On her influential blog and in speeches she gives around the country, Audrey Watters warns that gadgets deserve more scrutiny, and that they often mask what she sees as a political attack on the academy. Watters has known higher education as an insider. She was an almost-Ph.D., having come just chapters away from finishing her dissertation, and she taught for years when she was a graduate student. But she now stands on the outside looking in on the academy and providing her analysis of where ed tech is going. She’s a fiercely independent voice who refuses to accept ads on her blog or do consulting. Her website describes her job description with one word: “troublemaker.”
Just a few weeks ago, she started a podcast called Tech Gypsies. Each week now, she and her partner, who is an advocate for open software standards called open APIs, riff on the latest ed-tech news, and, as always, she calls things as she sees them. After listening to the first few episodes, one thing struck me. She’s deconstructing what she calls a Silicon Valley narrative that she sees as pushing into higher education.
