After fin­ish­ing our sum­mer course and only hav­ing a month of hol­i­days, I’m not quite ready to dive back into school life, whether as a teacher or a stu­dent in my Mas­ters pro­gram. Right now, I feel com­plete­ly over­whelmed, like I’m already behind before we’ve even start­ed! But here we go any­way…

We’re kick­ing off the new semes­ter with two cours­es, EDCI 569: The­o­ry and Dis­course on Dis­trib­uted and Open Learn­ing and EDCI 572: Devel­op­ment and Imple­men­ta­tion of the Cur­ricu­lum, which are essen­tial­ly being merged into one. I’m excit­ed that these top­ics blend so well togeth­er and hope that it will feel like we’re only tak­ing one course. Hope­ful­ly, the work­load will be lighter than it would be with two sep­a­rate class­es, or at least it’ll feel that way!

We jumped right in with two read­ings: Twen­ty Years of Edtech (Weller, 2018) and the BC Dig­i­tal Lit­er­a­cy Frame­work (British Colum­bia Min­istry of Edu­ca­tion, 2016), which I was relieved to find as a nice, light rein­tro­duc­tion to get me back into the mind­set for this pro­gram.

The first arti­cle by Weller was an inter­est­ing read, which had me rem­i­nisc­ing a great deal. The arti­cle out­lines the evo­lu­tion of edu­ca­tion­al tech­nol­o­gy, high­light­ing how tools like Learn­ing Man­age­ment Sys­tems (LMS) and open edu­ca­tion­al resources (OER) have fun­da­men­tal­ly altered the way we teach and learn. He empha­sizes the influ­ence of social media, par­tic­u­lar­ly through col­lab­o­ra­tive plat­forms like blogs and wikis, which have reshaped edu­ca­tion­al spaces by fos­ter­ing deep­er inter­ac­tion. Through­out, Weller reminds us that Edtech trends are often cycli­cal, with inno­va­tions such as AI re-emerg­ing, evolv­ing, and reshap­ing the class­room once more, much like how we see the con­stant inter­play of tra­di­tion and inno­va­tion in crafts­man­ship. For exam­ple, in wood­work­ing, tech­nol­o­gy advances like CNC routers and laser engravers have rev­o­lu­tion­ized pre­ci­sion and cre­ativ­i­ty, but they’ve also reignit­ed an appre­ci­a­tion for the sim­plic­i­ty and tac­tile expe­ri­ence of hand tools, bring­ing them back into focus for many crafts­men who val­ue the bal­ance between tra­di­tion and moder­ni­ty. This evo­lu­tion in Edtech had me rem­i­nisc­ing about my ear­ly expe­ri­ences, like adding gifs and short videos to my Geoc­i­ties page, and the leaps in Auto­CAD tech­nol­o­gy, from the ini­tial DOS scripts I trained on at BCIT to today’s Win­dows-based ver­sion with its user-friend­ly but­ton prompts.

The sec­ond doc­u­ment, the BC Dig­i­tal Lit­er­a­cy Frame­work, also brought back mem­o­ries of my own expe­ri­ence teach­ing and struc­tur­ing var­i­ous Com­put­ers cours­es and oth­er TechEd cours­es like Draft­ing and Wood­work­ing from Grades 7–12. The doc­u­ment out­lines the essen­tial skills stu­dents need to nav­i­gate a rapid­ly chang­ing dig­i­tal world, focus­ing on com­pe­ten­cies like com­mu­ni­ca­tion, crit­i­cal think­ing, col­lab­o­ra­tion, and dig­i­tal cit­i­zen­ship. One of its key points is fos­ter­ing stu­dents’ abil­i­ty to cre­ate and inno­vate with dig­i­tal tools, which I’ve seen first­hand through projects like web­site design in Grade 9, where stu­dents use HTML and basic web edi­tors to cre­ate their own pages, a task that not only teach­es cod­ing but also crit­i­cal think­ing about con­tent and design. For my wood­work­ing stu­dents, I encour­age dig­i­tal prob­lem-solv­ing through CAD soft­ware, where they design their own wood­work­ing projects, align­ing well with the frame­work’s empha­sis on using tech­nol­o­gy cre­ative­ly and respon­si­bly.

After read­ing these two arti­cles, I feel much more at ease about the new semes­ter. These read­ings brought back many fond mem­o­ries of my use, explo­ration, inte­gra­tion, and growth with­in the ever-chang­ing tech­no­log­i­cal land­scape of my gen­er­a­tion. I’m look­ing for­ward to see­ing how these cours­es fur­ther unfold.

Ref­er­ences

British Colum­bia Min­istry of Edu­ca­tion. (2016). BC Dig­i­tal Lit­er­a­cy Frame­work. https://www2.gov.bc.ca/assets/gov/education/kindergarten-to-grade-12/teach/teaching-tools/digital-literacy-framework.pdf

Weller, M. (2018, August). Twen­ty Years of Edtech. EDUCAUSE Review, 53(4), 34–48.