History of Ed Tech: A Story of Give and Take

As I was going through this weeks reading through the history of educational technology (Ed-Tech), I realized that I was fortunate to be alive in an era where the internet was always apart of my life. I was lucky to have access to the world wide web if my memory remembers, and the internet has had an increasing influence over my life as I got older.

The concept and history of Ed Tech is full of potential, good concepts, and varying levels of success. Throughout the existence of Ed Tech, there have been many arguments of semantics of varying concepts (Weller, 2020).

Since I don’t consider myself an artist, I decided to make a table of the 20 years’ worth of Ed Tech and categorize them into three stages: Genesis, Acceleration, and the Data Age.

The genesis stage laid out the conceptual and practical framework for Ed-tech. Wikis were webpages of information collaboratively worked that centralized access for many people (Weller, 2020).  E-Learning, the concept of online learning, and Learning Objects combination of education content to achieve one learning objective began the formalization of online learning as a potential alternative or compliment with traditional learning (Weller, 2020). E-Learning standards helped with interoperability and lowering costs of ed tech (Weller, 2020). Open Education Resources emphasized reusability, and complimentary aspect of online education, even though there was not a lot of awareness on the topic (Weller, 2020). The LMS was the acceptance of partial Ed Tech into their curriculum as an enterprise solution to providing centralized tools (Weller, 2020).  Except for Blogs, and LMS, this stage did not include a lot interaction between learners and was very elementary experience of learning trying to emulate the traditional experience. However, this stage laid the foundations for taking ed tech seriously.

As networking and computing capacity evolved, the Acceleration phase catapulted ed tech acceptance into the mainstream. Better compression techniques gave way to video streaming sites like YouTube, which encourage engagement, and sharing of learning content (Weller, 2020). The web 2.0, Connectivism, and Social media further exemplifying sharing user generated content, and back and forth interactions between creator and viewer, (or Learner and Learner). But a new avenue for bullying, and harassment opened due to the nature of anonymity of the internet. Second life and virtual worlds include custom avatars that can reflect the uniqueness and personalities of learners. E portfolios, and PLEs double down on the individual journey of learning, and focuses on ones individuals effort in developing an online personality. This stage encouraged interactions between online entities (learners) that allowed people to share their thoughts, collaborate, and further educate the public in a wider audience.

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) are online courses with a large amount of learners that come at a variety of different price points (Weller, 2020). But MOOC’s have trouble finding a sustainable business plan and many learners in MOOCs are already highly educated, which does not really mean that (Weller, 2020). Open Textbooks are low-costs textbooks available online that maneuvers around licensing restrictions often imposed by traditional online courses (Weller, 2020). Many MOOC’s are high quality, but usage of these textbooks is not reported. Learning analytics quantifies student learning behaviors and tries to give information to learners about their current process (Weller, 2020). Digital badges serve as online achievements for learners to aim toward and possibly use as a symbol of status and prestige to say they are competent in certain skills (Weller, 2020). Artificial intelligence usually only do one function in a given domain really well, but is not flexible enough to mimic a human brain (Weller, 2020).  The data age emphasizes central learning through technology and quantifying education, a human process that is incapable of being mimicked by machines and computers (for now). Data collected from learners are never owned by them and can be sold to others without the knowledge of them.

Overall, I feel like Ed Tech will continue to grow, as technology and reliance of the internet continues/expands. Ed Tech had difficult beginnings and had similar tropes to the market. Social media has served as a double edge sword which allows people to easily communicate with each other on common platforms but allows for a toxic open hostility with no repercussions. The business of ed tech has unlimited potential as more ed tech arises, computing power increases, and technology breakthroughs happen.

I have had very limited experiences with all these concepts as I grew up on the traditional in person learning style. Of course, I would experience parts of these technologies when I seek entertainment, but never really engaged with them on my educational journey. Some of my courses featured open textbooks (for free!), while other courses included a subscription-based gateway for reading a textbook, which had features such as an e-portfolio. Education is journey, which is almost never free.

References

Weller, M. (2020). 25 Years of Ed Tech. https://doi.org/10.15215/aupress/9781771993050.01