{"id":259,"date":"2023-09-03T18:43:33","date_gmt":"2023-09-04T01:43:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0277\/?p=259"},"modified":"2023-09-03T18:43:33","modified_gmt":"2023-09-04T01:43:33","slug":"everything-old-is-new-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0277\/everything-old-is-new-again\/","title":{"rendered":"Everything Old is New Again"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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I suspected that I would really enjoy immersing myself in Martin Weller\u2019s book 25 Years of Tech<\/em>, but I was a bit surprised to see just how closely it followed my own path in computer-mediated learning. I first accessed the internet in my high school computer lab in 1994 when Weller\u2019s book began, and I completed my college diploma in Teacher\/Trainer of Adults in Online Learning<\/em> in 2018 when it ended. Because my experience as both a learner and a learning professional (Bachelor of Education student, then corporate trainer, then instructional designer) followed the book\u2019s timeline so closely it\u2019s difficult for me to say whether or not Weller started his retrospective in Ed Tech too early or too late, but it\u2019s a question I\u2019ll continue to consider. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

One thing I really enjoyed in Weller\u2019s book, both the chapters we were assigned (1994 through 2001) and the Behind the Chapters <\/em>companion podcasts, was what Weller identified was \u201cThe Historical Amnesia of EdTech\u201d, or how institutions, organizations and practitioners are often trying to re-invent or re-package new approaches to Ed Tech when \u201cthere\u2019s a history to all this stuff, you\u2019re not inventing it from scratch\u201d (Weller, as cited in Pasquini, 2020). Over the pandemic I heard leadership expressing how remote communication was so hard, and trying to communicate over instant messenger in the office was just too new to them. No, Weller described CMC (computer-mediated communication) becoming more prominent in education in the mid-90s (Weller, p. 22), and I recall using the ICQ instant messaging tool to study with colleagues in University when I started in 1999. I\u2019ve heard educators pitch the idea of building learning modules as \u201cbuilding blocks\u201d which could be re-used in different courses, which is just a re-purposing of the concept of Learning Objects (p. 50). I have conversations each week with colleagues about the limitations of reporting from SCORM eLearning files which Weller describes was instrumental, along with IMS and LTI, in standardizing how the data in eLearning objects were presented to make them compatible with different systems (p. 58).\u00a0 Everything old really is new again, or at least it’s often presented as such. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

As my Ed Tech Geek Brain continues to think about what Weller presents, and what his collaborators have discussed in the Between the Chapters <\/em>podcast series, I\u2019ll stay aware of this potential for historical amnesia and seek to understand how we\u2019ve arrived at our current digital learning state.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

References<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Pasquini, L. (Host). (2020 November 2) About the 25 Years of Ed Tech Audio Project (No. 2 [Audio podcast episode]. In 25 Years of Ed Tech<\/em>. Google Podcasts. https:\/\/podcasts.google.com\/feed\/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy50cmFuc2lzdG9yLmZtLzI1LXllYXJzLW9mLWVkLXRlY2g<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Weller, M. (2020, February). 25 Years of Ed Tech<\/em>. AU Press\u2014Digital Publications. https:\/\/read.aupress.ca\/projects\/25-years-of-ed-tech<\/a>  <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I suspected that I would really enjoy immersing myself in Martin Weller\u2019s book 25 Years of Tech, but I was a bit surprised to see just how closely it followed my own path in computer-mediated learning. I first accessed the internet in my high school computer lab in 1994 when Weller\u2019s book began, and I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":294,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-259","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-lrnt523"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0277\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/259","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0277\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0277\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0277\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/294"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0277\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=259"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0277\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/259\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":261,"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0277\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/259\/revisions\/261"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0277\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=259"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0277\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=259"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0277\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=259"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}