A while ago I blogged about how many people I work with in the field of educational technology that have philosophy-related backgrounds. Recently I found that three women that I’ve worked with have a shared disciplinary background too: Naomi Korn, Lorna Campbell and Alicia Wise all started out as archaeologists.
It was ALT-C week, a big gathering of folk working in the meeting point of technology and education. I couldn’t resist a quick survey.
I asked:
- what is your disciplinary background? (this was a free text field)
- how relevant/useful is it to ed tech?
At the time of writing, I’ve have 57 responses and the results are very interesting.
Firstly, disciplinary backgrounds …
I think there might be some interesting trends/patterns there. I made this word cloud with wordle.net and used the first graphic it gave me, I haven’t tidied it up.
But more interesting were the responses to the other question. How many of these disciplines would you say are “relevant/useful” to ed tech?
Well … this looks pretty significant to me …
Hmmm!!! What I haven’t yet done is correlate the discipline to the relevance score. But at glance at the responses I would say that there isn’t a strong correlation between background and perceived relevance. So what does that mean? Is there something these disciplinary background have in common that contribute to their relevance? Or is ed tech a field that makes use of lots of disciplinary approaches? Or are people that gravitate towards ed tech people who are good at applying approaches across disciplines. Or? Or? …
The survey is still live at bit.ly/edtechdisc
If anyone is interested in getting the data to do some proper analysis please contact me!
Hi Amber, 57 responses? That’s great! Fascinating to see the spread of subjects and disciplines here. I think you may be right about ed tech attracting people who are good at applying approaches across disciplines. Although my degree in Archaeology hasn’t been of direct relevance to my work in ed tech, the skills I learned during my degree have been absolutely invaluable.
I never answered this question. Mine is design. Teeny tiny in the bottom left corner.
My favourite place 🙂