What computing software and hardware companies have learned from TV

Little by little, I am becoming more and more anti-technology.  It places me in a conflicted position, because as an educator, I use technology as a tool, both for my own personal productivity and to enhance learning.  Over the years I have seamlessly  shifted from rarely using a computer to a nearly daily use of one for short videos, incorporation of applets, virtual labs and simulations.  We are currently moving towards a having every student equipped with a computer in the classroom.  I'm ok with that.  Technology is a tool and one of the things it can do is serve education.  However, I feel this aspect is being used to beguile people.  If you want to skip the long post people it boils down to this:  Selling technology to children increases market size.  In order to do this you must convince parents it is in the interest of their children to won it.  One of the best arguments is that it is educational.  It doesn't have to be, because parent's don't typically have the means to evaluate the educational value.  It just has to look like it.  You can continue to read, or just scroll to the bottom to watch the video.

Technology is a business, and its a big one. The largest companies by market capitalization are computing, oil and car companies.  I'll save the car and oil company and their influence on urban development policy for another day.  Suffice it so say, technology isn't about making out lives better.  It's about making a profit.  Improving our lives is one way of accomplishing this, but it's not the easiest.  The easiest way to use technology to make a profit is to use awe, emotional seduction, and entertainment, to create a continuous revenue stream.

TV started as a communication and entertainment tool.  Unsurprisingly, entertainment won, and TV has, for decades, been treated as a brain atrophying device.  Sure, it made some inroads in education, but putting in a movie is often considered to be to be the sign of an uninspired teacher who is just phoning it in.  Video games were always meant to be entertainment, and even now when the military is able to show a positive effect on soldier training, people view them as useless for anything except wasting time.  Computers were developed as tools for working professionals, and for decades they did this admirably.  However, the last decade has seen an explosion in creating computing devices for the individual.  At first it was focused on adults, and though at times their use skews towards entertainment, I think most adults still use technology for a fair amount of work.  But adults are only a small part of the available market.  Selling to children offer the potential for a huge increase in market size.  However, kids don't need a computer for work, because they don't manage a home or work the way adults do. 

The work of a child is learning.  In the U.S., it's formalized to the point that it can be treated as the job of children.  So if you are going to sell to children and get their parents to spend the money, you need to sell the technology as a learning tool.  However, unlike selling to an adult, the end user is different from the payee.  As such, one must create a desire to have the device in the user, and a belief in the utility of the device in the payee.  However, the payee is not able to directly assess the the utility of the device because they typically don't see the how the individual utilizes the device on a work context, nor are they able to as easily measure the whether it has the desired effect.  What this all means it that, as a technology company, you can sell to children by creating the illusion of education to adults while focusing on the wow factor for children.  You have to have the wow factor, but you don't have to actually educate.  More and more, this is what I am seeing; devices and apps claiming to be wonderful tools for education, that do little more than package some basic information into a game or other feedback based application.  Where games and computers used to be treated as separate devices, they are becoming much more blended.  These educational games don't encourage deep thinking, questioning, or integration of information, because that can't be easily and cheaply packaged.  I don't know this because I've tested a bunch of them.  I know this because I know what it takes to teach, and for a computer to do this you need one that can pass the Turing test as an educated professional and we aren't there yet.

In 2011, this was Dow Corning's video (1) about their advancements in glass.

In 2012, this was Dow Corning's video (2) about their advancements in glass.

Color me skeptical about the educational value.  Is it just me, or does the second one make you a little depressed about the future for children as well? I'm just hoping that it's also so outrageously expensive that it just won't ever be utilized that way.