By Joe Riina-Ferrie, Associate Director of Educational Media, and Lucius Von Joo, Associate Director of Design Education

For the Fall 2025 semester, the Digital Futures Institute Gallery features the exhibit “DEAD TECH”. In this interview, Lucius Von Joo, designer and curator who is DFI’s Associate Director of Design Education, shares insights into the exhibit’s origins and goals. The following features excerpts from the interview conducted over Zoom on September 26, 2025, which has been edited for length and clarity.

Inspiration for this exhibit topic

Joe Riina-Ferrie: What is the DEAD TECH Exhibit?

Lucius Von Joo: It was something we were thinking about at DFI, watching the investment cycle around educational technology, and what we are calling the “hype cycle” around AI or generative AI (genAI) platforms. A few of us were talking, remarking that this is something we've seen in education before. So we started thinking about past moments from our research and personal memories about educational technology that had originally been presented as  “the answer” to educational problems, as in “This ed tech is going to save the day.”

Joe: In the context of this exhibit, what is ed tech?

Lucius: Most people discussing ed tech currently picture it as technology in the classroom that assists, supplements, or supports students in their learning.

Joe: As you were involved in some of the early conversations for developing this exhibit, can you describe its core idea?

Lucius: When we do exhibits in the Digital Futures Institute Gallery, we make an attempt to lead with questions, as opposed to a lecture or an answer to something. So it was really important for us to keep that tone to help visitors ask questions and find their own answers. While we all have our own opinions on this topic, we focused on the visitor experience and asked ourselves, “How do we design this where somebody can go around the exhibit and explore this topic?"

The first idea we centered on was the promises of ed tech. We looked at the people who first came out with an idea, or at least were the figureheads or known for that idea. What kind of things were they saying around that item? What surprised us, especially with the benefit of time, when you hear somebody making promises about an invention, and then you have years of reflection, you can see how the ed tech developed after its implementation, along with its early promise. We pinpoint that place in the ed-tech hype cycle where those promises were made, and support gallery visitors to hear those promises firsthand from the people making them, and then support visitors to make their own predictions of what may have happened afterwards.

In the DFI Gallery, we also aim to design exhibitions with less text. We want people to explore with the items themselves. By contrast, if you visit other tech museums, items from the past are often pedestaled or under an exhibit case; as a visitor, you're not going to touch it. At DFI’s DEAD TECH Exhibit, we encourage people to touch these technologies. We want people to think through how this developed, to open it up, to reflect on how it really works.

Featured “dead tech” items

Joe: Can you tell us about some of the technologies, their early promises, and what you've included in the exhibit to help people explore "dead tech"?

Lucius: One item is B. F. Skinner’s learning machine. Skinner, a behaviorist, felt that each child is a blank slate, and that child can learn anything you teach (idea related to tabula rasa). So with that in mind, Skinner believed that you can have a machine that trains students to learn anything, and that's the concept behind this learning machine ed-tech.

An early version of the learning machine would ask, “What does green on a stoplight mean?” And then you write in the word “go,” and then you flip a trigger, and then the machine tells you the answer. Then you acknowledge it as, "Oh, I got it right." Then you move on to the next question. It's basically a quiz machine.

Modern forms of quiz machines are platforms like Duolingo, while gamified, ask a question, do more rote learning, and then you repeat it. So we can see where the ideas behind the learning machine eventually went. Initially when learning machines were introduced, there was much excitement around it. On a side note, Skinner didn't invent the machines, but he did iterate and popularize them. 

The learning machine was sold to teachers with the promise, "This will be twice as fast as you, so use it." Obviously teachers reflected, "There's so much more to learning that I'm doing than just quizzing students," and so in real classrooms, it didn't get implemented in the same way that Skinner intended.

Another challenge is the Rheem version of the learning machine, which was very expensive, came out in 1962, and soon died out a few years later in the 1960s. And that's where this type of ed-tech ends for B. F. Skinner, even though some of his ideas live on. 

In another section of the exhibit, we also feature a learning machine model that was designed at Teachers College called the Cyclo-Teacher. It's a little plastic thing that you shift over, which is not very intuitive at all.

In the exhibit, there's also an adding machine that's similar to a quiz machine. I think mathematics historically lends itself to quick rote and quiz learning.

How to engage with this interactive, hands-on exhibit

Joe: At the DEAD TECH Exhibit, how do people check out these real learning machines from the past?

Lucius: We added some directions and a "Try Me" sticker on all the things that people can interact with because we realized that people are trained to not interact with exhibit items this way.

Visitors are absolutely encouraged to try the technology, as it will help people more fully understand what they are about and what the teacher and student experiences could be in using them. Here’s another ed-tech example from the exhibit:

The BrainCo's Focus1 demonstrates surveillance learning. It was designed with a headband that has two sensors for an EEG. And for those who work with EEG, you know you need more sensors to get clear data. So the idea is that it will show if the students are focusing or not.

It has a readout for teachers to see the students’ brainwaves, which looks like just a line on a graph basically. But it also has a red or a green light in front of it. So you have this band with a red or green light lighting up: Green means I'm paying attention, and red means I'm not.

This was sold to a few schools in China, with the promise to parents, "Look, you'll get a text message in real time about your child’s attention/focus in school." The parents would get messages if their child was focusing or not. This would be sent to the principals, also.

This product lasted about a year. Then that company pivoted towards health and well-being. So instead, they shifted to outside of schools, and the company president says, "Oh, it was doing exactly what it should, but schools just weren't ready yet."

We have one of the headbands in the exhibit, and visitors can try it on and see what it's like. 

Lessons for the future from ed-tech’s recent history

Joe: Why curate this right now? Why did this feel like a good moment for this exhibit?

Lucius: That's a great question. If it were 15 years ago, we could have been thinking about MOOCs. If I ask the general public about MOOCs now, most probably wouldn’t know about them. If they do, it's at a much lower percentage than if I ask about GenAI or use the word AI. 

So with any generation, there’s a huge change in the discussions and inventions around what’s going to change education.

Joe: Anything else that you want people to know as they're engaging with the DEAD TECH Exhibit?

Lucius: I’d like to say a little bit more about the hype cycle, which traditionally starts with a tech trigger point, then follows with inflated promises, and then goes to the trough of disillusionment. In the business form of this cycle after disillusionment, it's often argued that there's a steady climb of enlightenment, before you then have productivity that rests between inflated promises and disillusionment.

However, in DEAD TECH, we play with that hype cycle because to have a down, to have a peak again, you have to constantly have moments when you make layers of new promises. So it starts again with inflated promises, then to the trough of disillusionment, and then back to inflated promises. We hear those layers of promises with each new ed tech, just wondering what that next trough of disillusionment will be.

Joe: I love how you set up the DEAD TECH Exhibit to give people the chance to (1) have a relationship with the promises made and the related objects, (2) reflect on their own, and (3) leave the exhibit possibly thinking about our unique current moment, connected to educational technology throughout history. I'm excited for people to come see it.

Lucius: Yeah, absolutely. All ages are welcome to visit, from grad school classes and young students. For example, we just designed lesson plans for middle schools to come visit, as well.

DEAD TECH: An Exhibit Following the Hype Cycle of Ed Tech is open to visitors in the DFI Gallery, 5th Floor of Russell Hall, through December 19, 2025. Hours are Monday through Thursday, 9:00am-5:00pm, and on Fridays by appointment.