Pearson plans to sell its textbooks as NFTs (opens in new tab)

Before working in SWE I taught middle school math. The absurdity of textbook sales is truly incredible. Some textbook reps will come and attempt to sell all the teachers on how wonderful their books are. The irony of this being a completely useless exercise seems to be lost on nobody, certainly not the disaffected teachers that know their feedback to administration will be ignored. There are, of course, promises of how your life will be magically simplified through this year's books and how amazing the technology integration is.

"Technology" is thrown around like security buzzwords at BlackHat in these meetings, always with no vision for what that looks like. Teaching kids that mathematics is a fundamental set of ideas that can be applied to solve a wide variety of problems? No, no. Drill them with problems in abstraction, completely isolated from any idea of why the algorithm you have them following works. Make a bloated web interface for answering multiple choice problems instead of instilling curiosity or attempting to teach them how to use the magic light box to approach new problems or even how it works.

This is thoroughly unsurprising and aligns exactly with the approach I saw of needing "smart boards" that were supposed to revolutionize education, or "clickers" so kids could vote live instead of just a show of hands.

There was that time I went to a conference and somebody from Pearson was scheduled to give a talk. The speaker melted down and talked about how bad it was working for Pearson and how we was looking for another job.