Last week marked the ninth anniversary of Hack Education. It seems a little strange to even make note of the occasion as it’s been almost six months since I’ve written anything here.

I finally completed the draft of Teaching Machines on 31 May. It still needs some work – some editing, some peer review, some image permissions, and such – but I’m pretty pleased with how it’s come together. It’s not at all the book that I initially imagined I’d write when I first thought, so many years ago now, that I’d look at the long history of attempts to automate education.

In order to write the book, I put a lot of the work I’d regularly done on this website “on pause” – the weekly round-up of education news, the newsletter, the end-of-year “trends” articles. And all along the way, I have been thinking a lot about what exactly I plan to do here when Teaching Machines is done. I don’t really have a good answer yet.

As it currently stands, I do not plan on resuming the weekly round-up I’d write every Friday; and as such, I don’t think the year-end articles will continue either – at least not in the (long) form they’ve long taken. I will, however, start writing HEWN again. (Soon.)

And I will write articles here on Hack Education – I have a lot of ideas and stories to tell. But what I refuse to do is pay quite such close attention to the day-to-day bullshit of the ed-tech industry – or, more broadly, to the day-to-day bullshit of social media. I really can’t tell you how much happier I am – despite all the stress of researching and writing a book – by being offline and tuned out.

I can promise you, ed-tech is not changing faster than it’s ever changed before. The people who want you to think that are hoping that they can wind you up and spin you ’round and knock you off center so that you’ll be less able to stand firm and resist their “disruption.”