reading

INTRODUCTION

The Historical Amnesia of Ed Tech

An opinion often proffered amongst educational technology (ed tech) professionals is that theirs is a fast-changing field. This statement is sometimes used as a motivation (or veiled threat) to senior managers to embrace ed tech because if they miss out now, it’ll be too late to catch up later, or more drastically, they will face extinction. For example, Rigg (2014) asked “can universities survive the digital age?” in an article that argues universities are too slow to be relevant to young people who are embedded in their fast-moving, digital age. Such accounts both underestimate the degree to which universities have changed and are capable of change while also overestimating the digital natives-type account that all students want a university to be the equivalent of Instagram. Fullick (2014) highlighted that this imperative to adopt all change unquestioningly, and adopt it now, has a distinctly Darwinian undertone: “Resistance to change is presented as resistance to what is natural and inevitable” (para. 3). An essential ingredient in this narrative is that higher education does not change, and is incapable of change, therefore change must be forced upon it. Ed tech is the means by which this change-or-die narrative is realized, with people often divided, or forced, into pro- or anti-camps regarding any technology-based adaptation in higher education. Ed tech, then, is not a peripheral interest in higher education but is increasingly framed as the manner in which the future of all higher education will be determined. One aim of this book, then, is to provide some antidote to the narrative of higher education’s inability to change by illustrating both the breadth of change and innovation that has occurred in higher education over the past 25 years, and also to draw attention to examples when the caution and desire to examine evidence has been correctly applied.

Amid this breathless attempt to keep abreast of new developments, the ed tech field is also remarkably poor at recording its own history and reflecting critically on its development, as if there is no time to look in the rear-view mirror in a field that is always interested in the future. When ed tech critic Audrey Watters (2018a) put out a request for recommended books on the history of educational technology, I couldn’t suggest any beyond the handful she already had listed. There are ed tech books that often start with a historical chapter to set the current work in context, and there are ed tech books that are now a part of history, but there are very few that deal specifically with the field’s history. Maybe this reflects a lack of interest, as there has always been something of a year-zero mentality in the field. Ed tech is also an area which people move into from other disciplines, so there is no shared set of concepts or history. This can be liberating but also infuriating; for instance, I’m sure I wasn’t alone in emitting the occasional sigh of exasperation when during the massive open online courses (MOOC) rush of 2012, so many “new” discoveries about online learning were reported — discoveries that were already tired concepts in the ed tech field. A second aim of this book, then, is to provide one contribution to a literature of educational technology history.

In 2018 the UK’s Association for Learning Technology (ALT) celebrated its 25th anniversary, and to commemorate this I undertook a blog series on 25 Years of Ed Tech. As well as providing a discussion point for many in the association and their experience with ed tech (e.g., Thomas, 2018), it was also a useful time frame to revisit. The period 1994–2018 (inclusive) represents what we may think of as the Internet years of ed tech. There were some applications of the Internet prior to this, with e-learning dating from the late 1980s, and there are many applications that can still be classified as ed tech that are not reliant on the Internet during this period, but the mid-1990s witnessed the shift to the Internet being the dominant technology shaping ed tech. Indeed, an alternative title for this book might be “Educational Technology: The Internet Years.”

There are many different ways to approach a recent history of ed tech; for instance, it could be based around themes, individuals, semantic analysis of conference papers, surveys, and so on. For this book and the blog series, I have taken the straightforward approach of selecting a different educational technology, theory, or concept for each of the years from 1994 through to, and including, 2018. This is not (just) an exercise in historical pedantry to combat the claims from the latest ed tech start-up to have “invented” a particular approach, but it allows us to examine what has changed, what remains the same, and what general patterns can be discerned from this history. It is also an attempt to give some shared historical basis to the field of ed tech. The final entry in this book focuses on what I have termed “ed tech’s dystopian turn,” as there has been a shift from often unquestioning advocacy of particular technologies to a more critical, theoretical understanding. This represents something of a maturing in the field, although many technology vendor conferences are still free of any such critique. Ed tech itself, then, is at an interesting point in its development, perhaps akin to that of the discipline of art history in the postwar years. The 1970s, in particular, saw the development of what became termed “New Art History,” which the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art Terms (Clark, 2010) defines as follows:

Something of an umbrella term, embracing elements of Marxism, semiotics, and deconstruction, it is generally used to describe the various approaches to art history as an intellectual discipline which developed after the Second World War. This occurred in reaction to the earlier, predominantly literary and Renaissance-based tradition of art-historical scholarship which was widely perceived to have dominated the subject and to have become increasingly irrelevant to the modern world. (para. 1)

Prior to this, art history had largely been concerned with the lives of individual artists, but critics such as Hadjinicolaou (1978) argued that this approach proved an obstacle to art history as a serious field of study, while others such as Pollock (1988) highlighted how such an approach necessarily privileged a male perspective. This reappraisal of what it meant to be engaged in art history led to an expansion in models applied to the field, such as those mentioned in the definition above. Art history essentially shifted from being the study of the history of artists to the study of the role of art itself.

The history of ed tech can also be said to be focused on inventors, as Kernohan (2014) puts it, “Birth myths . . . are ahistorical. They tie in with a phallogocentrism of the concept of creation as a single act by a single person (generally a man . . .) rather than a whole set of pre-existing conditions and preoccupations” (para. 4). This is the grounding of the year-zero mentality, where any recognition of prior work undermines the myth of the individual genius creator. In a modest way, then, I hope this book provides one tool for allowing a similar critical turn in ed tech, by highlighting the long history and repeated attempts that underlie many technologies.

Looking back 25 years starts in 1994, when the web was just about to garner mainstream attention. It was accessed through dial-up modems, and there was a general sense of puzzlement about what it would mean, both for society more generally and for higher education in particular. Some academics considered it to be a fad. One colleague dismissed my idea of a fully online course by declaring, “No one wants to study like that.” But the potential of the web for higher education was clear, even if the direction this would take over the next 25 years was unpredictable.

Although the selection in this book is largely a personal and subjective one, it should resonate in some places with most practitioners in the field. I am guilty of also being rather arbitrary in allocating a specific year to any given technology: the selected year is not when a particular technology was invented but, rather, when it became — in my view — significant. The result of this approach is that inevitably you will find yourself disagreeing with my selection at some point on three grounds. The first point of disagreement is the exclusion of technologies that should have been included. By only allowing myself one ed tech development per year, the range is limited, and it is also, admittedly, biased by my own experience. I acknowledge that mobile learning, game-based learning, and learning design all merit entries in here, but are absent. As with lists such as “Best 100 films” or similar, they are as much characterized by what they leave out as what they include. In addition, there are limitations in the “one technology a year” method; it tends to prioritize technology, for example, as these are easier elements to hook onto, and it is also not very suitable for longer, horizontal themes, such as accessibility. This could run through many of the applications, so the web, associated e-learning standards, open educational resources (OER), Second Life, massive open online courses (MOOC), and so on, all have an accessibility strand. This, and other broader issues, such as academic labour, the concept of identity, and the role of the university can be glimpsed in places in this book, but probably merit a “25 Years of . . .” account of their own.

The second point of disagreement will likely be which particular year I have chosen to allocate to any specific technology. You will undoubtedly feel that some should have come earlier or later. This is partly an issue of logistics, in that some years saw several technologies vie for inclusion and so they had to be spread across two or more. It is also a result of perception, because I have opted for “significance” as my criterion rather than year of invention, and this is a subjective interpretation, and one that may also be influenced by geographical location — I am based in the UK and some technologies will be deemed significant later or earlier in that context than elsewhere. The third point of disagreement may come in the form of the treatment given to any specific entry. For this, I plead brevity of entry, as any one of these topics warrants, and indeed has, several volumes dedicated to them. The aim of each short chapter is to provide an overview, to supply some relevant research, and to draw out general themes that can be synthesized in the final chapter. I hope that even with these three disagreements likely to arise there is nevertheless something useful in the book for most readers.

One small example of the aim of this book can be represented by analysis of a single quote from Internet expert Clay Shirky (2012). Talking about MOOC (the subject of chapter 19 in this book) during their peak in 2012, he predicted that “higher education is now being disrupted; our MP3 is the massive open online course (or mooc), and our Napster is Udacity, the education startup” (para. 8).

Napster was the file-sharing service that started the online music revolution and Udacity was the first MOOC company. I could have selected from any number of quotes from a range of ed tech futurologists, but this one is telling and gets at the motivations for writing this book. Firstly, it is (perhaps wilfully) ignorant of the long history of e-learning at universities and posits that MOOC are the first flush of online learning. This in itself highlights the need for a broader recognition of the use of ed tech in higher education. Secondly, given this history of e-learning implementation, the quote is not so much about the technology of MOOC, but rather the Silicon Valley-type business model being applied to higher education. It was the large-scale interest of venture capitalists and a seemingly palpable example of the much-loved disruption myth (although, as usual, these predictions proved to be false) that generated much of the media interest. What this book hopes to set forth is that, while the start-up-based culture is certainly one model of ed tech innovation, it is not the only model. By first ignoring its own history, and then allowing a dominant narrative to displace it, higher education fails to make the case that there is another model, which operates to different demands, timescales, and metrics. Thirdly, this combination of historical ignorance and imposed narrative necessitates that much of the existing knowledge established over years of practice and research is ignored. In order for disruption to take place, and Udacity to be “our” Napster, it is a requirement that the incumbents in an industry (in this case, universities and colleges) are incapable of engaging with the new technology and unaware of its implications. The history of ed tech set out in this book refutes this narrative.

These will be themes that will recur throughout the book and be explored in greater detail, but this one typical quote in itself demonstrates the purpose, and I would suggest, need, for books such as this. In conclusion, then, the aims of this book are fivefold:

• To provide a (but definitely not the) basis for shared understanding and common knowledge between practitioners who enter into the ed tech field.

• To demonstrate a history of innovation and effective implementation of ed tech in higher education.

• To draw out themes and lessons from the application of different educational technologies over an extended time period that can helpfully shape future implementation.

• To highlight the necessity of a critical approach in ed tech.

• To provide an alternative historical narrative for ed tech to counteract the year zero, disruption based one.

Whether it is successful in meeting these, I will leave you to judge. If it is not, then simply being an exercise in historical pedantry is an acceptable outcome for the author.

CHAPTER 01

1994

Bulletin Board Systems

As well as being the convenient 25-year point, 1994 also marks an interesting shift in educational technology. I work at the Institute of Educational Technology at the Open University (OU), and for much of its life hitherto the focus of research was on the effectiveness of analog technology. The sort of questions researchers sought to address were: How could the text in printed units be effectively formatted to encourage interaction between the reader and the text? What is the best use of video or audio cassettes within a course structure? How effective were residential summer schools? And so on. By 1994 the shift was more to digital content — multimedia CD-ROMs, and, as we shall see, some nascent online tools. So, 1994 provides a useful starting point for plotting the development of what many now consider to be the definition of educational technology — the use of Internet-related technology in education. However, given my complaints in the introduction about the historical amnesia of educational technology, it would be amiss of me to suggest that the online version of ed tech is the only one. But it is in 1994 that this account begins, and the focus is thenceforth almost exclusively on technologies that are online or radically altered by the possibility of digital, networked approaches.

In 1994 the web was just about to enter mainstream consciousness, and the Internet was gaining more popularity. One of the technologies that old ed tech practitioners express nostalgia for is the Bulletin Board System (BBS). These were really the forerunner for much of what we know as social media and developed the structures and processes (or lack of them) for discussion forums. The BBS operated in a world of dial-up modem connections. Each one acted in effect as its own server, and each user would connect directly to the BBS. This meant that the number of concurrent users was limited, and also that those users tended to want to get online and off again quickly (in the early days you were still paying for connection minutes, like a regular phone call). While they were briefly connected, users would upload, download, and send email, but from our perspective the most interesting part was posting to public message boards. Initially designed to be analogous to the cork bulletin board people would be familiar with, they soon divided into specialist groups and discussion forums. Systems such as FidoNet allowed users to connect to different BBS so they could communicate with millions of people globally. As Internet access became more affordable, the underlying server structure of BBS changed. People could now access BBS from anywhere in the world, for equal cost, but the conventions and communications practices they had developed persisted, and were modelled by Internet service providers such as AOL and CompuServe.

These nascent online discussion forums marked the first real awareness of education to the possibility of the Internet. They often required specialist software at this stage, were text-based, and, because they relied on expensive dial-up, the ability to sync offline was important. But suddenly the possibility for remote students to engage in discussions with others was not out of the question for the average student. The language used to refer to these systems highlights their novelty and that they were occurring in an age when analog dominated. So, they are referred to as “electronic” bulletin board systems, or multi-user systems. Neither of these terms would require specifying now, which is indicative of the large cultural shift that has taken place since their inception.

At the OU they were experimenting with a BBS called CoSy. While some could see their potential, they were still viewed as a very niche application. At the time, the university needed to help people with the entire process of getting online, acting as an Internet service provider, dealing with unfamiliar software and advice on how to communicate appropriately online. This uses up a lot of academic real estate in a course about, say, Shakespeare. The following quote (Mason & Kaye, 1989) about the use of the CoSy system highlights that students did not always share educators’ enthusiasm for the benefits of the technology:

A series of questions about the convenience of electronic communications was included in the questionnaire for the course database. These show that about 60–70% of students returning questionnaires found [online communication] less effective for contacting their tutor, getting help, socializing and saving time and money in travelling. (p. 123)

The application of BBS was often reserved for subjects where the medium was the message: for example, in courses on technology and communication, and even then, students often found the technology frustrating. Despite the inevitable early teething problems, particularly for distance education, the possibilities were revolutionary — BBS had the potential to effectively remove the distance element. The only way students communicated with each other previously was at summer school and in face-to-face tutorials, or via telephone with their tutor. At campus-based universities, BBS were often used in computer labs, for example, to deliver early forms of e-learning, and in this sense can be viewed as the precursor to the Learning Management System (LMS) or Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). Levine (2018) recalled the use of BBS on campus in colleges during the 1990s, saying they “offered a suite of self-paced classes delivered over the network called ‘Open Entry / Open Exit’ . . . [and] tools for writing/submitting assignments, holding discussions, open class and direct communications” (paras. 3–4). As we shall see with later technologies, the early users of BBS tended to be already well educated, and had above-average earnings (James, Wotring, & Forrest, 1995). This was because they were a niche interest, and required specialist, often expensive, equipment to access. But as we know, if we view platforms such as Facebook as the successors to BBS, this privileged demographic did not persist. This is worth noting because new developments in ed tech, such as MOOC and OER, also reveal a similar user demographic. The question is whether this is permanent or a phase that leads to wider adoption.

Other early indicators that BBS provided that would be significant for ed tech included issues of distributing copyrighted material, Elkin-Koren (1994) arguing that restrictive copyright laws were preventing BBS from becoming effective social forums; the development of online communities, particularly for groups which might be marginalized in conventional society (Correll, 1995); the development of support groups as a means of bringing together geographically dispersed people with specialist interests (e.g., Benton, 1996; Finn & Lavitt, 1994); and conflicts between freedom of speech, libel, and online abuse (Weber, 1995). These are amplified now and society-wide, but their seeds are all evident in the early applications of BBS.

The lessons from BBS are that some technologies have very specific applications, some die out, and others morph to a universal application. BBS did the latter, but in 1994, most people thought this technology would be in one of the first two categories. What was required for it to become a mainstream part of the educational technology landscape was the technical and social infrastructure that removed the high technical barrier to implementation.

CHAPTER 02

1995

The Web

While the web was actually invented in 1989, the focus of this book is not on when a technology was invented, but rather when it became relevant in ed tech, which usually results from a certain level of uptake. While the story of the invention of the web is reasonably well known, it is worth revisiting with the knowledge of how it developed, and to identify the foundations in that development that have come to shape so much of educational technology.

Unlike many origin stories where claims are disputed, there is a clear and acknowledged inventor of the web — Sir Tim Berners-Lee. In 1989, he was working as a software engineer at the large particle physics laboratory, CERN. With scientists from around the world working on different projects and generating large amounts of data and findings, Berners-Lee (n.d.) identified that they had difficulty in sharing information:

In those days, there was different information on different computers, but you had to log on to different computers to get at it. Also, sometimes you had to learn a different program on each computer. Often it was just easier to go and ask people when they were having coffee. (para. 1)

Although Berners-Lee is the acknowledged inventor of the web, he was not operating in a vacuum. His proposal (Berners-Lee, 1989) brought together the Internet as a means of linking computers, and hypertext as a method of writing linked documents. By 1990 Berners-Lee had developed four technologies that made the web functional and that still underpin it:

HTML: Hypertext Markup Language, an easy to use markup language to produce web documents.

URI: Uniform Resource Identifier (also known as URL), a means of giving any page or resource on the web a unique address so it can be linked to and located.

HTTP: Hypertext Transfer Protocol, a data transfer method that allows web resources to be retrieved across the Internet.

Web browser: a piece of software that utilizes the previous three technologies to allow a user to navigate and use the web.

The fundamental design principles were as significant as the specific technologies in the development of the web. Berners-Lee (1989) identified that for success any such system needed to be open, and not a proprietary system owned by any one corporation. The technical attributes of the web can also be seen as giving rise to its social attributes. It was designed as a communication system, around principles of robustness, decentralization and openness. In terms of robustness, the web was built on the Internet, which was designed to survive attack, failure, or sabotage of any particular part and still function as a meaningful communication system, in other words as a network system, with no centralized, and thus vulnerable, control. This aspect is fundamental to how the web shaped society. With a decentralized system, no single node is, theoretically, more important than any other. Inherent in this is a democratization of communication. Although the ability to pay for search engine results and game algorithms would skew this, in principle the web page that any individual publishes is as significant as those from any large corporation, news outlet, or government. An open system, therefore, follows from the decentralized approach, so any compatible computer can connect and participate.

From these technological features, then, a system evolved which had no central authority, meaning that it was difficult for established agencies to control what was published on the web. What anyone could publish and debate was not governed or censored. In many ways, the Internet acts like a living organism, driven by these social values, and in this both the potential for good and ill was established. Much of this book will explore how these features developed in educational terms.

By 1995, the web browser was becoming reasonably commonplace, with Netscape dominating. With Facebook pages and WordPress sites created at the click of a button now, it is difficult to remember the effort but also the magic in creating your first web page using hand-coded HTML. I used to run Open University summer school sessions where we taught people HTML and over the course of a morning got them to publish a page online. The realization that anyone in the world could now see their page was a revelation. This act now seems like the mythical mudskipper crawling from the sea to the land: a symbolic evolutionary moment.

At this stage, the web still required a degree of technical expertise and was awkward to use, but it was on the way to becoming easy enough, and sufficiently interesting, to be moving beyond pure specialist interest. People regularly made proclamations that nobody would shop online, or that it was the equivalent of CB radio. Even at the time, these views seemed misguided: we could not predict smart phones and ubiquitous Wi-Fi but being able to dial up and connect to information sources anywhere was always going to be revolutionary — and particularly so for education. What the web browser provided (although it would take a few years to materialize) was a common tool so that specific software was no longer required for every function that you sought to carry out online. Prior to this file transfer was performed through File Transfer Protocol (FTP), email through specific clients, bulletin board systems through software such as FidoNet, and so on. The browser provided the potential to unify all these, and more, in one tool. In this the browser was like the HTML specification that underpinned it — in many ways it was inferior to bespoke versions for any specific function, but its generality made it good enough. This was one reason that many tech people failed to appreciate the significance of the web, they could always point out the superior functionality of their favoured software tool. Unix geeks sniffed at the simplicity of the web compared with what they could realize through command language interfaces. But “good enough” is usually the victor in terms of popularity if it can be made universal — Facebook is a more recent example of this phenomenon.

Learning to hand-code HTML presented a significant barrier to the popular adoption of the web. However, web publishing tools such as FrontPage emerged, which allowed people to use templates and simple menu functions, and then click “publish.” More broadly, Angelfire and GeoCities were online providers that helped people create websites with their templated tools. Many universities ran a default service for staff to generate their own pages. These were nearly always based on Unix servers, and because of the way the file structure was specified in Unix, each user had their own directory which was accessible by typing ~. Hence universities ran “tilde” servers, with web addresses such as www.uni.ac.uk/~mweller. A certain university style developed for these rather vanilla websites, which sometimes persist to this day.

Even in this simple design, the nascent possibilities of the web for education were evident. Firstly, it made communication, and as a result, networking, much easier. Even though social media didn’t exist yet, it was still possible to find the work of a scholar at another university and send them an email. This was, by some distance, easier than relying on an introduction or adopting the more intrusive and less reliable method of telephoning. Secondly, the uploading of publications to your own website marked the beginning of consideration about the dissemination of knowledge and the relationship with publishers which would lead to much of the open access developments. Thirdly, academics began to share teaching resources in this way, which as with publications, would plant the seeds of the open education movement.

Therefore, in this early, often amateurish, development of what became known as Web 1.0 we can see the important aspects of what the web gave education — the freedom to publish, communicate, and share. For distance education, which had previously relied on expensive broadcast (the much loved OU BBC programs, for instance) or shipping physical copies of books, videos, and CDs, this was a significant change. It not only altered how single function distance education institutions such as the OU operated, but also lowered the cost of entry into the distance education market, so now all other universities could effectively become distance, or hybrid, education providers.

The web laid the foundation for nearly all the technologies that follow in this book and is the one we are still feeling the impact of most keenly. Much of ed tech is essentially a variant on the question: what does the web mean for us? In teaching, the development of LMS, OER, and MOOC, as well as related pedagogic approaches, are all examples of this. In research, the use of blogs, analytics, and Web 2.0 tools have all been significant. For academics and universities responding to the cultural shifts caused by social media, video, and the dark side of the web has become strategically important. The removal of the publication filter that the web provided was often touted as the most significant socio-technological change since the invention of the printing press (e.g., Giles, 1996) and, 25 years later, that view does not seem like hyperbole.

25 YEARS OF ED TECH

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

INTRODUCTION

The Historical Amnesia of Ed Tech

CHAPTER 01

1994

Bulletin Board Systems

CHAPTER 02

1995

The Web

25 YEARS OF ED TECH

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

INTRODUCTIONThe Historical Amnesia of Ed Tech

CHAPTER 011994Bulletin Board Systems

CHAPTER 021995The Web

INTRODUCTION

The Historical Amnesia of Ed Tech

CHAPTER 01

1994

Bulletin Board Systems

CHAPTER 02

1995

The Web