The Future of EdTech is the Diamond Age
The Diamond Age,a science fiction novel by Neal Stephenson, should be required reading for anyone interested in EdTech right now. Set in the near future and centering on an interactive, AI educational device called A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer, the novel’s theme — how self-directed education through an intelligent tutoring systems (ITS) can affect social class, seems especially relevant. Today, when schools and colleges are in flux because of COVID closures, we cannot predict what the future holds, but we still have to try. This article is for higher education administrators, faculty, test prep tutors, college and graduate school admissions professionals, teachers, distance learning professionals, and anyone interested in EdTech.
Stephenson’s “primer,” an example of intelligent tutoring, is designed to provide immediate, personalized feedback to learners. The “book,” similar to an iPad, teaches not only academic subjects, but also survival skills, social skills and critical thinking skills. It reacts to its owner’s environment, constantly generating developmentally appropriate learning opportunities, responding to spoken questions and reading to preliterate children. As they get older, it serves as a telescope, microscope and martial arts instructor, among a myriad of other roles shaped by the children’s needs.
The novel’s protagonist is an impoverished four-year-old girl named Nell, born to a single mother. The primer falls into her hands by chance (it was originally commissioned for a royal child); the education it provides changes her life, and she in turn grows up to change her society and subvert the status quo. The novel’s second protagonist, Hackworth, is an engineer who develops the code for the device. Unlike Nell, he lives in a “neo-Victorianist” paradise. Hackworth’s hero’s journey is a quest for the ultimate in EdTech.
The Diamond Age is especially relevant now, because it seems that we ourselves are living during a new Victorian Age. When top colleges admit more students from the top 1% of the income bracket than from the bottom 60%, the educational class divide is larger than ever. The novel asks questions about who is allowed access to education, and in the Diamond Age’s globalized society, this has to do with “tribe” or ethnicity as much as with class. In Stephenson’s world, as in ours, intelligent tutoring can change many of these inequalities.
Stephenson, writing 1995, envisioned EdTech through nanotech hardware, while current trends are more software and cloud based. The transformative power of his primer is mirrored in today’s intelligent tutoring platforms like Khan Academy. When Sal Khan spoke at the college where I served as tutoring director, he explained how girls from Afghanistan are able to get an education through Khan Academy despite Taliban restrictions preventing them from attending school. I was reminded of the ending of The Diamond Age, where the primer, once intended for the top 1%, is copied and distributed to 250,000 Chinese girls in orphanages. Life changing and societal altering results are implied.
As a refugee from the former Soviet Union, ESL student and first-generation college student, I can personally attest to the power of self-directed education. I went on to obtain a PhD in, ironically, English and have since spent my career in higher education, helping students improve their writing and test-taking skills and heading up one of the largest college writing and tutoring centers in New York City. At the City College of New York we were able to gather data on over 25,000 individual tutoring sessions over the course of several years using TutorTrac classroom management software. The SaaS based system allowed for appointment scheduling, automatic grading, lesson notes and progress reports. It also had whiteboard capability for our Online Writing Lab (OWL). In addition to traditional college students, we saw international students, English language learners, older adults, and students with disabilities. Students saw a 15% grade improvement on average during the semester, were 13 times more likely to pass their course and 2x less likely to drop out. Check out our tutoring foundations here. We then used the data gathered to support the college’s re-accreditation process. What TutorTrac can improve on is to allow for a better interface for supervising online tutoring staff.
When I began to use adaptive tests for diagnostic purposes in my own tutoring and admissions consulting venture, it really helped my students improve on GMAT, GRE, LSAT and MCAT tests, allowing them to gain admission to top tier college and graduate schools. Students were admitted to Harvard Law School, Columbia Business School, NYU Business School, and Northwestern University, even after being rejected in the past. Statistical analysis helped determine not only what types of test questions students got wrong most often, but more importantly, when they changed their response from the correct answer to the wrong answer. This happened when students were stuck between two answer choices and second-guessed themselves. Once we identified these kinds of patterns, I was able to advise students on when to change their responses and when to leave their answers alone. Students saw 30 percentile-point improvement on average.
Finally, as an instructor who has taught over 20 sections of college English and literature, I’ve found turnitin’s digital plagiarism checker extremely useful. I’ve used Blackboard, a web-based LMS for over 15 years, seeing it grow and develop. My kids have been using intelligent tutoring and other EdTech for the past ten years, and my next article will explore their learning through tech from first to tenth grade.
Works Consulted
Andrews, Gillian. “To Boldly Go Where No Learner Has Gone Before: Independent Inquiry, Educational Technology, and Society in Science Fiction.” E-Learning and Digital Media 2015, Vol. 12 (3–4) pp. 343–360.
Khan, Sal. “Reimagining Education,” Samuel Rudin Distinguished Visiting Scholar Lecture. The City College of New York. 01 Apr 2019.
Schindler, Laura, et al. “Computer-based Technology and Student Engagement: a Critical Review of the Literature.” International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education. Vol. 14 (1): 25. Dec 2017.
“Some Colleges Have More Students from the Top 1% Than the Bottom 60.” The New York Times. 18 Jan 2017.
Stephenson, Neal. The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer. Bantam Books. New York, NY: 1995.
About the author: Svetlana Bochman is a Columbia graduate who holds a PhD in 19th century British literature; she is the founder and former President of the City University of New York’s Writing Center Council, where tutoring center leaders across New York City meet and share ideas. Svetlana is the author of “Leading in Uncertain Times: Best Practices for Higher Education Administrators During COVID-19.” She is currently the founder and CEO of Bochman Tutoring.
