From the 1920s American psychologists experimented with teaching using machines. Inspired, in part, by the expansion of schooling, especially at the secondary level; the success of paper-and-pencil ...

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. Benjamin Wolff covers leadership insights from the world of the arts. Are robots coming for us and our work? The dystopian answer ...

One of Audrey Watters’s observations in her deeply researched Teaching Machines is that ed-tech evangelists seldom make an effort to learn the history of educational technologies. For those ...

To its 5,000 salesmen across the U.S., Grolier Inc., publisher of America’s oldest encyclopedia, last week handed out an odd-looking new product to sell door to door. A green, windowed, sheet-metal ...

As I was reading Audrey Watters’s Teaching Machines: The History of Personalized Learning, recently published by MIT Press, the word “landmark” kept occurring to me.[1] This is a landmark book. It is ...