During the Reclaim Hackathon at UMW last week, several of us were talking over food and beverages and realized that we had the opportunity to document the current thinking in the “edtech scene”. It’s something that we hadn’t tried to do explicitly before, but we realized that if we don’t do it ourselves we’ll be left with the narratives pushed by the Big Business of Edtech Venture Capital™. So, David Kernohan and I took it on as a project. We recruited Andy Rush to record a series of impromptu interviews with some of the people who were present at the event1, and off we went.

I took on editing the footage into something that tells the stories, starting with this:

Reclaiming Educational Technology: the business and politics of edtech from UCalgary Taylor Institute on Vimeo.

Thanks so much to Audrey Watters, Kin Lane, and Martha Burtis for agreeing to participate (and to the many other folks who took part - they’ll be making appearances in future episodes - OOH! THE SUSPENSE!).

I’m planning on several additional segments/episodes, exploring the nature of innovation, shifts in culture and technology, and more. I’ll make time to put those together ASAP. When all of the smaller segments are done, I’ll try to work them together into a longer documentary that ties everything together.

  1. I’d have loved to interview everyone, but even these brief interviews produced an hour and 48 minutes of raw footage - we’ll have to plan follow-up sessions later… ↩︎