When I began my doctoral studies in 1989, the field of Educational Technology was relatively small -- there was no program in educational technology at the university where I studied. Few of my professors used email and the Internet was little more than an obscure technological sideshow, used by computer scientists. Outside of academia, the Internet was practically unknown. The World Wide Web changed everything. I will remember 1994 as the pivotal year, when suddenly URLs began to appear in advertising. When I was hired in 1996, the dot-com era had begun and there was a sense that educational technology would transform education. It was heady stuff .
As a consultant to faculty on technology, there was also an opportunity to discuss pedagogy. There was immense pressure on faculty to take advantage of these new capabilities and resources -- a sense that the train was leaving the station and that it was important to get on. I was deluged with people who were interested in exploring how technology could be implemented to support their teaching goals. And I could have into what happened -- I could encourage faculty to consider learning goals, rather than just teaching goals. I could persuade faculty to consider how to approach problems in a scalable way, so that the same approach could be used by other faculty and for other kinds of problems. Then the bubble burst.
The collapse of the technology sector and the recession in the economy made a one-two punch to the University. First, public perception about technology changed dramatically. Educational technology was often perceived as something that had failed or, at least, had failed to live up to our expectations. Interest in using technology waned. Second, even as funding was being cut at the University, all of the leadership jumped ship. The chancellor left. The provost left. The dean left. There was a huge leadership vacuum at the institition. The new leadership that took over, began to de-emphasize education and to pressure faculty focus on research -- in particular on securing additional external funding.
Finally, the response of Universities to perceived needs for educational technology has been to license learning management systems from large commercial vendors. The rise of these learning management systems has stiffled a lot of the debate about technology in education. These systems were designed largely to replicate existing educational environments. By catering to existing models of pedagogy, they reify existing practices and are rapidly closing the window on using technology to innovate in education.