Media: Not Another EdTech Cheerleader

@edsurge #edsurge    After months operating as an electronic newsletter, EdSurge has finally rolled out its beta website, including "150+ products, 350+ topics, 150+ organizations, 600+ news items" as well as an archive of the past year of newsletters.  

That's great -- glad to see it -- and I like the fact that EdSurge requires users to sign in to access content and lets them use Twitter or Facebook to do so. But I remain mildly troubled (see previous posts) that the EdSurge team (Betsy et al) describes its offerings as "reporting," its blog posts as "articles," and characterizes its site as "a technology-journalism mashup."  They call it journalism to make you feel better, and to give themselves credibility but I don't really see any journalism here -- not much skepticism, even. And I worry that edtech enthusiasts on the provider and purchaser sides will get even further caught up in the hullabaloo surrounding education technology rather than getting better informed and making smart, difficult decisions. (For example, compare the tone and substance of what you see on EdSurge to this recent EdWeek article on venture capital in education.  Both get funding from Gates, but to me at least there's a big difference in what they're doing and the EdWeek version.)  

All is not lost, however.  I get out of bed on the wrong side pretty much every day and I may be entirely wrong about the site.  You be the judge.  Second, users might end up using comments and social media aspects to balance out EdSurge's enthusiasm. Anything that ensures we don't spend another 10 years talking about and developing technology that doesn't transform schools is fine with me.  Previous posts: New Blog To Hype Blended Learning Bubble June 2011, Wanting A Little More From EdSurge December 2011.

Comments

[betsy]

Thanks Alex, for the mention.

Most important: we would LOVE to hear from any of your readers who have experiences and perspective on using edtech products (feedback@edsurge.com).

We do think we're attempting a tech-journalism mashup. If you dig into the site, you'll discover we've written 20 detailed "reports" on widely used tech products. (Example: take a look at our "report" (tab) on Study Island http://www.edsurge.com/p/121).

Truth in advertising: we don't have a school/testing lab where we can try out products, so we are talking with teachers. We're also trying very hard to strip out the hype from descriptions of how these tools work. Here's one interesting thing that we've surfaced: it's surprisingly hard to get vendors to talk about what they charge for their products. (You won't find such numbers on most websites!)

We are fact-checking our reports in an "old-school" journalism sort of way, but we are certainly not taking descriptions straight from vendors.

As you note, most important will be teachers' comments on products. For now, we're verifying the identities of people who comment on products; we aim to build in identity features to ensure that comments are legitimate.

Your critiques and comments are good. What we've done so far is just a first step -- but we hope an important step to have open and fair conversations about the value of different tech products in education.

Best, betsy