Students Size Up Edtech’s Dark Side

When students in my graduate seminar on education technology were given the chance to select a topic for a class session, they wanted to devote time to the digital world’s dark side.This made a great deal of sense. We’re witnessing waves of technology skepticism and dread, with multiple Facebook debacles, the publication of new critiques about the negative impacts of tech giants, and rising concern about privacy in an age of growing big data and AI. My students are also in a graduate program that teaches critical understanding of media.They self-organized readings and key points to examine. Here were the three biggest trends they identified (in no particular order). Rich media—gaming, VR, mixed reality—can be so powerful that they distract us from the offline world. This theme keyed into addiction concerns, as social media and gaming become ever more effective in giving us dopamine hits. While some may end up with too much of the latest media, others are completely cut off, due to persistent lack of broadband. Gaps opened up by race, income, education and geography drive wedges between technologies and entire populations. These gaps could well continue or widen as emergent media become more demanding of bandwidth, hardware and user knowledge. These divides, in turn, can lead to unequal educational access.