Audrey Watters has a nice essay/lecture on Why History Matters, on her Hack Education blog, that goes into detail on the history of the blackboard, (the wall-mounted slate kind, rather than the online LMS kind.) I appreciate learning more of our history, as it’s always eye-opening. I also find myself agreeing with her, more than with the educational technologists she’s arguing against. In one of my seminary classes, I wrote a paper about how the clock had changed life in monasteries and villages across Europe, wherein the days previously had been punctuated by the manually calculated Liturgy of the Hours, based on sunrise and sunset. Once a clock was installed, it attempted to replicate the same natural rhythm, but failed. Now our world and our worship are predicated on mechanical–and now digital–timepieces.
