Writing a history that you helped to create is awkward, as Anne Trumbore acknowledges in her new book “The Teacher in the Machine: A Human History of Education Technology.” Yet as one of the many hardworking, unsung “humans in the loop,” as she calls them, who made the dream of mass education a reality, Trumbore was uniquely positioned to tell the edtech story, communicating the complexity of edtech’s mixed legacy.

For Trumbore, it started in 2004, when she went to Stanford to work for Patrick Suppes, who had been studying computer-assisted learning since the 1960s. She began by designing a web-based grammar program before joining the team that created the Stanford Online High School. In 2012, she moved to Coursera, then an experimental startup struggling to bring Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) to students around the world. She also worked at NovoEd, another online learning platform. By 2015, Trumbore was at the University of Pennsylvania running Wharton Online. Today, she leads the lifelong learning online certificate program for the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business.

“I have been an ensemble player in the transformation of online education from experimental and low status to ‘innovative’ and ‘disruptive,’” she writes.

“I have also,” she adds ruefully, “helped to make wealthy institutions, venture capitalists, and more than a few professors even wealthier.”

In “Teacher in the Machine,” Trumbore traces edtech’s beginnings to three professors at distinct schools: Suppes, who founded the Computer Curriculum Corp. in 1967 to produce computerized learning equipment; Donald Bitzer at the University of Illinois, developer of PLATO, the computer-based learning system of the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s that introduced online discussion boards and, later, the framework for social networking; and Seymour Papert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who, with his colleague Marvin Minsky in the late 1960s, devised vital early research on artificial intelligence by studying how humans learned.

Suppes and Papert had opposing views of how the computer and technology should function in education. Suppes was shooting for a kind of super tutor — the “individual Aristotle,” he called it — that could guide the student through any problem. Papert favored the computer as a super tool, with the student instructing the machine to solve a problem.

Read the full article about edtech’s mixed legacy by Mary-Liz Shaw at EdSurge.