In this section we see some themes that arise from the way in which technology is funded. At each stage of funding rounds, or to garner support from larger organisations, educational technology projects have to justify their existence with revenue, projected revenue, or number of users, not with their impact on learning. Audrey Watters writes about the edTech development community from a critical and historical perspective. Her blog is well worth following, and at the link below, you can download as a pdf her "The Monsters of Education Technology' project.This isn't a book and has no page numbers, it is simply a collection of the transcripts of her talks as guest speaker during 2014. I would recommend all of it when you have the time, but for this week, the most relevant sections are The History of the Future of Edtech, which is on pp.8-16 of the pdf, and Ed Tech's Monsters on pp.75-85.
Audrey Watters, The Monsters of Education Technology.

In the former lecture Watters first suggests how the history of educational technology and that of computing is intertwined. She demonstrates the dangers of ignoring historical perspectives and says that the ideology of technology innovators is one which "shapes the story that many edTech entrepreneurs tell about education and about their role in transforming it". She asks what are the differences between current initiatives such as Khan Academy and Coursera, and equivalents from 15-20 years ago that are now ignored by the tech innovation community. She introduces some of the key players within Coursera and presents their comments on profitablity and views on education generally, and then looks to an Edtech that has taken hold in the same time period, the LMS or Learning Management System. Finally Watters talks about Seymour Papert and his aims for computers in education, to inspire new ways of thinking, rather than to instruct or deliver content, and she describes the commercialisation of PLATO, and its following failure, highlighting the parallels with online systems such as Coursera.

In the Ed Tech's Monsters section, Watters extends these ideas and shows the underpinning behaviourist approach, originating from B. F. Skinner, and valued by "libertarian tech types" who embrace a "free marketplace of ideas" and which has inspired gamification and persuasive design. The following two papers discuss the diverging views on the affordances of computers and technology which ought to be central to education, from Papert's vision of inspiration in the 1980s, which did not take hold, and Skinner's instructional, behaviourist vision, on which persuasive design is based.

Additional optional reading

The first paper is another from Ben Williamson, who analyses the Lytics Lab at Stanford University and Pearson's big data research centre in terms of the influence of their political economy on educational theory and the current trends in education data science. The considerable economic and social capital that supports these ventures gives them dominance over the market, and their perspective on education becomes encoded in the software tools they develop, black boxed and privileged over alternatives. He describes circumstances when technological capability enables a functionality that coincides temporally with a desire for that functionality - we'll see this in the case study also.

Williamson, B. (2017) Who owns educational theory? Big data, algorithms, and the expert power of education data science. In E-Learning and Digital Media, 14(3) pp.105-122.

If you want to explore this topic further, this next paper parallels these issues with an exploration of why Logo, Papert's 1980 computing initiative, didn't take hold in formal education, which can be summed up by the following quote: "The gap between the initial expectations and the reality of its implementation demonstrates that the technology needs to be surrounded by social and political relationships that will allow it to do transformational work

Agalianos, A., Noss, R., & Whitty, G. (2001). Logo in mainstream schools: the struggle over the soul of an educational innovation. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 22(4), 479–500.

The terminology of "venture capital" originally comes from "adventure capital." Venture capitalists are willing to take big risks because a small percentage of their investments will produce exponential returns, even though most will fail. For example, Sequoia turned $60 million invested in WhatsApp into $3 billion. Lightspeed Venture Partners turned an $8 million investment in Snap into $2 billion.

Tech companies have an unrivaled capacity to grow quickly in ways other businesses struggle to match. For social media platforms, growth is fueled by network effects - the more users on the platform, the more valuable it becomes. More broadly in tech, disruptive innovations that create entirely new markets enable hypergrowth. These innovations often come at the cost of established markets. For instance, smartphones and tablets disrupted the personal camera market.

The potential for enormous returns on early tech investments has led to a flood of global capital into the sector. This creates huge pressures for rapid growth. A hotly anticipated initial public offering (IPO) can generate tremendous wealth for early investors if hype reaches a fever pitch. Some companies have ridden this wave without products to justify sky-high valuations, like WeWork and Theranos.

The outsized rewards on offer incentivize "blitzscaling" - growing at all costs, even with unsustainable business models. This dynamic is amplified by an influx of less agile capital from sources like pension funds and sovereign wealth funds.
The result is a proliferation of "unicorns" - private companies valued over $1 billion. There are currently 36 EdTech unicorns that have raised $30 billion in funding and are collectively valued at $105 billion. The venture capital model hinges on the exponential returns from a handful of runaway successes outweighing many failed investments.