I enjoyed reading Marc Watkins recap of OpenAI’s education forum. Marc correctly points out that “There is excitement about what AI can do in the future, but not much time spent addressing what AI is actually doing to students now.” For those of us who have been in edtech for a while, this is deja vu… deja vu to radio, TVs, correspondence education, authorware, virtual worlds, MOOCs, and on an on. Much of edtech focuses on the possibilities rather than the realities. And it’s not that those innovations haven’t been impactful in particular contexts. They have. It’s that they haven’t had the systemwide transformational impacts that their proponents promised. Will it be different this time?

On second thought, deja vu might not be fully appropriate. Modus operandi might be a more apt way of describing this, as that’s how the edtech industry operates regardless of evidence and history.