Part 1 of my Top 10 Ed-Tech Trends of 2014 series
It’s time once again for my annual review of the dominant trends in education technology. This is the fifth year that I’ve done this. It’s a massive undertaking, aided in part by the weekly roundups of all the education-related news that I write every week. It’s a project that I both dread – I mean, this is how I will spend December – and adore. I learn so much about the politics, industry, implementation, ideology, business, and bullshit by scrutinizing the year's occurences so closely. As someone who is fascinated by the cultural history of ed-tech, it’s always useful for me to see what stories are told most frequently and most passionately, what stories resonate and why.
A quick look back at previous year’s trends:
2010
Ed-Tech Politics
Online Learning
Mobile Learning
Social Learning / Social Networks
Investment in Education Technology
2011
The iPad
Social Media – Adoption and Crackdown
Text-messaging
Data (Which Still Means Mostly “Standardized Testing”)
The Digital Library
Khan Academy
STEM Education’s Sputnik Moment
The Higher Education Bubble
“Open”
The Business of Ed-Tech
2012
The Business of Ed-Tech
The Maker Movement
Learning to Code
The Flipped Classroom
MOOCs
The Battle to Open Textbooks
Education Data and Learning Analytics
The Platforming of Education
Automation and Artificial Intelligence
The Politics of Ed-Tech
2013
“Zombie Ideas”
The Politics of Education/Technology
Standards
MOOCs and Anti-MOOCs
Coding and “Making”
Hardware
Data vs Privacy
The Battle for “Open”
What Counts “For Credit”
The Business of Ed-Tech
As you can see by this list, some things change; some things don’t. Indeed, last year I kicked off the series by arguing that what we often see in education technology are “zombie ideas,” monstrosities that just don’t seem to die.