Weller, M. (2020). 25 Years of Ed Tech. Athabasca, CA: Athabasca University Press.
Martin Weller, Professor of Educational Technology at the UK Open University, writes well, is insightful and often uses his knowledge and experience – he’s as been around open and distance education for a long time – to challenge us to think differently about pedagogy. He is a constant source of inspiration and, as this open source book shows, a walking repository of the history of educational technologies for learning.
His long history and deep experience is why this book is important. As he points out, we are poor at documenting both what we did, why we did it in the way we did and what it meant for teaching and learning. This leads to many repeat attempts to invent things we already tried or others to make claims of newness when in fact many were there before.
The book is not intended as a complete history of educational technology since 1994. There are many things “missing” – for example, Athabasca’s pioneering of fully online graduate programs in 1993 and 1994 using proxies for learning management systems not yet invented. But Weller is clear – this is his account of both the broad picture and it is intended to be highly personal. The book is also United Kingdom and euro centric – there is little about developments in Asia, China, Latin America and only some reference to Canada and the United States (especially early on).
The book presents the educational technology in time by year, with each year used to identify a particular development. For example, 1998 is the year of the Wiki and 2000 the year of learning objects. Some of the dates are fuzzy, as Weller admits. Choosing 1999 as the year of e-learning, when many e-learning innovations happened in the five years before, may strike some as odd, but as Weller points out he is focusing on the patterns of change not the specifics.
The book speaks to the various moments when vendors or journalists or some specific practitioner made the claim a particular development involving educational technology – the learning management system (LMS), massive open online courses (MOOCs) and more recently artificial intelligence (AI) – will transform higher education, making many of the past ways of working redundant.
Gert Biesta, the educational philosopher based in Dublin, refers to these moments as “moments of capture” and to some of the underlying assumptions of such claims as the “learnification” and “datafication” of education. Weller is conscious of the critiques and, on many occasions within the book, shares them. As an inveterate innovator, Weller knows the real challenge is to intensify and make authentic the experience of both teaching and learning and his interest is in finding enabling technologies which can make this happen. Exaggerating the potential of a development – just look at how many positioned MOOCs – does not help to refine the application of a technology to a specific set of learning challenges related to particular domains of learning for culturally located groups of students.
One interesting aspect of this book is it helps us recognize the short life some technologies had – what might be termed the “half-shelf life”. Bulletin boards, broadcast television, wikis and personal learning environments are all still in use, but on the margins of pedagogy. As Weller notes, newness encourages others to innovate, but once newness becomes sameness, many revert to past practice.
We see this in MOOCs. The constructivist MOOCs, which is how MOOCs began, was replaced by instruction driven MOOCs (known as xMOOCs but perhaps better thought of as “instructionist” MOOCs) – a way of distributing traditional university courses and now degrees, certificates and diplomas on a mass scale. Weller warned about this in 2015 and does so again in the book. He points to the rhetoric of those who are convinced education (especially public education) is “broken” and the willingness of vendors (especially Silicon Valley) to suggest they have a “fix”. Both of these narratives are false.
Each chapter offers insights, based on both a depth of understanding of learning as a complex process but also of the limitations of what teachers and technology can do to enable learning to occur. The chapter on learning analytics, which really did start to be taken seriously in 2014 but was emerging for some time, shows a real depth of understanding of both the challenge of making analytics a helpful tool in the armoury available to educators given the ethical, legal and moral challenges the use of data gives rise to. This chapter is also a good example of Weller’s skill in taking a technology and showing the way it is used versus what could be its use creates challenges.
The chapter on AI – correctly titled ‘The Return of Artificial Intelligence’ – points out AI-enabled tutoring has been with us for some time but found little traction. The new excitement, shown in new uses such as virtual co-operatives and AI-enabled and -supported simulations, mirrors the old excitement early adopters had in the mid 1980s. Weller points out one reason for this is the difference between vendor-created excitement and that found amongst those who are engaged in teaching and learning. This is now a common complaint: many of the innovations in educational technology are developed by teams who do not teach and have never done so.
When educators are engaged in the design, development and deployment of technology adoption looks different and has different outcomes. Weller explores these themes in some depth in his 2018 chapter in which he explores the dystopian view of educational technology and its implications.
The book ends with a reflective chapter, well worth reading. Weller suggests a key challenge for educators is to get into the driving seat for the development of educational technology rather than being the passengers. He also suggests building on past successes and learning from failure may be more helpful than the constant reinvention of educational technology, which repeats past mistakes. While this requires a real sense of history and an understanding of past practices, it also requires access to an evidence base of interventions and their impacts which we do not really have.
Part of his conclusion is:
When we look back over the last 25 years, the picture that emerges is a mixed one. Clearly, a considerable shift in higher education practice has taken place, driven by technology adoption. Yet, at the same time, nothing much has changed, and many ed tech developments have failed to have a significant impact. “Everything changes while simultaneously remaining the same,” is perhaps the rather paradoxical conclusion.
Weller sees the future in much the same way as many now describe the future of work: a relationship between people, technology and a body of knowledge and skills which leads to learning. We are learning to dance with machines to enable learning to occur. One day, all learning will be technologically-enabled, but universities, colleges, schools and teachers will be still be there. What and how they do things will continue to evolve. Weller cautions us not to be believe those who say “X technology” will be the end of universities and colleges as we know them. That is what they said about, well, lots of things.
A good read. A quick read. Well worth reading.
