Gretchen's Timeline- Twenty Years of EdTech

Perhaps more than any other technology, wikis embody the spirit of optimism and philosophy of the open web. The wiki—a web page that could be jointly edited by anyone—was a fundamental shift in how we related to the internet. The web democratized publishing, and the wiki made the process a collaborative, shared enterprise.

E-learning had been in use as a term for some time by 1999, but the rise of the web and the prefix of “e” to everything saw it come to prominence. By 1999, e-learning was knocking on the door of, if not already becoming part of, the mainstream. Conventional and distance colleges and universities were adopting e-learning programs, often whenever the target audience would be willing to learn this way.

The learning management system (LMS) offered an enterprise solution for e-learning providers. It stands as the central e-learning technology. Prior to the LMS, e-learning provision was realized through a variety of tools: a bulletin board for communications; a content-management system; and/or home-created web pages. The quality of these solutions was variable, often relying on the enthusiasm of one particular devotee. The combination of tools also varied across any one higher education institution, with the medical school adopting one set of tools, the engineering school another, the humanities school yet another, and so on.

YouTube was founded in 2005, which seems surprisingly recent, so much has it become a part of the cultural landscape. As internet access began to improve and compression techniques along with it, the viability of streaming video had reached a realistic point for many by 2005. YouTube and other video-sharing services flourished, and the realization that anyone could make a video and share it easily was the next step in the broadcast democratization that had begun with HTML. While the use of video in education was often restricted to broadcast, this was a further development on the learning objects idea.

The practical term “web 2.0” gathered together the user-generated content services, including YouTube, Flickr, and blogs.
As web 2.0 morphed into social media, the inherent issues around free speech and offensive behavior came to the fore. In educational terms, this raises issues about duty of care for students, recognizing academic labor, and marginalized groups. The utopia of web 2.0 turned out to be one with scant regard for employment laws and largely reserved for “tech bros.”

Online virtual worlds and Second Life had been around for some time, with Second Life launching in 2003, but they begin to see an upsurge in popularity around 2007. Colleges and universities began creating their own islands, and whole courses were delivered through Second Life. While the virtual worlds had strong devotees, they didn’t gain as much traction with students as envisaged, and most Second Life campuses are now deserted. Partly this was a result of a lack of imagination: they were often used to re-create an online lecture.
Like learning objects, e-portfolios were backed by a sound idea. The e-portfolio was a place to store all the evidence a learner gathered to exhibit learning, both formal and informal, in order to support lifelong learning and career development. But like learning objects—and despite academic interest and a lot of investment in technology and standards—e-portfolios did not become the standard form of assessment as proposed.

Founded in 2006, Twitter had moved well beyond the tech-enthusiast bubble by 2009 but had yet to become what we know it as today: a tool for wreaking political mayhem. With the trolls, bots, daily outrages, and generally toxic behavior not only on Twitter but also on Facebook and other social media, it’s difficult to recall the optimism that we once held for these technologies. In 2009, though, the ability to make global connections, to easily cross disciplines, and to engage in meaningful discussion all before breakfast was revolutionary. There was also a democratizing effect: formal academic status was not significant, since users were judged on the value of their contributions to the network. In educational terms, social media has done much to change the nature of the relationship between academics, students, and the institution. Even though the negative aspects are now undeniable, some of that early promise remains. What we are now wrestling with is the paradox of social media: the fact that its negatives and its positives exist simultaneously.

f MOOCs were the glamorous side of open education, all breathless headlines and predictions, open textbooks were the practical, even dowdy, application. An extension of the OER movement, and particularly pertinent in the United States and Canada, open textbooks provided openly licensed versions of bespoke written textbooks, free for the digital version. The cost of textbooks provided a motivation for adoption, and the switching of costs from production to purchase offers a viable model. As with LMSs, open textbooks offer an easy route to adoption. Exploration around open pedagogy, co-creation with students, and diversification of the curriculum all point to a potentially rich, open, edtech ecosystem—with open textbooks at the center.22 However, the possible drawback is that like LMSs, open textbooks may not become a stepping-stone on the way to a more innovative, varied teaching approach but, rather, may become an end point in themselves.
Learning Analytics

Data, data, data. It’s the new oil and the new driver of capitalism, war, politics. So inevitably its role in education would come to the fore. Interest in analytics is driven by the increased amount of time that students spend in online learning environments, particularly LMSs and MOOCs

Providing digital badges for achievements that can be verified and linked to evidence started with Mozilla’s open badge infrastructure in 2011. Like many other edtech developments, digital badges had an initial flurry of interest from devotees but then settled into a pattern of more laborious long-term acceptance. They represent a combination of key challenges for educational technology: realizing easy-to-use, scalable technology; developing social awareness that gives them currency; and providing the policy and support structures that make them valuable.
Artificial intelligence (AI) was the focus of attention in education in the 1980s and 1990s with the possible development of intelligent tutoring systems. The initial enthusiasm for these systems has waned somewhat, mainly because they worked for only very limited, tightly specified domains. A user needed to predict the types of errors people would make in order to provide advice on how to rectify those errors. And in many subjects (the humanities in particular), people are very creative in the errors they make, and more significantly, what constitutes the right answer is less well defined.
Of all the technologies listed here, blockchain is perhaps the most perplexing, both in how it works and in why it is even in this list. In 2016 several people independently approached me about blockchain—the distributed, secure ledger for keeping the records that underpin Bitcoin. The question was always the same: “Could we apply this in education somehow?” The imperative seemed to be that blockchain was a cool technology, and therefore there must be an educational application. It could provide a means of recording achievements and bringing together large and small, formal and informal, outputs and recognition

Blogging developed alongside the more education-specific developments and was then co-opted into edtech. In so doing, it foreshadowed much of the web 2.0 developments, with which it is often bundled.