Is Palantir Peter Thiel Trump's Fascist Education Chief or Tutor? Thiel's Surveillance Ed Tech Since 2010...
Reasons Why I Raised Concerns About Data Surveillance during The Digital Education Revolution under Prime Minister Rudd in 2008.
The PLANE Team crashed and burned from too many life long overpaid technocrats.
And not enough lead learners asking better critical questions of "big data" and the implications for "student surveillance."
Audrey Watters was an ed Tech researcher who clearly saw through the utter "AI KPI outcomes based PISA test/data scores education" model BS even then. From 2010...
And now we have Mussolini Trump 15 years later moving towards evoking The Insurrection Act on his own people... I guess it took Hitler only a decade or so to rise to power, (1920 1933) and then another 6 years to start WW2.
Does China even want to appease The Aggressive, Flapping Flagrantly TACO Donald Duck?
Or is China content to watch their only "competitor" self destruct in a red neck good ole buoy big data technocrat urban warfare "riotous" gas chambers?
Let Saturday's Big Beautiful Dill Birthday Parade Begin...
A Latter Day Salute to A Dolt's Chest Thumping Proper Gander Numbnut Rallies of 1933 to 1939
Donald Duck will be in his Uncle Scrooge Party Cake Element.
Hesgeth Goebbels and Vance Goring will be pleased
We know Neville Chamberlain tried "appeasement" with Hitler and failed.
Dismally.
But Is West Coast Beach Buoy Gavin Newsom a Latter Day Domestic Churchill?
Oh the mantra repeats just like His Story...
"Wait, Who Is Peter Thiel?
Peter Thiel’s entrepreneurial and investment history, in brief:
He co-founded the online payments company PayPal in 1998 with Max Levchin. PayPal merged with Elon Musk’s financial transaction company X.com the following year, going public in 2002 and then sold to eBay later that year.
In 2004, Thiel founded Palantir Technologies, a data analysis company funded in part by Q-Tel, the investment wing of the CIA.
In 2005, Thiel launched his investment firm Founders Fund. Other partners in the firm include Napster co-founder Sean Parker and PayPal execs Ken Howery and Luke Nosek.
Thiel joined the tech accelerator program Y Combinator as a partner in 2015.
A quick look at Thiel’s philosophies and philanthropy:
He is openly gay, and some contend that Gawker’s outing him in 2007 was part of Thiel’s rationale for supporting Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against the publication.
He has supported other political campaigns, prior to becoming a pledged delegate for Trump this year. He endorsed Ron Paul for President in 2008.
Thiel believes in the singularity – the theory that artificial intelligence will reach a point where it far surpasses human intelligence, eventually bringing about the end of the Anthropocene. Thiel has funded the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence. He’s also a financial backer of OpenAI (along with Elon Musk, LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, and Y Combinator president Sam Altman), a non-profit research organization that promises to develop “friendly” AI and, according to recent New Yorker profile of Altman, to “prevent artificial intelligence from accidentally wiping out humanity.” In that profile, Altman described himself as a survivalist of sorts and name-checked Thiel as his back-up plan if the end-of-the-world does come and Altman can’t make it to his bunker. Thiel has also pledged money to the Seasteading Institute, supporting its efforts to develop autonomous ocean-dwelling communities outside of current nation-states’ jurisdictions. And Thiel has supported anti-aging and life-extension research.
And then there’s his influence and investments in education…
Thiel and the Silicon Valley Narratives about Education
Thiel, a graduate from Stanford (with a BA in philosophy and a JD from its law school), pronounced in 2011 that we are in the midst of a bubble – not a real estate bubble but a higher education bubble. He told then Techcrunch editor Sarah Lacy, “A true bubble is when something is overvalued and intensely believed. Education may be the only thing people still believe in in the United States. To question education is really dangerous. It is the absolute taboo. It’s like telling the world there’s no Santa Claus.” College just isn’t worth the price, Thiel argued.
Thiel had unveiled a “20 Under 20” contest at Techcrunch’s annual conference the previous year – a plan to offer twenty young people under the age of twenty $100,000 to drop out of school and pursue other work. Among the recipients of The Thiel Fellowship (which, now in its sixth iteration, has expanded to thirty recipients per year, all under the age of twenty-two): Dale Stephens, founder of UnCollege, a startup that encourages young people to pursue a non-college path and sells “gap year” services; Vitalik Buterin, the co-creator of Ethereum, a blockchain service; Ben Yu, inventor of sprayable caffeine; and Laura Deming, who has founded a venture capital firm to invest in anti-aging and life extension technologies. (Deming is one of the few female recipients of the fellowship.)
Thiel is also the co-author of The Diversity Myth: ‘Multiculturalism’ and the Politics of Intolerance at Stanford, a book that argues that “political correctness,” restrictions on free speech, an “a curricular obsession with oppression theory and victimology” permeate higher education, lowering the quality of education at Stanford and undermining what he deems the most important type of diversity on campus – intellectual diversity.
Despite actively promoting a narrative that college isn’t worth it, Thiel remains heavily involved in education, teaching at Stanford and, of course, investing in education companies.
Thiel and his VC firm Founder’s Fund’s Education Technology Investments (since 2010)
Knewton (adaptive teaching software)
Declara (adaptive teaching software)
AltSchool (private school that relies heavily on data surveillance and software)
Thinkful (coding bootcamp)
Clever (helps connect various software products for schools so that data can be more easily shared)
Uversity (student engagement platform, formerly Inigral, acquired by TargetX)
ResearchGate (social networking site for researchers)
Lore (learning management system, formerly Coursekit, acquired by Noodle)
If You Can (education game-maker, founded by Trip Hawkins, the founder of Electronic Arts)
SoFi (private loans)
Upstart (private loans)
Affirm (private loans)
This portfolio reflects some of the big stories Silicon Valley is selling via education technology – “personalized education,” data collection and analytics, private student loans, coding bootcamps.
Those last two are noteworthy, I’d contend, particularly considering Thiel’s claims about a “higher education bubble.” That is, he seems quite happy to profit from the growing cost of tuition via the booming private student loan market which is well-positioned to profit from the growth in coding bootcamps, whose students are not currently eligible for federal financial aid.
So What?
I track all ed-tech funding data at funding.hackeducation.com. The data is freely and openly available via the GitHub repository that powers the site. The data includes a list of all investors in ed-tech companies going back to 2010, as well as a more detailed look at individual investments, acquisitions, and mergers so far this year.
I track this data, in part, because it helps inform the criticism I write of the ideology of education technology – its business, its politics, its stories. It’s important to peel back the veneer of “progress” – technological progress, political progress – and scrutinize the message, not just the product, being sold. It’s worth scrutinizing the networks – powerful networks – behind education technology. Who is funding the technology makers? Who is funding the policy makers? Who is funding the storytellers? To what end?
At the core of the companies that Thiel has founded and funded is surveillance. Palantir. Facebook. AltSchool. The regime of data collection and analysis is framed as “personalization.” But that’s a cover for compliance and control.
"I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible" – Peter Thiel
What if, instead of wondering how on earth Thiel could support Trump or Trump support Thiel, we consider how they’re quite well-aligned and how the technologies we’re adopting in education are shot through with this very ideological affinity?
Audrey Watters
Published 16 Oct 2016
Ferreira had a gift for the colorful claim. In the Forbes article, we find the suggestion that "it will know what kids will get on the SAT, so they won’t have to take it." When he appeared at the White House's 2012 Datapalooza (the real name of a real thing), he claimed that Knewton would be able to tell students what they should eat for breakfast in order to get a good test score that day. In 2015, he told NPR, "We think of it like a robot tutor in the sky that can semi-read your mind and figure out what your strengths and weaknesses are, down to the percentile." Their adaptive learning technology was going to end up in "every classroom in the country." It would customize educational content "down to the atomic concept level" and would not just be personalized, but "hyper-personalized."
The Knewton story is the story of yet another "innovative," "game-changing," "trailblazing," education technodisruptor that was given tons of breathless press-- it was, I kid you not, going to "solve the global education crisis." At Davos, Knewton was going to "take education by storm." Not a single writer or reporter paused for even a second to ask if this weren't all a bunch of bullshit. (Michael Feldstein caused an online uproar by saying re the NPR piece that Ferreira was selling snake oil.) And the investors lined up to throw money at Knewton. From 2012:
In October Knewton raised $33 million from Pearson and Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, reportedly at a valuation north of $150 million. The company had already raised $21 million from venture firms such as Accel Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners and First Mark. Says Thiel, an impassioned advocate for shaking up the college model: “We like companies that have breakthrough technologies but not disruptive technologies, which typically don’t work. Knewton tries to make the existing system better with a very powerful tool.”
Knewton partnered with several publishers, most notably the behemoth Pearson, once heavily committed to a digital ocean of learning, but more recently backing away from that sea.
People who actually know education have been unconvinced all along by thee over-promising and underperforming of Big Data and adaptive learning (when you have a few minutes, go ahead and read everything that Audrey Watters ever wrote). But it has taken a while for thee wind to leave Knewton's sails.
Knewton tried a little side step and set aside its dreams of Big Brothering the world to become a player in higher education. In 2016, Ferreira stepped down, and the new focus became selling digital courseware to the higher ed market. That, apparently, has not worked out for them. The purchase price has not been divulged, but analysts think it's far below the $180 million in venture capital sunk into the company.
So another big time adaptive learning personalized learning company has promised big and failed to deliver.
As for Ferreira, don't worry. After he was out the door at Knewton, he was on to another start-up. He co-founded BakPax with two other guys who have no background in education. Did Ferreira learn anything about making audacious promises you can't back up? Well, here's what BakPax says it's about:
Bakpax reads handwriting and grades assignments for you. It gives you deeper insight into class performance and gives your students immediate feedback.
Sigh. You give the BackPax server your answer key, then you-- or your students-- take a picture of student papers with your phone and BakPax grades it. Right now it's free. At least, I guess, it doesn't pretend it can grade essays. In the meantime, other purveyors of personalized [sic] adaptive data mining learning stuff could learn a lesson from all this-- something about trying to stage an education revolution when you mostly just know about investing and data. They could learn a lesson. I'm betting they won 't."
