My own introduction to educational technology predates Weller’s starting point entirely. In the late 1980s, I practiced math, spelling, and vocabulary on floppy disc programs at home, and played games like Oregon Trail in elementary school computer labs, well before the web existed. Because of this, I came to these chapters expecting a history that would reach back further than 1994. What surprised me instead was how familiar the early internet-era challenges sounded, even though my own hands-on experience with ed tech came before the internet entered classrooms at all. Weller describes students in the late 1980s finding early electronic communication tools frustrating and less effective than face-to-face contact with instructors (Mason & Kaye, as cited in Weller, 2020, “1994: Bulletin Board Systems”), echoing frustrations learners still voice today when technology feels like an obstacle rather than a support.
The idea of “historical amnesia” in ed tech struck a chord. Weller argues the field often behaves as if it has no past, adopting a “year-zero mentality” (Weller, 2020, Introduction), evident, for instance, in how the 2012 MOOC boom was framed as ed tech’s own “Napster moment,” disrupting a field with no prior experience of online learning at scale, when in fact large online courses long predated it. I see the same pattern in health care education, where new digital tools are routinely framed as revolutionary even when they echo older approaches. Watters (2022) warns that this forgetting lets hype cycles repeat and lets powerful actors rewrite narratives about innovation and failure.
If I were writing a similar book, I would not begin in 1994. My own early experience with floppy disc learning games and school computer labs suggests the story starts earlier for many learners, not with the internet, but with any use of computing to support instruction. Beginning earlier, and looking beyond one institutional context, would help make clearer that today’s debates about access, equity, and pedagogy are not new problems but recurring ones, unevenly remembered depending on whose history gets told.
References
Weller, M. (2021). 25 years of ed tech: The serialized audio version [Audiobook]. Athabasca University Press. https://25years.opened.ca/
Watters, A. (2022, November). What happens when ed tech forgets: Some thoughts on rehabilitating reputations. Hack Education: The History of the Future of Education. https://hackeducation.com/2020/11/11/forgetting
30 August 2026 at 9:18 pm
Hi Kelly,
The “Year Zero” mentality is something that really struck a chord with me as well, I believe we must have a similar background as I also linked it to health education and the new revolutionary programs and systems that always seem so similar to older systems. I also played games like Oregon Trail in my elementary school years, how many times did you die of dysentery or fording a river? 🙂
Callan
31 August 2026 at 5:03 pm
Hi Callan,
Haha, too many times to count, dysentery got me more often than the river crossings ever did! Funny how a whole generation of us has that shared memory. It does make me think we come by our skepticism honestly; if a “revolutionary” new health education tool cannot beat what a floppy disc did for us in 1988, it has some work to do.
Kelly
31 August 2026 at 3:17 pm
Hi Kelly,
I struggled with the premise of ed tech amnesia in these readings. Not because I dispute that it exists, but because it raises the question, “So what?” That is not me being flippant about the very real risks of wilfully ignoring historical experiences and observations. It is my concern that identifying these historical precedents has become an academic exercise, rather than focusing on the more practical task of analyzing and evaluating whether anything useful can be gleaned from the past (mistakes) and applied to present-day initiatives. If the answer is yes, then a retrospective look is warranted, of course. If the answer is no, I find myself aligning with the perspective of the Uber engineer cited in the Watters (2020) reading, who purported that only future outcomes matter.
31 August 2026 at 5:46 pm
Hi Matt,
I think that is a fair challenge, and I agree that historical awareness is only useful if it changes what we actually do. But I would push back on the idea that this is mostly an academic exercise, at least from where I sit in health care. I started my career doing paper charting and have since lived through the rollout of several electronic charting systems (MetaVision, NetCare, Epic & Connect Care). Every single time, the promise is the same: it will save time, streamline documentation, and eventually give us more time with patients once we get the hang of it. Every single time, the lived experience of nurses using the system says otherwise, we have less patient contact time now than at any point in my career. To make it worse, whenever these systems go down or need updates, which happens often, we revert to paper charting and then have to go back and enter all of the missing information once the system is back up. So the systems that are supposed to save time end up costing us more of it. What strikes me is that the complaints from people actually using these systems rarely seem to reach the people deciding to roll out the next one. That is close to what Watters describes with Blackboard and Coursera, the same reassurances, sometimes even the same people, moving from one failure to the next launch with hopes and promises of improvement. There is little accountability for what came before, and apparently little willingness to listen to the people the tools are meant to serve.
Kelly
1 September 2026 at 4:01 pm
Hello Kelly
You took me back in time with your post. I remember playing math games on a Texas Instrument console. My kids played math games like Math City from Scholastic.
I think that your memories of when ed tech first came about is directly dependent on your environment. My dad was a computer programmer so there were always computers and ed tech around in one form or another.