In reaction to the start of this post by Rose Luckin…
‘The Dot-Com Bowl. The Crypto Bowl. Now the A.I. Bowl.
In 2000, more than a dozen internet start-ups bought Super Bowl adverts. Pets.com, Epidemic.com, Lifeminders.com. Most shut down within months when the tech bubble burst.
In 2022, crypto companies spent $54 million on Super Bowl spots. Coinbase, Crypto.com, FTX. By the end of the year, FTX had declared bankruptcy and Coinbase shares had collapsed. That game became known as the Crypto Bowl.
This year, 15 of 66 Super Bowl ads featured AI. OpenAI, Anthropic, and a roster of start-ups each paid an average of $8 million for 30 seconds. The New York Times is already calling it the A.I. Bowl.’
…I posted this blogitem:
Having similar concerns and having had a more than average involvement with introducing IWBs in Education as initiator of 2 related discipline-specific EU projects (iTILT) this post triggered me to a) try and find estimates of out what the economic impact of the device was at the time b) check what was my conclusion again in one of my papers on the topic.
As to a): By the mid‑1990s, IWBs were still experimental, used mainly in pilot projects and early adopters’ classrooms. But from 2000 onwards, national programmes — particularly in the UK — accelerated their uptake. Within a decade, IWBs had become a familiar presence in schools across Europe and beyond.
Interactive Whiteboards grew into a USD 3.7B global market in 2024 and are projected to reach USD 9.9B by 2034 (CAGR 10.9%) — driven by technology promises rather than proven learning impact gminsights.com.
These figures illustrate how quickly the product, thanks to its technological affordances for efficient content presentation, could scale across sectors when policy, procurement and vendor ecosystems align.
As to education, however, the pedagogical impact of IWBs has always been more modest than the economic narrative suggests. Research consistently shows that their added value depends heavily on teacher competences, contextual alignment and the quality of task design. In other words: the technology itself does not guarantee better learning. What matters is how teachers integrate it into their practice — and whether institutions create the conditions for meaningful use.
Today’s AI hype follows the same pattern: rapid adoption, strong vendor influence, limited evidence. For AI to contribute meaningfully to teaching and learning, we need to foreground pedagogy, context and teacher expertise. Only then can we move from technology‑driven adoption to evidence‑informed implementation — and ensure that this time, innovation aligns with the real needs of educators and learners.
As to b)
At the time we arrived at this conclusion in Interactive Whiteboards in educational practice: the research literature reviewed (1998)
[…] And – to conclude – the results reported in this review provide, to us at least, yet another confirmation of an old adagium about the integration of ICT in education: ‘ It’s not so much the program: more what you do with it […]’ an observation made in 1986 by Chris Jones about a piece of software for language learning, which he included in the title of one of his papers.
Relieved …I can live with this 🙂