website.

--Marshal Zeringue