Bonnie Taylor, EdD

How did you pick your career? Did you know all along?

Nobody grows up saying: "I want to be an Educational Technologist when I grow up." I grew up saying "I want to be a teacher" but it wasn't really true. I liked learning maths and languages, but I didn't want to stand up in front of either children or adults and make them do homework or give lectures, or anything like that. I did like learning new things and showing other people how to do them, and I did like the feeling I'd get when I helped someone who started out saying they didn't understand something but now they get it. But how do you make a career of that, if you're not going to be a teacher? I really didn't know how to figure it out, so I went and did a lot of other things instead: I worked at both a large department store and a small gift shop in the local shopping mall. I became a demonstrator for various home and hobby products. I answered customer telephone calls for many businesses: a bank, an insurance company, a local ceiling fan repairman, etc. I worked in a traveling carnival, I started my own business--twice--and I went to college...a LOT of college. Over time, I collected a lot of information and experience about what it takes to learn something new and some of the reasons people like to change things up, reasons why they don't like to, and what motivates them the most to start doing things differently. All the jobs I had in the past seemed to involve some aspect of that: how do you use this new and amazing product? What do I do if it breaks? Why do I need this or that service? People kept asking the same kinds of questions regardless of where I was working at the time. Thinking about my past in that way led me to earn a doctoral degree by investigating the ways some teachers decided how to use technology to help them teach, as well as how/why they sometimes talked themselves out of using that technology. Now I work for an educational technology company where my main job is two things: 1) help people learn how to use our company's products and 2) think of ways our company's products can be used in new situations. Either way, I have to be able to encourage people to keep trying new things, especially at first when they may not be very good at it. It's not a job I would have been able to predict I would have, but looking backwards it seems to make a lot of sense now.

In layperson terms, what do you actually do at work?

Imagine your job requires you to know how to respond at the scene of a car crash, so you are taking a class about that. Your teacher needs to put you in situations where you can practice taking care of injured people, but doesn't want to just pair you up with another student where you two switch off between pretending to be the injured person and the emergency responder. Instead, your teacher wants to put both of you in a situation where you each get to be the emergency responder and you are both attending to a realistic looking patient who is scared and crying, yelling for help, bruised, bleeding, having chest pain, etc. I work for a company that creates augmented reality scenarios for situations like that. It's similar to virtual reality games that most people at least know about nowadays, even if they have never played such a game themselves. The difference is that my company doesn't recreate the whole world, just the parts that need to be different from what's already here. So for example, you and your classmate can be crouched in an empty ambulance or standing at a roadside scene that doesn't actually include a car crash victim in it, but when you each wear our goggles you can see and hear an injured person on the ground right in front of you. You and your buddy can check the victim's breathing and heartbeat, and even put a tourniquet on an arm or leg if you need to, even though there's not actually a person there. My job at this company is to help your teacher learn how to use our technology to make that imaginary car crash victim show up on the scene. I help them practice with our customized headsets and handheld tablets to create activities depicting different characters and scenarios. I help them solve problems with using the equipment, ranging from "I don't know how to turn the headset on" to "I want to know how to create a 4-person accident scene with a man, a woman, a baby, and another child." To do this job, I have to be very familiar with how our equipment works and what to do when it apparently doesn't work. I also have to know about how to teach people to do new things and how to encourage them when they may be confused or frustrated. But the most common thing I do is write down the directions for how to use our products and post them online for people to look up on their own when they need them.