Forty years ago, back in 1985, when Madonna was getting into the groove and Bett had only just begun, no one could have predicted the edtech of 2025.

That, at least, is what Bridget Phillipson told Bett (a huge edtech vendor orientated trade show held each year in London) earlier today. She continued:

And there’s no way to know what the next 40 years will bring

She’s wrong.

One of the foundational myths of education technology is that it is new. Researchers have noted the peculiar ahistoricism of the field, a marketing-driven attempt to position everything as new and cutting-edge that arguably does a lot more harm than good. Edtech is not new. The only thing that has really changed between 1985 today is that devices are smaller, faster, and cheaper, and prettier – and networks are ubiquitous.

That’s it. Seriously.

In 1976, while studying at the Open University – you could have encountered a computerised tutor (Cicero) that would ask you questions and respond to your answers. By 1979 you could have been using an online, multi-user, electronic blackboard as a part of your remote studies. The mid 80s brought the advent of CoSY (itself an adaption of the mid 70s state of the art PLATO, from the University Illinois) – an asynchronous text-based collaboration tool allowing you to discuss and share your work with students all over the world.

The lineage of personalised machine based learning that tracks your progress and offers appropriate – still the promise of a million overeager vendors – can be traced back to the work of Sidney Pressay, BF Skinner and others and as far off as a century ago. The chatbot – a person-like interface to a computer using pattern matching to give the impression of a meaningful response to your prompt – could be traced back to Eliza (the work of Joseph Wizenbaum) in the mid 1960s. Head-mounted VR (if you really must) has a lineage harking back to 1960s Harvard.

Drift around the EXCEL centre and you’ll spot the latest iterations (and they are iterations – for all the talk of “disruption” in edtech nearly everything is a shinier version of something that has been done before, festooned with the fashionable buzzwords of the day) of the ideas above and maybe a handful of other old saws – flashcards and spaced repetition, annotating tools, computerised multiple choice questions. You don’t have to go to more than a few events like this before you spot the old favourites and note the failures carefully swept under the carpet.

Look in vain for the pedagogic innovations. It’s behaviorism all the way down.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m not anti-technology or anti-innovation. Technology has brought and continues to bring a lot of value to education, used well it can save time and effort for staff and it can help learners engage. But what it has never done is transformed learning.

And it has been a long time since it has been impossible to predict the future of edtech.