A mild rant today.
Yesterday I participated in a training on Drupal, which is a content management system you can use to create web pages. I've used different content management systems (Omeka, wordpress) to teach my students some digital history skills. Still, Drupal offers serious, build from the ground up, learn it and you can be a web-creator, options. The White House uses Drupal, as does the University of Minnesota. (If you ever want to know how a webpage is built, use builtwith.com.)
Lots of interesting participants, including a retired artillery officer interested in G.K. Chesterton, several folks from a local web development firm, and a couple small business folks.
One small business owner described herself as an "essential oils educator." I'm going to skip the ignorance of her medicine ("when you apply oils to the head, the oil has greater access to the brain" - no it doesn't), and the appearance of a scheme ("I don't sell retail, I sell wholesale to others looking to start a business"- like Charles Ponzi) and focus on the educator part.
Those of us who are actual educators must protect, advance, and advocate for that term. Salespeople are not educators. Knowledgeable? Of course. Valuable?, absolutely. When I buy a running shoe I ask the salesperson to help me navigate the different models available. But a shoe salesperson isn't a foot technology educator. And the sales reps from all the ed-tech firms that are on campus from time to time aren't education technology educators. Educators are those whose primary mission is to educate, not to sell a service or product, nor to tell others how to teach. If we let the term devolve to anyone who wants to explain something, we risk the same problem that news organizations now face with talking heads claiming the mantle of journalists.
Those who can, teach.
