Being moderately familiar with the impacts of ed tech as a consumer of education is considerably different than being familiar with the history and context of how ed tech has transformed over the past two and half decades. I was surprised by several references throughout the first eight chapters, but the timeline, in general, was the most enlightening. The article begins in 1994, and it is clear the author is not limited in content or breadth of content to fill the next eight years. Computers were present throughout most of my formal education years. However, my understanding of how computer technology made learning accessible was quite specific to building documents and referencing information using cd-ROMs. Weller (2020) points out cd-ROMs as one of the digital successors to cassettes and VHS (p.11) to promote interaction. In 1999 I completed my last year of high school via distance learning, which was structured around paper booklets and textbooks; this flexibility was presented to me as the only alternative to traditional face-to-face learning and one of the first juxtapositions I encountered with the timeline. Bringing attention to how ed tech interpreted ‘interaction’ within the digital sphere has not surprisingly changed with the addition of networks to learning pedagogies; even today, as we see incalculable interactive tools, the concept isn’t really new. In chapter 4, Weller (2020) draws on Vygotsky’s concept of social constructivism, bringing in the social interaction aspect, whereby proposing that learning takes place through interaction with others rather than being constructed individually (p.28). The growing opportunities available to collaborate on a global scale in real time may have been too futuristic for Vygotsky’s 1978 theory; however, is illustrated here as the backbone to more recently developed definitions and highlights just how diverse and widely varied, though universally shared, definitions, such as “interaction,” can be used.
References
Weller, M. (2020). 25 years of ed tech. Athabasca University Press. https://doi.org/10.15215/aupress/9781771993050.01
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