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The educational setting has been the backdrop for numerous debates as far back as recorded history. Today's educational setting, however, contains technological elements so advanced that they by their very nature bring with them a series of highly significant implications which educators have never before been required to address. These issues reside primarily in the area of the individual user's data, including its collection, storage, privacy, and dissemination. To contextualize this issue, this article first briefly presents some of education's most prominent educational debates of the recent past, and then progresses to examine issues associated with today's educational technology setting pertaining to data collection, storage, safety, and privacy. Suggestions for further examination of this subject are provided, as well as the claim that this is a subject that all educators, not just educational technologists, will be required to fully understand and possess strategies for dealing with it.
From its earliest incarnation education, has been no stranger to debates. Disagreements about the most effective methods for teaching are a particularly constant theme within the history of education, but that subject is but one debate among many waged over the arc of education's long life. Once education emerged as a separate field along with the associated field of educational psychology (both in the 19th century), debate and disagreement moved outside the narrow confines of technique to the vast essence of learning itself, to the theories and models that proponents posited were the key to understanding-and also maximizing- educational outcomes. These deliberations continue to this day. In this article, however, we discuss one of the most significant and important debates looming in the very near future, one that, in truth, has actually already begun to be waged, both in plain sight and behind closed doors, within the educational community.
It is not surprising that there have been so many debates surrounding education and educational technology. After all, the human mind, even with today's extensive advances in brain science, is far from being fully understood. That fact remains true whether we are in the confines of a scientific laboratory or within the "real world" where most individuals apply the educational psychology theories they have learned, and where any learning that occurs is "invisible" unless we examine the evidence...