Yes, Classroom Tech Can Tackle Inequality—but Change Takes Politics and Patience

Digital Education Is Lifting Students While Challenging Academics and Silicon Valley

Even as digital technology has grown exponentially more sophisticated, accessible, and integral to our lives, social inequality has cast a deeper shadow across the United States in recent decades. Simultaneously, getting a quality education has become ever more essential for individual success and fulfillment.

The question of whether tech-enhanced education can help break down—or perhaps even erase—growing social divisions confronted a panel of educators brought together at a Zócalo/Arizona State University event titled “Can Digital Learning Dismantle the American Class System?”

The panelists’ collective answer: Digital education can indeed shake up rigid …

For a More Open Society, Keep the Internet Neutral

Metering Traffic or Filtering Speech Would Throttle Democracy and Innovation

Why would someone who spent much of his career working for a multinational telecommunications company care so much about preserving “net neutrality?”

That someone would be me. I worked for Vodafone, …

Is A/B Product Testing Turning Us into Silicon Valley’s Lab Rats?

The Tech Industry Says It's Helping Us Shape the Future, But Our Clicks Could Entrap Us

A:
Test me all night, baby.

No, really. Sign me up to be the subject of A/B testing. I’d even be willing to sign a blanket consent form, right now, …

When Pac-Man Started a National “Media Panic”

Video Games Revived a Perpetual Debate Over the Virtues and Vices of Technology for Kids

In the early 1980s, spurred by the incredible popularity of Atari, Space Invaders, and Pac-Man, everyone seemed to be talking about video games, if not obsessively playing them. A …

An Overconfident Public Learns the Limits of Predictive Technology

In Chaotic Times, We Rely Too Much on Big Data to Forecast the Future

It’s dark outside and you’re bleary-eyed. You search for your phone and it reads 3:17 a.m. Your mind starts to wander: Why does my boss want to meet with me …

How Democracy, in the Kremlin’s Crosshairs, Can Fight Back

Russian Cyber Meddling Turns Free Speech and Technology Against Open Societies

The most dramatic development of France’s recent Presidential election was last Friday’s announcement by the Emmanuel Macron campaign that their email and account records had been the target of a …