Library / Professional
Educational technology
Evidence, evaluation, and the long history of overclaiming.
Why this shelf
Every generation of technology arrives certain it is different. This shelf is the record of the previous ones saying the same thing.
Book
Multimedia Learning — Richard E. Mayer, 2001
The experiments behind every rule I follow about words and pictures. Read it once and you cannot unsee redundancy in a slide deck again.
Book
E-Learning and the Science of Instruction — Ruth Colvin Clark & Richard E. Mayer, 2003
Mayer’s findings turned into decisions a course designer can actually make. The translation step, done properly, by people who did the research.
Book
Disrupting Class — Clayton M. Christensen, Curtis W. Johnson & Michael B. Horn, 2008
Here because its central prediction did not come true, and the reasons why are more instructive than most things that did.
Book
Teaching as a Design Science — Diana Laurillard, 2012
Argues that teaching is a design discipline that fails to accumulate knowledge because teachers have no way to share what they build. Still the best framing of that problem.
Book
Learning with Technology — Jane L. Howland, David H. Jonassen & Rose M. Marra, 2012
Technology as something learners think with rather than receive from. An old argument that most platforms still have not absorbed.
Book
Minds Online — Michelle D. Miller, 2014
Cognitive psychology applied to online course design by someone who teaches. Specific about attention in a way the genre usually is not.
Best door inBook
Teaching in a Digital Age — A. W. Bates, 2015
Comprehensive, current, and free to read online — which makes it the shelf’s obvious door in. The chapter on choosing media is the part I return to.
Book
The Evolution of American Educational Technology — Paul Saettler, 1990
The long history, from lantern slides onward. Nothing cures technological certainty faster than reading the confident claims made for film in 1922.
Rules
How this shelf is kept
- Nothing is here because it is famous. Several famous things are deliberately absent.
- Every entry carries one line in my own words on why it matters. No publisher blurbs.
- Every shelf names its best door in for a newcomer.
- Anything superseded is removed, not archived.
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