We’re halfway through 2018, which means I need to start thinking about this massive end-of-year project and start identifying the dominant trends and narratives.

What are the stories we’re hearing about ed-tech? (Who’s telling those stories? Who’s paying for them to be told?)

Due to that other big project I’m currently working on – Teaching Machines – I am going to have to make this year’s review a little shorter than usual. (And honestly, writing last year’s series was terribly grueling because of this awful combination of authoritarian politics and authoritarian technology that we’re experiencing.)

I’m just going to pick five rather than ten stories to focus on this year. So far, I think they’ll include these:

• School safety (e.g. guns, surveillance)
• Robots in the classroom (e.g. algorithms, Alexa)
• The business of ed-tech
• Social-emotional learning (e.g. “mindsets”)
• Job training

These might change, of course, once we get closer to December and once I look more closely at my notes from the year and at where the money has gone...