The owner of Tiktok,, a global technology tycoon Bytedance whose market valuation rose to $180B (Phan, 2021) earlier this year launched its first hardware product – surprisingly to many, an educational lamp.

Fig.1: ByteDance’s Smart Dali Lamp https://www.inputmag.com/tech/bytedances-first-piece-of-hardware-is-educational-smart-lamp

Since its very founding years, Bytedance has been a very transformative force in social media, expanding its global footprints far beyond China. Considered as a major player whose existence threatened the dominance of Facebook and Instgram (CNBC International, 2020), it owns multiple app and platforms, each of whose active daily users amounts to hundreds of millions, including the most famous ones like Douyin (short-video platform), Toutiao (news platform) and Tiktok etc. Its founders Zhang Yiming has spoken aloud his vision about the role that technology can play in empowering and enabling education as early as 2017. In 2020 alone, ByteDance has made major investment in education, including hiring over 10,000 staff into its education arm (Yan, 2021).

While ByteDance’s gives the new name “Dali” in Chinese, meaning “almighty or all powerful” to its new product masterpiece, the fundamental question still remains – does this new education technology produce take a transformative approach to education at all? The answer might be worth considering.

The two key functions of the lamp are said to be the video-equipped check-in screen and the light itself, a national AA level professional eye protection standard (Wille, 2020). Now let’s set aside the second function for the moment. The check-in screen of the Daili Lamp, interconnected with ByteDance’s super-powerful data mining ecosystem, can help students to have more convenient remote learning experience, which includes finishing homework assigned by parents remotely who are travelling out of home turfs. According to Professor Cope (2015), that behind the hyper tech-savvy equipment, the didactic / mimetic pedagogy stays the same – students are still positioned as knowledge consumers- absorbers of information to be remembered, routines to be replicated, or definitions to be applied. In this case, life to be supervised distantly via a screen.

ByteDance’s legacy in social media is unprecedented that it transforms a conventional media access experience into a unique personalized journey where consumers can access and explore topics of interest, backed up by powerful algorithm. Sadly, with the most recent national policy to relieve the burden of young children in China, ByteDance’s ambition in education seemed to recede. However, it remains such a powerful social agenda as its founder once argued, technology can help to close the gaps of social inequality and disconnected access. And that might be a true move for education technology to fulfill its reflective and transformative mission.

References

• Cope, B., & Kalantzis M. (2015). Assessment and pedagogy I the era of machine-mediated learning. A Taos Institute Publication.
• Phan, T.T. (2021, Jan 27). TikTok’s parent company ByteDance is valued at $180B. Its worth way more. https://thehustle.co/01272021-bytedance-valuation/
• CNBC International. (2020, Sep 17). What is ByteDance: CNBC Explains Why. [Video]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QxISCiUzq7o
• Wille,M. (2020, October 29). ByteDance's first piece of hardware is an educational smart lamp.https://www.inputmag.com/tech/bytedances-first-piece-of-hardware-is-educational-smart-lamp
• Yan J.L. (2021, April 3). Translated: ByteDance can keep dancing. Education Can’t, can it?https://www.jiemian.com/article/5905700.html