Who Is Important Here?
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.
January 15th, 2008 at 12:57 pm
Seymour Papert….accessible programming for the kids
Roger Wagner…I don’t know what became of Hyperstudio but it made schools realize the computer could be a useful tool for knowledge creation
Will Richardson….his book on Blogs, Wikis and other 2.0 type things and ways of thinking about the classroom have revitalized my job.
These are off the top of my head so I apologize for any blarring misses.
January 19th, 2008 at 12:23 pm
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January 25th, 2008 at 11:33 am
I wouldn’t dare cast a vote on most important as do not participate enough in the ed tech community. But the most influential to me has been David Warlick. I attended a conference where he was the keynote speaker. His address was amazing.
January 30th, 2008 at 11:50 am
This is a great question to ask your students. I am in a computers in education class at Grand Valley State and we are talking about this very topic we haven’t really go into to much detail on the founders, but I’m sure we will be getting into that. Right now we are learning all the pro’s of having technology in our classrooms. Our assignment this week was to find a blog that some one has written about ed. technology. Find yours and yours is very valid, and this was a question that I did not but now do have answers for.