1994?

I found 25 Years of Ed Tech by Martin Weller, (Chapters 1-8)  surprisingly entertaining and informative. I expected the writing to be dry however, much like the subject matter evolves, and we step behind the curtain, Remembering the screech of dial up, I experienced these changes in technology in real time, taking them somewhat for granted. Weller lays out a history I am familiar with and asks me to stop and examine the variables which apply to each year; to see how one change leads to the next. Weller’s story telling takes us through his history capturing the Ed Tech journey from 1994 to 2008 (I will be reading at the remaining chapters later). If I take Weller at his word, understanding his chosen structure of highlighting one technology for each year and his bias in doing so through his experiences, I actually find myself myself nodding as I recall the progress noted in each chapter. It is remarkable to note how educational technology started slowly and as the proverbial steam train, the changes get closer and closer together and move forward faster and faster while travelling surely across one bridge to another. If I take the analogy further (if you, dear reader, would indulge me) I would say as the passengers, being educators, trust the direction and speed to which and at which the train travels. 

I did find Weller’s choice to peg bulletin board systems to 1994 interesting. Chat rooms in the 70’s were a thing. Operating systems like MS-DOS and networking technology Token Ring  were from the 80’s. The Ethernet would take over local area networks (LAN) later on. Token Ring allowed information to be sent from one computer to the next. Perhaps, because educational technology (the term or the action) was not yet widespread, Weller chose to go with 1994 simply because that is where significant uptake started? Dial up was expensive, the web was invented yet?  “But it is in 1994 that this account begins, and the focus is thenceforth almost exclusively on technologies that are online or radically altered by the possibility of digital, networked approaches” (2020 p.21). What would educators have done with bulletin board systems if they were part of the educational technology tool box fifteen or so years earlier? Perhaps it would not have worked because only a few computers could communicate with each other versus thousands of users being able to access something at the same time. But then, wouldn’t demand force a tech revolution? Perhaps educators were not yet ready to embrace online spaces – after all, the digital space was the wild west; no rules. That lead me to think about student centred learning and I went through the remaining chapters with that concept in mind. In chapter 06, 1999, E-Learning established itself and its definition perhaps finally made sense. It is the fog around face-to-face education that interested me. E-Learning is so much a part of my experiences as a student and as an educator and not until this year and COVID, did I pause to consider the discourse around F2F versus online and how E-Learning adds to or subtracts from the learning experience. For me, that question remains open and perhaps I will be able to come up with a suitable answer once I complete the rest of the chapters.

 

 

 

Weller, M. (2020). 25 Years of Ed Tech. Athabasca University Press.