When considering people with im- portant roles in educational technology, one realizes how much cross-pollination of fields, ideas, and personalities has occurred to make the field what it is today. Significant contributors include scientists who investigated electricity and developed components from capacitors, hard drives, memory chips, and CRTs; technicians who engineered ways to merge these components into computers and other technologies; visionaries who recognized the value these new opportunities offered to education; curriculum experts who developed effective educational structures that integrated these technologies, and the teachers who inspire and motivate their students through the application of these tools.
In Ohio, Ohio SchoolNet (now ETech Ohio) provided the vision and funding that truly launched the major technology focus of modern education in our state, and this initiative was sourced primarily in the desire to capitalize on the value of an amazing resource: the Internet. With that fact in mind, the first name that comes to mind for me is Tim Berners-Lee who, during his tenure at CERN in the 1980s, developed a little program called Enquire that provided the seed from which the World Wide Web developed. Berners-Lee later returned to this program as he was attempting to develop a tool to improve communication and collaboration, and eventually a new technology that completely changed the paradigm of everything from academic research to booking a weekend vacation. Of course, no matter how impressive a technology is, it takes a visionary educator to recognize it's value and identify methodologies for integrating it into his or her curriculum. One such notable visionary is Alan November, one of the more well-known proponents of what have come to be called Web 2.0 technologies and author of popular articles and books such as Empowering Students with Technology. He is also popular on the speaking circuit, and has been a keynote presenter at eTech Ohio's State Technology Conference.
While Tim Berners-Lee produced a revolution with worldwide impact, and Alan November envisioned ways to use technology to enhance educational opportuni- ties for students that subsequently impacted entire learning systems, my third notable person originally achieved his prominence for a more niche product which had it’s impact in a subgroup population. Researcher, inventor, and futurist Ray Kurzweil achieved fame by taking technology into new areas with the visually impaired. Kurzweil’s pioneering Optical Character Recognition (OCR) research of the early 1970s resulted in him looking for important applications for that technology, and his vision led him to apply it to the development of the Kurzweil Reading Machine. Through the combination of flatbed scanning technology and text-to-speech technologies, as well as the OCR that was capable of recognizing a large range of fonts (and, therefore, applicable to a large range of original print materials), Kurzweil’s company developed a machine that opened a world of print materials to the blind. As you would expect, the original was bulky and expensive so availability was very limited, over time components and manufacturing processes improved, prices dropped, and these systems became affordable for wider distribution.Ultimately, however, it may actually be the thousands of lesser-known and and therefore less-heralded visionaries, such as Central Ohio’s own Roy Gordon who identified a very niche need and used a simple tool, FileMaker Pro, to develop a database that facilitated the creation of Individualized Educational Plans (IEPs) for special needs students, that have the greatest cumulative impact on educational technology. Or, perhaps, the classroom teacher down the hall that uses technology in creative ways to stimulate and engage students so that they stay in school to learn, graduate, and go on to college and/or productive, creative careers so that they make their own contributions to the world.
No comments:
Post a Comment