Is Innovation Good or Bad?

I can't believe I've been working in education for four years, and interested in technology and learning for even longer, and tonight is the first time I've encountered the work of Audrey Watters. I'm still processing a lot of her thoughts, and as I was reading her series on The Stories We're Told in Education I kept stopping to read shocking facts and connections out loud to my husband. Overall I'd say I agree in large part with her general premise---that we need to look deeply and critically at not just the functionality of the technology tools we use in education but where they come from, who is selling them to us, and why they are so cheap. I will definitely follow Watters's writing in the future, because informed, critical voices that provide context are often hard to find.

I'm currently taking EDCI 325: Leadership and Technology at UVM, and I was struck by how differently Watters talks about the concept of innovation in education (and more specifically in edtech) than how I have encountered it thus far in my course. I mean, we read a text and participated in a MOOC for this class called The Innovator's Mindset. Innovation, to me, until tonight, has been as George Couros describes it: working to create something new and better, a positive goal, something to strive for as an educator.

From what I understood in my reading, Watters conception and criticism of "innovation" comes primarily from the tech world. I get the sense, reading her work, that it is an over-used buzz word among the Silicon Valley crowd. It's funny that I feel disconnected from that place and the work that happens there, but the work they do has an outsize impact on my life (checking my iPhone, using Google products, posting on Instagram, etc.). I'm surprised I didn't already have the sense that innovation was a buzz word. Prior to reading Watters's work, I didn't realize, for example, that Betsy DeVos characterizes many of her proposals for changing (privatizing?) public education as "innovation." That it is a thing for schools to aspire to run more like businesses. Watters's writes:

"It’s never so much that educators or others are against “innovation” per se...It’s that “innovation” has come to mean a specific set of practices – political practices, financial practices, and ecclesiastical ones."

Who gets to decide what a word means? And when is a word over-used to the point that it becomes imbued with so much meaning from those many many other uses that they negate your intentions? Is it naive to think it could ever be an unqualified good thing to see yourself as an innovator, when "innovation", as Watters says, implies a complex web of less than fair, just, or moral practices?

Reading Watters, I'm wondering if Couros's thinking about innovation, education, and technology is naive, or at the very least uncritical. Or are they just two sides of a coin---one an optimist, inclined to trust, one a pessimist, inclined to doubt, but both believing in the potential of our educational undertaking?

I think my next step will be to read more of Watters writing on innovation, and to revisit The Innovator's Mindset with a more critical minset, so I can try to figure out where I stand on innovation.