Education 2.0 & 3.0

The answer to the question in the “click bait” title is – yes of course we do, we most definitely need the role, but do we still need the title?

In 2014 Santanu Vasant wrote an article in jobs.ac.uk identifying the broad nature of the role and the broad background and expertise of role holders so I won’t go into any detail about what a Learning Technologist (LT) might be as you can read that article linked below as a starting point.

https://blog.jobs.ac.uk/education/teaching-learning/what-is-a-learning-technologist/

My experience is that Learning Technologists often have significant technological and pedagogical expertise. I know from personal experience the value of working with fantastic “learning technologists” and they can be key to really successful learning experiences.

Key Takeaways
New digital tools and platforms create opportunities in pedagogy, but they also result in deployment of under-tested digital tools in classroom instruction, which raises questions and challenges for educators.
A collaborative project between a media studies professor and a digital humanities librarian at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign sought to address these challenges by developing digital pedagogy practices.
As the two case studies described here show, these practices can foster an environment of interdisciplinary, collaborative student engagement with new tools; openly acknowledge the digital tools' experimental states; and encourage playful student tinkering with the tools, even when they appear simple or familiar.