25 Years of Ed Tech

“Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end.” ― Lucius Annaeus Seneca

Having surveyed one particular take on 25 years of ed tech, it is now possible to synthesize some generalities. In this chapter, several themes arising from the analysis of this history will be proposed, and then some suggestions regarding what this means for the next 25 years of ed tech will be proffered. Read by Martin Weller.

“Don't let the bastards grind you down.” ― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale

For this final year of the 25, a trend rather than a technology is the focus. There is in much of ed tech a growing divide, particularly in evidence at conferences. One camp is largely uncritical, seeing ed tech as a sort of Silicon Valley-inspired, technological utopia that will cure all of education’s problems. This is often a reflection-free zone, because the whole basis of this industry is built on selling perfect solutions, often to problems that have been artificially concocted. In contrast to this is a developing strand of criticality around the role of technology in society and in education in particular. This camp can sometimes be guilty of being overly critical, seeking reasons to refute every technology and dismiss any change. However, with the impact of social media on politics, Russian bots, disinformation, data surveillance, and numerous privacy scares, the need for a critical approach is apparent. Being skeptical about technology can no longer be seen as a specialist interest. Read by Anne-Marie Scott.

All hype, no heart = blockchains in higher ed.

A panel about our podcast turned into another episode for this podcast. You're very welcome.

Of all the technologies covered in this book, blockchain is perhaps the most perplexing, both in how it works and in terms of its purpose in education. I include it because it received a lot of attention, but also because it is indicative of the type of hype that surrounds a new technology that does not seem to address a clear need. Read by Caroline Kuhn.

Don't call it a comback... A.I. has been around higher ed for a while.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is an interesting case study in ed tech, combining several themes that have already arisen in this book: promise versus reality, the cyclical nature of ed tech, and the increasingly thorny ethical issues raised by its application. Read by Maha Bali.

What would an open/digital badge mean for your future of work? We talk about this and more on this book club episode for Chapter #22.

Digital badges are a good example of how ed tech evolves when several other technologies, such as those that we have seen in this book, make the environment favourable for their implementation. Badges allow for a more fine-grained representation of skills and experience gained in formal education than a degree classification. In this, they are an extension of the desire of e-portfolios to surface skills and competencies that are useful to employers. Read by Deb Baff.

Let's get behind the learning analytics and do better: “Because what we measure sends a message about what matters.” ~ @ammienoot #truth

Data, data, data. It’s the new oil and the new driver of capitalism, war, and politics, so inevitably its role in education would come to the fore. Interest in analytics is driven by the increased amount of time that students spend in online learning environments, particularly LMS and MOOC, but also the increased data available across a university, including library usage, attendance, demographic data, and so on. This chapter is read by Brenna Clarke Gray.

Open means access for learning. It's not just about free textbooks and learning resources -- listen and learn more on this between the chapters conversation.

If MOOC were the glamorous side of open education, claiming all the headlines and sweeping predictions, then open textbooks were the practical, even dowdy, application. An extension of the OER movement, and particularly pertinent in the United States and Canada, open textbooks provided openly licensed versions of bespoke written textbooks, with the digital version being free and printed versions at low cost. Read by Rajiv Jhangiani.

Let's talk about MOOCs! Looking at the year of the MOOC (2012) and what we have learned/not learned about massive open online courses.

Inevitably, the selection for 2012 is massive open online courses, or MOOC, with The New York Times declaring it “the year of the MOOC” (Pappano, 2012). We have looked at the roots of MOOC in the explorations of connectivist approaches, but more broadly the MOOC phenomenon can be viewed as the combination of several preceding technologies: some of the open approach of OER, the application of video, and the revolutionary hype of Web 2.0. The MOOC were an idea waiting to happen. This chapter is read by Laura Czerniewicz.

PLEs, PLNs, and connecting virtually online with a community... it's always about the people!

Personal Learning Environments (PLE) were an outcome of the proliferation of services that suddenly became available following the Web 2.0 boom, combined with the thinking around distributed learning that we looked at in the previous chapter. Learners and educators began to gather a set of tools to realize a number of functions.

Get yourself connected... the writing is on the [social media platform] wall.

By the late 2000s though, with the advent of greater connectivity, user-generated content, and social media, a number of educators began to explore the possibilities of education in a more networked, connected model that had these new developments as core assumptions. The theory of connectivism, as proposed by George Siemens and Stephen Downes in 2004–2005, could lay claim to being the first Internet-native learning theory. Chapter read by Terry Greene.

Tweets, posts, hashtags... OH MY! Getting social with our media has impacted how we teach, learn, research, and work.

If the Learning Management System (LMS) represents the dominant educational technology, then Twitter is the behemoth of third-party tech that has been adopted in education. There’s too much that can be said about Twitter to do the subject justice in a short chapter, and most people will have their own views on its role in education, but it would be remiss to leave it out of any historical account. Read by Simon Horrocks

Curating all the practice, reflections, and learning ... in portfolio format for this @YearsEd book club episode.

E-portfolios provide a digital means of gathering together a range of outputs, assessments, and resources for a student. The argument for e-portfolios is a compelling one — they provide a place to store all the evidence a learner gathers to exhibit learning, both formal and informal, in order to support lifelong learning and career development. It is an idea that has significant impact for education — instead of recognizing education at the level of qualification, such as a degree in a particular subject, it allows a more granular recognition of specific skills, linked to evidence. This chapter is read by Julian Prior.

Welcome to the rabbit hole of virtual worlds, gaming communities, Second Life and more... buckle up, this episode is going to take us on a virtual journey back to 2007 and Chapter 14.

While Virtual Worlds had been around for a number of years, 2007 marked a peak in interest by educators to the environments and, specifically, Second Life. While much of the experimentation in education within Second Life often failed to do more than recreate existing structures and pedagogies that occurred in the "real world", Second Life has paved the way for larger social acceptance and use of augmented reality platforms and may still see a number of applications for education emerge in the future. Chapter is read by Grant Potter.

Oh web 2.0... where did you go? Lessons learned and testing of tools in the land of user-generated ed tech.

In 2006, the hype about Web 2.0 reaches a fever pitch. Everything was suddenly "2.0" to indicate a new and improved version. Ed Tech and higher education were not immune, with 2.0 things becoming so ubiquitous that the term soon became irrelevant and a joke. So, for something that has become something of a joke, what lessons can educators take away from the time of Web 2.0? And how did the culture of Web 2.0 influence and change both technology and our institutions? This chapter is read by Sukaina Walji.

We're halfway through this audio project of the #25YearsOfEdTech -- so we thought we'd podcast about the podcast. Enjoy!

Video killed the pedagogical teaching star... or did it? We dive into talk about video, media, and more for teaching and learning related to Chapter 12 on this episode.

While video has a long history of use in education, it was the advent of YouTube in 2005 combined with an increasingly Do-It-Yourself participatory culture attitude and the decrease in costs in video production equipment that ushered in a new era of video use in education and enabled new pedagogical models of teaching & learning, such as the flipped classroom. Read by Chad Flinn.

Let's get open about our resources, practices, teaching, learning, research, and all the things in between. Enjoy this extended, 2-part conversation on OER for Chapter 11.

M.I.T. is credited with the first large scale Open Education Resource (OER) project with the launch of their Open Courseware initiative in 2002. Since then, OER's have become something of a success story in education with OER projects and educators still pushing the concept forward and into mainstream adoption. This chapter explores some of the early days of OER and how those early projects & pioneers influenced a global movement that continues to build and evolve today.

All about blogs, bloggers, blog communities, and the blog posts we have or should have written as we reflect on Chapter #10: Blogs.

Although blogs were not a technology developed specifically for education, it did not take long for educators and academics to realize the benefits associated with blogging. These ranged from the development of academic identities, quicker and more accessible dissemination of research findings, and the development of professional networks. But like other technologies examined in this book, blogging was not without challenges and setbacks before they gained academic acceptance.

On this episode Laura is joined by Brenna, Caroline, & Laura to unpack the learning management system (LMS). We've got a few thoughts, metaphors, and words for you, dear LMS. Listen up!

Without a doubt, the dominant educational technology in use today in most educational institutions is the Learning Management System (LMS) or Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). Despite repeated calls over the years by educators for the end of the one size fits all LMS/VLE, it has, like the institutions it serves, proved to be resilient and hard to break down. However, is this because the LMS is a "good enough" tool, or is it a result of "software sedimentation" that has resulted in enterprise process and structures being built around the LMS/VLE in such a way that alternatives become impossible to imagine, let alone implement.

For this book club chat, Between the Chapters, Laura talks with Lorna and Phil all about eLearning Standards. What they are, why they were developed, and what we can learn from these now.

Metadata, SCORM, LTI. This chapter takes a look at the year 2001 when technical standards for the creation of interoperable learning content emerged.

Learning Objects, metadata, and repositories.... OH MY! In this Between the Chapters "book club" Laura gathers 'round the fire with John, Brian, & D'Arcy reminisce about the early aughts of learning object repositories and interoperable metadata standards. "Every time a bell rings, an angel fills in a LOM record." ~D'Arcy Norman

Did Learning Objects succeed, or did they fail? Why did something that seemed to have such a compelling argument for their development seem to sputter in implementation? Read by Brian Lamb.

It looks like we're still at the 1999 party for e-Learning... listen to Laura & Kelvin Bentley discuss how this distance education disco has and hasn't changed in this Between the Chapters episode.

It could be argued that, at the turn of the last century, E-Learning ushered in a golden age of education technology with educators experimenting with numerous models and technologies to facilitate learning using the internet as the primary distribution and connective network. E-Learning is read by Angela Gunder.

In this Between the Chapters book club conversation, Laura is joined by Mark Guzdial to talk about all things wikis, specifically the collective learning and teaching with wikis and the web.

1998 is the year of the Wiki. With its roots in the hippie culture of California, the wiki was one of the first collaborative web platforms that led to the rise of a web that was not only consumable by anyone, but also writeable by anyone, and led to the development of one of the most popular collaborative websites in the world in Wikipedia. This chapter is read by Ken Bauer.

In this episode, Laura & Jesse chat/rant/think about constructivism (Chapter 4) and ALL THE THINGS about teaching & learning.

Tim Carson, host of the Praxis Pedagogy podcast narrates chapter 4 1997 Constructivism. In this chapter, Martin explores not a specific technology, but a number of different pedagogical models & learning theories that became popular because of the increased use of networked technologies.

Laura chats with Clare Thomson & Mark Brown on all things CMC, and how it relates to our teaching and learning practice online then and now.

Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) marks the point where the technology began to be used with pedagogical intent in education, providing support for emerging Constructivist models of learning. The use of CMC's also began to force questions of educators to explore the implicit assumptions involved in teaching & learning and begin to unpack those assumptions to meet the demands of CMC environments. This chapter is read by Laura Pasquini.

In this episode, Laura Pasquini and Jim Groom reflect back to their first Internet experiences as they get nostalgic about The Web from Chapter 2 of the book.

Even though it was invented in the late 1980s by CERN researcher Time Berners-Lee, 1995 marks the year that the World Wide Web burst into wide public consciousness. Initially dismissed as a passing fade by many in education, the web more than any other technology has gone on to profoundly alter not only education but society as a whole. Chapter 2 is narrated by Jeffery Saddoris.

In this episode, Laura chats with Alan Levine about Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) and what was going on in the land of learning online in 1994.

Our historical review of education technology begins in 1994 with Bulletin Board Sustems or BBS and looks at how BBS laid the groundwork for much of the networked communications we now use on a daily basis. The chapter is read by Bonni Stachowiak host of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast.

From a blog post series to exploring each year in more depth to now -- the book is born! In this episode, Laura has a chat with Martin about the creation of the 25 Years of Ed Tech book.

This episode gets meta. An episode about the bonus podcast episodes discussing the audiobook for the 25 Years of Ed Tech. Pulling back the curtain, baby! How the "bonus" episodes came about.

Listen to how this audio project for the 25 Years of Ed Tech book got started with Martin, Clint, & Laura

In this episode, author Martin Weller kicks off the audio version of the book with his book acknowledgements & the book introduction which establishes the major themes of the book.

Trailer for upcoming 25 Years of Ed Tech audio book and Between the Chapters podcast.