Celebrating and Preserving Educational Technology History in Canada: the AMTEC History Project

This paper examines the roots of the Association for Media and Technology in Education (AMTEC) in Canada and its connections to global educational technology and media organizations including the Association for Educational Communications and Technology (AECT). The AMTEC History Project, which is preserving memories, voices and documents related to the field of educational technology in Canada, celebrates the 50th anniversary of AMTEC in the context of the 100th anniversary of AECT. Generations of AECT leaders had a substantive influence on the history of AMTEC. Interviews with memory keepers as part of this history project revealed the importance of communication, collaboration, networking, persistence, and a learning mindset for those engaged as educational technologists, as they navigated change. Students, academics, and practitioners of educational technology may benefit from lessons learned by the Canadian pioneers of multi-media instruction and research collected in this project.