Zuckerberg and Musk are battling over rival social media platforms right now, and let me say right away that I’m not much of a fan of either. While Musk seemed content to sell us Teslas simply, he’s now in the business of Twitter.
Zuckerberg, on the other hand, has been attempting to market share his way into our schools for a few years now. And I think Meta’s attempts to do that should show us all we need to see. Because whoever wins these social media battles is irrelevant to me as either will undoubtedly wish to move into the space of our classrooms in whatever virtual way they can.
There’s money to be made there.
Just take the recent Meta advertisements to sell us their product that will, they say, revolutionize our teaching.
Meta calls it “The Impact Will Be Real.” As a veteran teacher, I don’t think anything could be further from the truth.
In the first clip, while a professor teaches college students from around the world virtually, a professional voice declares, One day, this lecture hall will be made of code, and although they’re virtual students, what they will learn is real.
My initial question was, why would anyone start an advertisement for Meta with this? The video shows nothing more than a more realistic version of Zoom. Virtual instruction wasn’t exactly, nor ever has been, any kind of success. In fact, much data supports the idea that it was detrimental to an entire generation of children. Mark Zuckerberg, though, in his Metaverse, has somehow found a way to fix all that. How? Graphics?
In the second clip, while we watch a medical student perform virtual surgery, a friendly voice declares, “A surgeon will be able to practice as many times as needed in the Metaverse, before laying her hands on a real patient.”
My question for any of us is, who wants a doctor cutting them open who has never been involved in a real operation on a real human being? And for the doctors-to-be themselves, how will the doctor feel, working only on virtual patients when she encounters a living, breathing human being? Will Meta evaluate the way its platform affects doctoral norms or pedagogy? Will Meta evaluate how patient-doctor relationships are affected by completely recalibrating how doctors learn? And finally, for all of us, it is changing the way professionals like doctors practice their craft based on the fact that technology is simply available, superior to updating best practices based on qualitative and quantitative data from real human beings, not a company looking to make itself richer than it already is?
And finally, while high school students gather around men in togas, we’re told, “These students aren’t really back in 32 B.C.E. but they can still watch Marc Antony debate in ancient Rome.”
I have yet to see a historical movie that has ever gotten the setting just perfect. That’s Hollywood. We go to be entertained, and if we learn a few things, we follow up by reading little things called books. When it comes to Mark Zuckerberg’s debate-on-the-steps fantasy here, my question is, who exactly will be designing this virtual environment? How will they interpret the primary sources to create immersive yet historically-accurate experiences?
Is Mark Zuckerberg going to have Steven Spielberg come out of retirement for an immersive Holocaust experience? Will Jerry Bruckheimer provide just the right amount of background shelling and explosive bombardment to give kids a sense of WW1 trench warfare? Or could we maybe assume that an Ivy League college grad, most likely white and affluent, like Zuckerberg himself, with little to no understanding of the material or the diverse themes that run through it, will be the designer of these experiences? I rather think we can.
Mark Zuckerberg is about to embark on a substantial venture-one that will make him and quite a few other people very rich, I am sure. His commercials clearly reveal that they want education to be a massive part of that grand experiment and that they believe there is a market in our classrooms for that product too. Maybe, as is described in one advertisement, we won’t even need our classrooms anymore, right?
But Mark Zuckerberg has forgotten that he is nothing more than a businessman selling a product. As a teacher, it’s preposterous to me that he would believe his money-making Meta product belongs in our classrooms. As a father, it’s scary as hell that he’d think Meta would ever replace them.
And whether Elon Musk’s Twitter remains on top of the most recent social media war or not, one thing is for certain: More advertisements are to come, and so are more attempts to bring billionaire business into our lives and classrooms.
Let’s note what those advertisements promise us carefully before we sign up.
