SOME PERSONAL INFORMATION ABOUT: Betty Collis

(Last update, 09 January 2009

What questions and beliefs motivate my work? | My background (by the decade) | 

What questions and beliefs motivate my work?…

Every thing I do professionally relates to one particular area:

Technology as a learning workbench

and one particular set of questions:

"Will learners and those who support learning use this? Why or why not? What can we do so that they are more likely to use it?"

These questions had their roots in my own background, as a teacher who started to use technology (in the 1960s, an overhead projector) not because I was interested in the technology itself but because I had a problem with my own teaching situation that I wanted to solve. (I am left handed, and never have been able to write legibly on blackboards; also I didn't like to loose my eye contact with my students by turning around to the blackboard and struggling with chalk.) From this personal and seemingly trivial starting point has evolved a major part of what motivates my work: the belief that for the majority of learners and instructors, a decision to make use of a particular educational technology should start with a problem that the individual is concerned about. Thus, I am not technology driven, but problem and person oriented:

Start with a problem: Then see if technology can help

A second guiding principle for me is to look at the context: Learners and teachers will not use a technology that is difficult to fit into their own circumstances. This leads to my implementation orientation:

Technology products are never used in isolation: The context has a major effect on if, and how, and to what good, they are used.

This leads to another of the major determinants of my thinking and work:

There are no simple or conclusive answers about the effectiveness of a media product or a type of technology for learning. It always depends on the context.

Finally, behind all my work are the facts that I love to teach, I respect the difficulty of teaching effectively, I realize that teaching will never be easy or something that can be taken over by a media product, and:

I get great pleasure out of being a fellow-learner with my students. 

All of these these points are discussed in the book that my husband, Jef Moonen, and I wrote in 2005 for our early retirements from the University of Twente. You can download it here…..

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My background:

Decade 1 and 2:

I was born, oh so long ago (actually, 1944), in Detroit, Michigan in the USA. But my family came from Sweden (my father, and my mother's father), and I grew up with Swedish customs and music. I went through elementary school and secondary school in Detroit.

Decades 2 and 3:

I did my first degree at the University of Michigan, in mathematics and computer science. This was also a LONG...time ago, when we did our computing on punched cards and in Fortran 4. I became a mathematics teacher and fell in love a few times. 

I also studied in London, England, and this experience convinced me I wanted to travel, see the world, learn more about cross-cultural differences, and drink beer at interesting pubs. 

Then I went to California, and did my Masters degree at Stanford University, in Mathematics Curriculum. I did programming for extra money, but didn't like it. I liked best the chocolate doughnuts we had every day at 10:00 and the fact that the place I worked was on top of a very beautiful hill in California.

I taught in a high school--different mathematics classes-- and also co-wrote a mathematics textbook. 

I also got married, moved to Victoria in British Columbia, Canada, and had two children, my daughter Christy and my son Paul.

Decade 3 and 4:

At the University of Victoria Faculty of Education, I did my PhD in the measurement and evaluation of computer applications in education, and taught there for many years--until 1988. 

During the years in the 1970s and 1980s, I:

Discovered microcomputers and their educational implications and began writing educational software 

Began working on projects involving educational telecommunications and on-line professional education for teachers in British Columbia 

Served on many, many committees and projects about computers in education 

Supervised many Master's theses and PhD candidates 

Worked professionally in many countries, many US and Australian states, and many Canadian provinces--all to do with computers or telecommunications in education 

And also, I moved to The Netherlands in 1988 and joined the Faculty of Educational Science and Technology (now the Faculty of Behavioural Sciences) at the University of Twente. I remarried in 1990.  For a glimpse of how my husband Jef Moonen and I have supported each other in our work, see an article about us published in the journal ETR&D (2002, 50(3), 112-118) which we link here.

The story of how I came to the University of Twente??? 

That is for another medium, not the WWW! 

Decade 5:

I started exploring the World Wide Web in January 1994, and was immediately intrigued by the benefits of bringing hyperlinked connectivity to distributed documents on the Internet. 

Since then, I have been watching the evolution of the Web and am convinced that this is a very important new type of electronic environment for education and training. The reason??

For the first time, people with creative ideas, like many of the students in my courses, can suddenly have the same opportunities for dissemination of those ideas as those who had previously been the "gatekeepers" (and cost-determiners) of educational learning materials. 

I did many things at the university and internationally (see this whole Web site). Perhaps the two highlights were leading the team that development the TeleTOP system, a course-management system that reflects our “learning workbench” ideas, and getting involved with corporate learning, particularly Shell EP. All that is described in this Website as well.

I also saw my children, Christy and Paul, grow up, go away to universities in different parts of the world (Canada, Scotland, Australia), find their partners, and establish their professional careers as well as their families. Both of them also have discovered that they like to teach... I would say much more about them here, but they would rather I didn't! 

Decade 6:

Now that I have taken early retirement from the university, I seem to be as busy as ever with our consulting work. But it is different from being so involved in a university for so long.

And we continue to enjoy our six grandchildren (two in Canada, three in The Netherlands, and one in Australia). I keep enjoying detective novels and puzzles and since 2005, Suduko!

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How can you contact me?

E-mail: bettycollisjefmoonen@gmail.com

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