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The combined history that Reiser (2001) and Weller (2018) present highlights many advancements in educational technology, along with plenty of dead-ends and failures. However, I believe these failures are necessarily productive ones. To find approaches that work, educators and technologists need to be willing to experiment, and to accept that not all ideas will succeed\u2014or should succeed. The successes, along with the failures, offer many lessons for future endeavours to learn from.<\/p>\n
A lesson from the past that struck me as particularly poignant in Reiser\u2019s (2001) article was the importance of not using technology just to teach technology skills. He noted that as computers were introduced, their application was \u201cfar from innovative\u201d (p. 60) and often used to perpetuate computer-related skills. In my experience working in a K-12 school, I\u2019ve seen this trend as well. For example, a lesson might focus on teaching Adobe Photoshop skills, rather than aiming to teach broader concepts of colour theory, typography, and aesthetics. Teaching a particular app as the end-point gives students a narrow application of their learning potential. As I design learning activities for my computer science course, I plan to keep this lesson in mind: beyond teaching a specific programming language, which will go in and out of fashion and varies based on the goal, I aim to develop activities that foster problem solving and programmatic thinking skills regardless of the presence or absence of technology.<\/p>\n
In Twenty Years of Edtech, Weller (2018) suggests that blogging is \u201cfull of potential\u201d (p. 39) and is \u201can ideal educational technology\u201d (p. 48). This is a lesson I feel still applies to business and higher education, yet it is in conflict with the reality I\u2019ve seen in my day-to-day work in K-12 education. From what I\u2019ve experienced, students are searching and turning to blogs as informational artifacts, but I see them increasingly less interested in authoring their own blog posts. With the prevalence of WeChat and WhatsApp, students are often engaging in closed systems of communication\u2014able to broadcast quickly to a large number of predetermined people, and less often broadcasting their words publicly on the internet. If they do broadcast, it tends to be in a social media format: Instagram, YouTube, and Twitter. Is this a shift in the way future generations will communicate online? In my school, an effort was made to create and promote classroom blogs as well as student-authored blogs, yet the endeavour rapidly lost momentum. Was this a systemic failure, or endemic of the users\u2019 dwindling interest? These results lead me to wonder about the age demographic behind the majority of blogs on the internet. Are the upcoming generations as interested in blogging as the generation that came before them? What will the future histories of Edtech say about the importance of blogging in education?<\/p>\n
Weller\u2019s closing sentiment for Twenty Years of Edtech was that \u201cnothing much has changed, and many edtech developments have failed to have significant impact\u201d (p. 48). Counter-intuitively, these failed developments make me optimistic about the future of edtech. The more we fail, the more we have tried. The technologies Weller highlighted\u2014failures and otherwise\u2014were both increasing in scope and in diversity. I am sure there will be plenty of missteps and unsuccessful technologies in the future, yet each one of these has the potential to lead to new ideas, or at very least epitomize the lessons we must to continue to learn from the past.<\/p>\n
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References<\/p>\n
Reiser, R. A. (2001). A history of instructional design and technology: Part I: A history of instructional media. Educational Technology, Research and Development<\/em>, 49<\/em>(1), 53-64. Retrieved from https:\/\/link-springer-com.ezproxy.royalroads.ca\/article\/10.1007\/BF02504506<\/p>\n Weller, M. (2018). Twenty Years of Edtech. EDUCAUSE Review<\/em>, 53<\/em>(4), 34\u201348. Retrieved from https:\/\/er.educause.edu\/articles\/2018\/7\/twenty-years-of-edtech<\/p>\n Attribution<\/p>\n Photo by Samuel Zeller<\/a> on <\/span>Unsplash<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The combined history that Reiser (2001) and Weller (2018) present highlights many advancements in educational technology, along with plenty of dead-ends and failures. However, I believe these failures are necessarily productive ones. To find approaches that work, educators and technologists need to be willing to experiment, and to accept that not all ideas will succeed\u2014or… Continue reading Learning from the Past, Looking to the Future<\/span>