Reading 25 Years of Ed Tech (Weller, 2020) is an interesting experience for me, particularly because it starts in 1994. During this first third of the book, I was not yet at an age where I was in school or thinking about the implications of educational technology. Reading about these years is therefore enlightening because they describe developments that I did not personally experience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
An element of the book that I find surprising and somewhat limiting is the organization of chapters and technologies according to their significance and timing of adoption rather than their initial creation. Weller acknowledges that determining which technologies are significant is subjective, but this approach also highlights the difficulty of separating the emergence of a technology from the point at which it becomes culturally or educationally significant. A technology may exist for years before it becomes widely adopted, normalized, or understood as transformative within education. Examples in the book include the Web, invented in 1989 but identified as having educational significance in 1995, and Wikis, invented in 1995 but identified as educationally significant in 1998.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This gap between invention and adoption makes me think differently about the language of \u201cinnovation\u201d and \u201cdisruption\u201d in educational technology. If we focus primarily on when a technology becomes significant rather than tracing its development and the conditions that made its adoption possible, it becomes easier to construct an ahistorical narrative in which something suddenly appears and changes education. This connects to Watters\u2019 (2020) concept of \u201cEd Tech amnesia,\u201d in which the field repeatedly forgets its own history. Looking at the history more closely instead reveals a process shaped by existing technologies, practices, institutions, and cultural conditions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Footnote:<\/strong> ChatGPT was used to refine the language in the final draft of this reflection. All ideas are authentically mine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n