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Had I been born just a little bit earlier I would have been a full-tilt, Klingon speaking, convention going Trekkie.
Don't get me wrong - I'm a fan.
My undergraduate years overlapped with The Next Generation ("Make It So!").
Grad school brought Deep Space 9. (Which makes sense if you think about it a bit).
My first academic job was when Voyager was stranded in the Delta Quadrant.
I was just starting to get deeply into online learning when the prequel Enterprise was launched.
Who among is not already camping out for tickets for the May 17th release of J.J. Abrams' Star Trek Into Darkness?
Today, those of us who would have naturally taken our place in the Trek universe have instead taken jobs in academic technology.
Why live in the 23rd century when we participate in the creation of the future of higher education?
Rather than warp drives and disrupters we have constructivism and iPads.
No holodecks (yet), but Riker never had access to a MOOC.
Geordi's visor or Google Glass?
Commander Data is cool, but isn't the potential of "big data" even more impressive.
Edtech people believe that the future will be better than what we have now. Learning technology is our Enterprise, it will carry us to strange new worlds.
How would we re-write Captain Kirk's famous opening narration:
The Original: Space, the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its 5-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.
The EdTech Rewrite: Learning technology, the final frontier. These are the voyages of Academic Computing. Its 5-year mission: to explore new models of technology enabled learning, to seek out new faculty in which to collaborate, to boldly go into blended learning where no academic has gone before.
Live long and prosper.
