The Forgotten Black Innovators of Ed Tech

Black History is vast and most of us are only taught a small fraction of it. This month ITG wants to highlight the work of black innovators in Ed Tech. Professor Shayan Doroudi of University of California, Irvine, has written a series of posts about Black educational technology innovators. These innovators did cutting-edge work. Check them out:

Part I – Dr. Weusi-Puryear and Dr. Weusijana were pioneers in educational game design, working ahead of their time building computer models of dialogue for educational use in the 1960’s and 1970’s.

Part II – Dr. Roulette William Smith was an early educational technology researcher and a polymath. His dissertation “Modeling Instruction Using Computer Generated Dialogue,” was one of the earliest applications of AI to education, predating the first conference on AI and education by over a decade.

Part III – Dr. Shaw and His Mentors Alan Clinton Shaw was born in 1963, at the height of the Civil Rights Movement. He created a model for how individual cognitive developmental paradigms can be used to guide technological approaches intended to foster social development. 

Check them out at Prof. Shayan Doroudi’s site