This article first appeared in Beyond Current Horizons Blog on 15 July 2008

When looking at the future it’s easy to forget that we aren’t the first people to live in the present. What’s happening to us now is naturally much more real than what happened before we existed, or what has yet to exist, and it’s only human to privilege it without realising. But it’s essential to try and avoid this way of thinking if we want to avoid going over ground that’s already been well-trodden.

The March issue of the British Journal of Educational Technology highlighted this. In an introduction from Nick Rushby and Jan Seabrook, the authors suggest that most current efforts to support learning with technology don’t tend to show any awareness of previous efforts: in their words, “It is almost as if our field started in the late 1990s, and that nothing of importance happened before that time. Yet, the two decades from 1980–1999 encompass a great deal of UK research and development in the use of technology in education and training”. The penalty of working in this state of ignorance, of course, is that progress comes hard and energy is wasted.

So what can combat this lack of awareness? One initiative that has the potential to provide researchers into learning technologies with the kind of perspective Rushby and Seabrook are looking for is the fledgling National Archive of Educational Computing, a collection of memories, documents, artefacts and software herded together by Richard Millwood of Core UK and previously Ultralab. Launched at the Institute of Education last week (read Merlin John’s report of the event), NAEC aims to document the history of learning technologies and the experiences of those who built and used them. It’s a huge and much-needed undertaking, and if you can contribute a story or support the project in any other way you’d be doing a valuable service.

The BCH project is looking at the futures that lie ahead for education and technology, not the past, so NAEC might not seem like the most obvious topic for us to look at. But the archive offers us the promise of perspective and context, the chance to step back from what seems like a constant rush of technological excitement and learn from what’s happened already. An example: the recent reorganisation of government departments that gave birth to the DCSF, DIUS and BERR might prompt us to consider whether educational technology is something that stimulates industry and is an economic asset to the UK, or whether its economic value is more indirect, through its equipping learners with modern technological skills (or indeed, whether there is more to education than just supporting the economic health of the country). This is a current debate. But it takes access to the experience of people like Mike Aston for us to know that the Department for Trade and Industry and the Department for Education and Science were struggling to control this new approach to learning back in the late 1970s. Or that calls for “systems thinking” or “algorithmic thinking” have been made for nearly forty years. When a debate seems less novel it’s easier to assess its impact or importance than when caught up in the urgency of the present-day.

There’s a “but”, of course. The archive itself could benefit from a similar sense of perspective: at the moment, it seems to be working under the assumption that all learning technology comes in the form of disks and tapes and printed documents (listings and manuals and worksheets). But the technologies being pressed into service to support learning won’t allow themselves to be so neatly archived. How do you store the internet, or distributed programmes, or documents that change every few minutes, or activities that exist half in this world and half in another? The archive needs to be more future-focussed, if it isn’t going to end up in a museum itself. No doubt it will be, once it’s up and running.

But even if it confines itself to the last forty years of work, its presence will still help to remind us to guard against being seduced by narrow-minded presentism. And that is already a pretty useful contribution to any exploration of the future.