Reading Weller’s (2020) 25 Years of Ed Tech felt less like discovering a distant history and more like revisiting one I remember. I lived through all of the technological changes he describes, from the growth of the web to online communication and e-learning. What surprised me was not how quickly educational technology developed, but how differently that development can be experienced depending on where someone is teaching or learning.

Weller (2020) acknowledges that assigning significance to a technology is subjective and can be influenced by geographical location (p. 7). This resonated with my own experience. In 2005, I moved to China to teach. Although Weller’s timeline had already reached e-learning standards by 2001, most of the schools where I taught relied on chalkboards and had no Internet access. In rural areas, technology could feel years behind what I had previously experienced. Technological progress may move forward chronologically, but access to that progress does not.

This also complicates Watters’ (2020) concern about “ed-tech amnesia.” She argues that forgetting the field’s history contributes to the assumption that new technologies are necessarily innovative or represent progress. My experience makes me question the idea of progress itself. A technology can exist without being accessible, relevant, or transformative for everyone.

If I were writing a similar history, I would not necessarily choose an earlier starting date than 1994. Weller clearly explains that his focus is the “Internet years of ed tech” (2020, p. 4). Instead, I would question whether educational technology has one starting point or one timeline. Perhaps understanding its history requires asking not only when technologies became significant, but where, for whom, and under what conditions.

References

Watters, A. (2020, November 11). 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

Weller, M. (2020). 25 years of ed tech. Athabasca University Press.
https://www.aupress.ca/books/120290-25-years-of-ed-tech/