Indiana University Bloomington

I am an educator first. Long before my research focused on AI, learning technologies, and interdisciplinary design, I was a middle school teacher. I have spent much of my career preparing teachers, working alongside schools, and studying curriculum and learning. That experience shapes how I approach educational technology at the Center for Research on Learning and Technology. I am far less interested in what a particular technology can do than in whether it helps us create better learning experiences for students. That distinction matters, particularly now.

Educational technology tends to start with the tool. A new technology emerges and our first question becomes, “How can we use this in education?” I think we need to reverse the question. Start with the learner and then the learning goal. Start with a problem that matters, align it with the standards, and then ask whether technology has a meaningful role in addressing it.

When I evaluate educational technology, I consider whether it will meaningfully improve the learning experience. Does it help learners do something meaningful? Does it deepen thinking rather than simply make a task faster? Does it provide access or opportunities that were previously difficult to create? Does it support the teacher rather than add another layer of complexity? And, importantly, who might encounter barriers because of the way the technology has been designed?

My work with Universal Design for Learning (UDL) has made that last question particularly important to me. Accessibility is too often something we evaluate after a technology has already been built. By then, we are asking how to accommodate learners within a design that may have created unnecessary barriers in the first place. Effective design requires us to consider the learners we have not yet considered.

We saw this shift through TechTeach, a project that brought together undergraduate teacher education and computer engineering students to design educational technology in response to authentic curricular needs identified by middle school STEM teachers. As students designed, they began thinking about color accessibility, captioning, reading demands, flashing lights, and assumptions about users. The technology mattered, but the design conversations mattered more.

That experience also reinforced my belief that one of the most important trends in educational technology is not a particular technology. AI will continue to evolve. Immersive environments, simulations, games, and technologies we have not yet imagined will follow. What deserves closer attention is whether we are developing the capacity to make human-centered, research-informed decisions about those technologies.

"Technology can be part of the answer, but it should never become the primary question."

AI makes this especially urgent. The question cannot simply be whether AI can generate a lesson, tutor a student, provide feedback, or save a teacher time. We also need to ask what happens to learning when it does. What thinking are we supporting? What thinking might we inadvertently remove? Whose needs are represented in the design? What role should the teacher continue to play? Research can help us answer those questions, but only if research remains connected to practice.

Some of the most important work I have been involved with has brought researchers and practitioners together as partners. Those experiences have taught me that translating research into practice is not a one-way process in which researchers discover something and then tell educators how to use it. Teachers possess knowledge that researchers and technology developers need: knowledge of learners, curriculum, communities, instructional constraints, and what actually happens when an idea meets a classroom. We need to design with educators, not simply for them.

The same principle shapes the advice I would give someone beginning a career at the intersection of education, research, and technology. Do not build your professional identity around a particular technology because technologies will change. Build expertise in learning. Learn how to ask good questions, then truly listen to the answers. Understand research, but spend time with practitioners. Learn to recognize barriers. Become comfortable working with people who know things you do not. Most importantly, remain curious enough to discover when your assumptions are wrong.

My career has moved between classrooms, teacher education, research, and educational technology. I increasingly see those not as separate kinds of work but as different vantage points on the same question: How do we create better opportunities for people to learn? Technology can be part of the answer, but it should never become the primary question.