25 Years of Ed Tech, Part 2: 2002 – 2011

Photo by Maxine Power on Flickr

The second third (that sounds weird when you say it, and it looks weird when you write it… “the second one-third” doesn’t sound much better) of Weller’s “25 Years of Ed Tech” (2020) spans a period from 2002 through 2011, where many key evolutions in learning technologies came to the forefront, including the Learning Management System (lms), various “participatory web” technologies such as blogs, video, virtual worlds, and social media, through to a connectivist theory of learning, and Personal Learning Environments (ple).

The chapter on Connectivism resonated strongly with me, as some of the core ideas of connectivism – particularly the idea that the ability to see connections between concepts, ideas, and fields should be seen as a core skill in learning (Siemens, 2015 as quoted in Weller, 2020, p. 116). This strongly mirrors my own thoughts about creativity being primarily a process where we find connections between things that nobody had ever seen before. The other principles Siemens describes also support this kind of thinking, connecting diverse areas of thought, specialized nodes, or information sources.

I also appreciate how Kop (2011, quoted in Weller, 2020, p. 117) describes connectivism as four primary learning activities: 1) aggregation: curating a selection of knowledge resources; 2) relation: connecting new knowledge to existing experiences; 3) creation: learners synthesizing this new knowledge into an artifact of their own, such as a blog post; and 4) sharing: learners share their knowledge with others in their network, fuelling further discovery. This cyclical process also reminds me a little of the structure of Csikszentmihalyi’s (2014) flow theory, or Kolb’s “Four Stages of Learning” (Konak et. al., 2014) in describing learning processes. While none of these theories are not perfect, but do offer some interesting idealized frameworks to consider.

In contrast to the ideals presented in the learning theories, the practical applications of Weller’s chapter on Twitter and Social Media in learning caused some cognitive dissonance for me. The time in which Weller was researching and writing his book was at the tail end of the early-stage naïveté and and excitement about the possibilities of social media platforms in their early years.

But in a post-algorithm, post-Cambridge-Analytica world where we have increasing awareness of troll farms, bots, bullying, disinformation campaigns, and general political and social meddling that is a part of the Twitterverse or Facebook feeds (Berghel, 2018), or the suspicious data practices of TikTok (Beschizza, 2022), we have good reason to be skeptical.

Every page of Weller’s chapter on Twitter and Social Media included warnings about the risk of threats of intimidation, abuse, harassment, and generally anti-social behaviour that comes with the territory.

While I can see the value in using these tools for academics to conduct research, build networks, and promote the publication of their research, I question the benefit of bringing those practices into the classroom. Even YouTube, while it is an excellent video distribution platform that allows us to embed rich media into our learning environments, when we push users out to the site itself, learners are exposed to advertising and questionable comment streams that complexify (the opposite of simplify) the learning objectives due to an ad-supported agenda of content monetization. What role should commercial interests play (if any) in our digital learning environments? Will lessons posted in our lms be sponsored content?