ISTE is the perfect place to question what the hell we’re doing in ed-tech in part because this has become a conference and an organization dominated by exhibitors. Ed-tech — in product and policy — is similarly dominated by brands. 60% of ISTE’s revenue comes from the conference exhibitors and corporate relations; touting itself as a membership organization, just 12% of its revenue comes from members. Take one step into that massive shit-show called the Expo Hall and it’s hard not to agree: “Yes, it is time to give up on computers in schools.”

The stakes are high here in part because all this highlights Google’s thirst for data — our data. The stakes are high here because we have convinced ourselves that we can trust Google with its mission: “To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

More than any other aspect of digital texts, this sense of malleability is what I find most exciting as an educator because it helps us expand the definition of what constitutes writing and it reminds us that writing, just like all forms of creation, is a social practice in conversation with others in the world around us.

That’s what we want to do. Well…OK, that’s what I in my omniscient infinitude want to do. This is the problem of the connected classroom how can one give up the hiearchy, trusting that the course of things will be taken up in manifold ways and products?

And therein lay the rub: in response to the fear and confusion I sensed in my students I became Uncle “Hub Central”. Understanding how to summarize became an external act outside their own minds consisting of checklists, algorithms, and templates designed to connect the dots that I so faithlessly put on the page. But in the end I believe that summing up needs to be an internal algorithm that rises up as a personal exigency, a massing together of sets of neuronal allies, firing and wiring like a mosh pit of nodal “hands” holding up the crowd surfing madman named Summary.

Meaning making and perhaps internal connecting? A consummation devoutly to be wished.