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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Are you tired of telling machines what to do and what not to do? It’s a large part of regular people’s days – operating dishwashers, smartphones and cars. It’s an even bigger part of life for ...

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 ...

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 ...

In the early 1950s, Harvard psychologist and new father B. F. Skinner turned his attention to arithmetic teaching. He argued that such instruction could be carried out by machine, and designed ...

We shouldn’t ask how much knowledge an agent can retain, but rather if it has had the opportunity to develop expertise by ...

Arend Hintze receives funding from NSF and Strength in Numbers Game Company. Are you tired of telling machines what to do and what not to do? It’s a large part of regular people’s days – operating ...