Archive for January 13th, 2008

I ran across Google Trends yesterday.  I was reading through my news reader while watching the football game.  I clicked over to Google Trends and made a quick realization.

Based on the searches people were doing right now, there were a lot of people watching what I was watching.  The Packers game was on.  The top searches

• green bay
• ryan grant
• brett favre
• lambeau field
• matt hasselbeck
• comanche moon

The names were all of people playing in the game.  Don’t let that last one fool you.  There were a lot of commercials advertising a new show called “Comanche Moon.”  When the first game ended, the searches shifted to names from the second game.

The networks must use this data to determine what people are watching and what they are thinking about.  Better yet, what if a school could get a Google appliance that will show local search trends.  Maybe there is something already out there now.

If you could choose three people as the most prominent people in educational technology, who would you select? This is the question I posed to one of my classes. I gave no ground rules. We have no text book with a chapter that discussions this. It’s wide open.

Pick three and give the reasons for selecting each.

If you think about this question in a different context, it could be easy to answer. Name the three most important people in the history of American government. In technology, it would be easier to list the three most important people in the world of personal computers or in the development of the Internet.

Educational technology is more obscure. The entry in Wikipedia wasn’t created until 2005, four years after most topics were entered. There is no standard introductory text that is used in edtech. In fact, most of the people I know in this field are self-taught.

It will be interesting to see the names that make the list.