 So welcome to another edge cause community conversation. I'm excited to be here today with Audrey Waters whose new book is about teaching machines and a history of personalized learning. And I love the book. I'm a fan of your work. I think your voice is so important. I'm curious, you know, we all have our stories before the stories, but what's your story with educational technology? Oh, this is such a great question. And thank you so much for having me having me on your show, John. So, you know, it's really hard to sort of pinpoint one particular moment for me. I mean, I have a very, I don't know, my whole educational history is a little bit of this, a little bit of that I from Wyoming, but my mom is British. And when I was in fourth grade, for example, she decided that it would be fun for me if I went to live with my aunt and uncle in England for part of the year and I went to school there. So I've had, and I went to high school and ended up being sent away to school in England in high school. So I've had a lot of different education experiences in general. And I think that even before we talk about think about technology, I think that that has helped me see the ways in which education is something that is really connected to society and culture. And it's not natural, so to speak. It's organized in different ways with different goals and different practices. And so really, my whole educational history has been this observer about what we do when we do this thing called school. And I'm a certain age. So I suppose the personal computer was around when I was a kid. But I have to say, really, our schools in Wyoming, we didn't have a lot of opportunities to use computers. I was very fortunate that my grandfather decided when the Apple IIe came out that he was going to invest in my brother and my future and got a computer for us at home. But really, ed tech wasn't something I started to think about until graduate school, interestingly enough, when in the late 90s at the University of Oregon, we received word on high that we needed to start putting all of our course material into this new software that the school had adopted called Blackboard. So really, my first experiences teaching college as a grad student were entwined with this mandate to use a particular piece of ed tech. And so I've been thinking about the ways in which, again, these practices have evolved, these technologies are involved for a very long time, long before I sort of turned my focus to ed tech. I have two thoughts. While you were talking, one is having a very clear recollection in the 90s, which is the decade I think we're referring to here, being in a meeting room. And at that time, I had what I still think was the dream job. I was half-time teaching English and half-time being an evangelist for ed tech at that sort of breathless time where telling a faculty member, you could use Excel for your grade book, and it will make everything so. You mean I can do that? You mean it was kind of a petty time. But I also remember being in a meeting room where a bunch of people kept saying the phrase, we need to throw up more courses on the web. I kept looking around to see if anybody caught the irony of that, and it wasn't a time for catching irony, I think, that decade. Yeah, that moment of enthusiasm is so interesting, because I mean another job I had at the time was I worked at the University of Oregon. They ran, they had a conference management department that did continuing ed. And they ran conferences, mostly education conferences. And there was this little conference, a little national conference, national education computing conference. And it was pretty small, a couple of thousand people went every year, but in 97 they held it in Seattle. And the keynote speaker was this fellow Bill Gates. And suddenly it went from a very small conference to like seven or 8,000 people showed up. And so I just remember that all of a sudden moment in the late 90s it felt like people were like felt compelled to sort of get on board with this ed tech thing. Even though I think teachers, especially innovative teachers have been using it for decades really, but it really felt that there was this sense that, wow, we all have to get on board.