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Keynotes and Public Talks

Audrey Watters

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This talk was delivered virtually to a class at Teachers College, Columbia University. I was asked to speak about learning analytics. And I did, if you pay attention. Mostly, I talked about the history of tracking steps as a signal for health. This sort of counting has a history, a technical and pseudo-scientific one....

This talk was delivered at the NMC Summer 2017 conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts. This was the closing keynote (and I believe my last talk of 2017) so I wanted to talk about something a little different, or at least defamiliarize the stories we often tell about education by talking about baby monitors....

This talk was delivered at the OEB MidSummit conference in Reykjavik, Iceland. I was part of the plenary on the future of learning, and so I wanted to talk a bit about the history of "personalized learning" and more broadly the history of "personalization." Whose definition of this is ascendant?...

These remarks were delivered at the University of Mary Washington as part of its Presidential Inauguration Week. I was part of a panel was titled "Higher Education in the Disinformation Age: Can America's public liberal arts universities restore critical thinking and civility in public discourse?" The other panelists included Steve Farnsworth (University of Mary Washington), Sara Cobb (George Mason University), and Julian Hayter (University of Richmond)....

This talk was delivered at The University of Edinburgh. Ostensibly it's a talk about automation, artificial intelligence, and education technology, but as I wrote it, it also became a talk about autonomous vehicles and self-driving cars. What sort of future is one where the model for learning is "the driverless university"?...

This talk was delivered at the University of Richmond. What is the future of education technology under Trump? Honestly we should have been asking questions about privacy and security and the safety of students and faculty long before this moment. But here we are....

This talk was delivered at Virginia Commonwealth University as part of a seminar co-sponsored by the Departments of English and Sociology. It's an examination of technology forecasting. What can we learn from these predictions? Hint: we won't learn what the future will be, but we might learn what powerful people hope it to be....

This keynote was delivered at the Designs on eLearning conference. The theme of the conference was anxiety and security, two things rarely confronted by those who stand at the podium and profess ed-tech-ness. I used this opportunity to call for a re-con-figuring ed-tech, via the figure of the pigeon....

This keynote was delivered at the ILTA's annual conference in Dublin. Here, I argue that we must care for our technological creations, lest they become monsters, that we must scrutinize "humbugs" and not merely dismiss them as entertainment, that we must reject technological End-Times rhetoric. And something about Sea Monkeys....

This talk was presented at the ICDE 2015 conference in Sun City, South Africa. Yes, I went to South Africa to talk about California: about the "Californian Ideology" and the "Silicon Valley Narrative" and about the technology industry's plans to "eat the world." How does education technology reconcile that? (Can it?)...

This talk was delivered at the Digital Pedagogy Lab Summer Institute. In it, I ramble on about the history and the (predicted) future of teaching machines, Turing Machines, love, collectivity, and care. Is "robots are coming for our jobs" the wrong framing; are we paying attention to learning and labor?...

In 2014, Gary Stager joked that we should submit a proposal to ISTE for a panel titled "Is It Time to Give Up on Computers in Schools?" No surprise, it was rejected. But this year, he submitted again, and the very same proposal was accepted. This was a fun talk....

This keynote was delivered at EDEN 2015 in Barcelona. Initially I proposed a title that would prompt me to say something positive about networks as an alternative to teaching machines. But the more I thought about networks, the less I feel like they are necessarily sites or technologies of liberation....

This talk was delivered at Davidson College as part of its Annual Teaching Showcase. Ostensibly, it's an argument for student agency and education technology. (At least, that's what I was asked to speak about.) So I traced the history of education psychology and teaching and testing machines - through Wonder Woman....

(This talk was delivered at Ryerson University's ChangSchoolTalks.) We are suffering from amnesia. We have forgotten much of the history of technology. We now tell stories about the past, present, and future whereby all innovations emerge from Silicon Valley, and there is no force for change other than entrepreneurial genius....

(This talk was delivered at the University of Mary Washington.) It hasn't been a fun year to be a woman on the Internet. I have lost count of how many of my peers have experienced online harassment. I can't imagine counting all the microaggressions. Yes, this happens in ed-tech....

(This keynote was delivered at ALT-C.) Frankenstein is often seen as a cautionary tale about technology gone awry. But Bruno Latour argues that Victor Frankenstein's crime wasn't that he built his creation. It was that he didn't love it. That's what made the monster -- our ed-tech monsters too....

(This talk was delivered at "Minding the Future," a conference before the OpenVA conference.) Sebastian Thrun once predicted that in the near future we'll only have ten universities. What has to happen to make that happen? Which ten universities would survive? A thought exercise... a doom-filled, horrible thought exercise....

(This keynote was delivered at the Canadian Network for Innovation in Education conference.) What do we mean by innovation? What does the term even mean? What does the term demand we do? Whose changes, actions does it privilege? Innovation to what end? How can we resist its end-times rhetoric?...

(This keynote was delivered at the Ed-Tech Innovation conference in Alberta, Canada. I'd like to think I hold the record for the most f-bombs dropped in a keynote in Canada.) Argo made a great Hollywood movie. But it erased the contributions of Canada. Sorta like MOOCs, I guess....

Image credits: Bryan Mathers