Module 02: Whence Educational Technology?

Introduction Connect Apply Reflect Extend

 

When your great aunt Bessie or your nephew Julian corner you at the family reunion and want to know what you’re doing, you tell them you’re studying educational technology. "Educational what?" is the usual response. Their brow wrinkles, their forehead furrows, and you hasten to explain for fear they’ll need plastic surgery to repair their face before the evening is over. If it’s a big party and there’s a lot of noise in the room, or your listener has had a few bowls of punch and is clearly not inviting a thoughtful treatise on your career choice, you can give the "cop-out" answer: "Educational technolog--" you babble innocently, "it’s using stuff like computers and video to teach people. Do your kids use computers in school? That’s educational technology."

You know all the while, of course, that the noisy party answer is really not very accurate, and that educational technology is much, much more than using hardware and software for learning. Another, somewhat better, short answer, goes something like this: "Educational technology--it’s the systematic design of instruction." Of course, that one often just wrinkles and furrows your listeners even more deeply.

In a more reflective conversation you might describe educational technology as a savory combination of educational psychology and communications in a thick sauce of systems theory with a dash of interactive media. That’s not the whole answer, either, of course, but it gets you started in a more favorable direction.

This module will provides some background to help you better understand the field.  You'll briefly review how our field emerged, in this country at least, and where it seems to be headed.


Module 02: Connect

In this module: The roots of educational technology

What are the roots of educational technology?

The roots of educational technology as a systematic approach to instruction go back, in Western thought, at least, to the ancient Greeks. Socrates (foremost proponent of the aptly named Socratic method), his pupil Plato, Plato's pupil Aristotle, the Sophists, and many other Greek philosophers were interested in how people learn and how best to teach them. From the European Middle Ages through the 19th Century any number of educator/philosophers observed and commented on the processes of teaching and learning, often, like Herbart and Froebel, prescribing instructional strategies and creating and marketing instructional materials to implement those strategies.


Socrates (470?-399 BC)

None of these methods, however ingenious or appropriate to their time as they may have been, were backed by empirical evidence. Only in the late 19th century and early 20th century did educators begin to apply scientific method to teaching and learning.

The dominant idea of learning leading up to the late 1800s was that of mental discipline & the idea of "mind as muscle." Like a muscle, the mind grew in strength through proper exercise and became skilled through repetition and practice. Hence the study of subjects like Latin, long after their practical utility was largely diminished.

As a secondary school student in the early 1960s I and many of my peers "took" Latin. It was not an exercise in futility. For example, many English and other European languages’ words trace their roots back to Latin and it helps me to this day to infer the meaning of some unfamiliar terms. Be that as it may, the main reason Latin and many other subjects held such dominant positions in the curriculum was that they provided a mental gymnasium. They exercised and refined the mind.

This idea, incidentally, largely superseded by the psychological approach to learning, recently has been getting a new lease on life. Researchers show evidence that people who keep their minds active, engage in mental "exercises" as mundane as working crossword puzzles or reading, can postpone or even avoid debilitating mental conditions in their later years.

Edward Thorndike

Enter Edward Thorndike (1874-1949), a student of psychologist William James at Harvard. Thorndike tested the psychological theories of the day using the empirical method, and came up with his theory of "connectionism."

The idea was that learning depends on improved conduction of nerve impulses in the physical nervous system. His studies downplayed the value of practice and repetition in improving conduction. He felt that reward or punishment, success or failure, satisfaction or annoyance following an action did more to strengthen or weaken associations. He began to take into account ideas of motivation, incentive, and environment as they influence learning.

From this model of learning, Thorndike proposed a theory of instruction. He advised teachers to create learning environments in which students acquired specific behavioral connections as part of a larger pattern. He felt teachers should reward learners’ expressions of desirable connections and create discomfort for expression of undesirable connections.

Thorndike prescribed five principles of teaching and learning. The first of these principles was self-activity, which meant that the student must ultimately be the initiator of all learning activity. The second principle involved interest, or what might today be termed motivation. The third principle he called preparation or mental set. It included reviewing past experience or what today might be called activating prior knowledge. Fourth, he felt that instruction should be individualized. That is, instructional situations and media should be tailored to suit individual differences in past experience and mental set. Teachers should diagnose individual students’ conditions and prescribe activities accordingly. And fifth, Thorndike felt that socialization was a important purpose of education, and that instruction should take place in natural social settings.

His emphasis on individualized instruction and self-activity anticipated the programmed instruction movement of the 20th century and the work of the Behaviorists, in particular B.F. Skinner. Thorndike himself helped develop new textbooks and other printed aids. He saw such media as a way to free teachers to do the diagnoses and prescription necessary to individualize instruction.


John Dewey


John Dewey (1859-1952)


John Dewey (1859-1952) also studied with William James, and along with James became a major proponent of "functionalism," the idea that people are living organisms, formed both by heredity and environment. His major contribution to the psychology of learning was his view of an educated person as one who could think reflectively and solve problems. Authority and tradition should, in Dewey's view, take a back seat to scientific problem solving. The goal of education, for Dewey, was to improve intelligence, and the method by which to accomplish that was through reflection.


He disagreed to some extent with Thorndike. Dewey held that stimulus and response were organically related, that there is a two-way interaction between the learner and the environment. Learners get cues from their environment, process those cues within the nervous system, and use them to solve problems. Such experiences form the basis of learners’ goals and actions.

Dewey put his ideas into action at an experimental "lab" school. Students did not do drills and recitations. Their desks were not arranged in neat rows. Anticipating the interdisciplinary theme of modern school reform, the subject areas were not separated at Dewey’s lab school.

Breaking from the 19th century practice of whole class instruction, in the lab school, individual children took part in different activities going on simultaneously. The teacher, instead of lecturing from the front of the room became more of a "guide on the side."

The central idea in Dewey’s theory of instruction was that of "reflection" --essentially, the scientific method. Dewey’s taught his students to practice the steps of the scientific method in all their inquiries.


Individualized Instruction

The "industrial" model of education, featuring large classrooms (sometimes with hundreds of pupils) with blackboards and individual slates, dominated the fledgling field of public education during the early 1800s. By the end of the century, educators introduced individual laboratory activities. By the early 20th century, under the influence of people like Thorndike and Dewey, interest grew in individualized instruction.

The principle characteristics of individualized instruction programs were that (1) students could learn and advance at their own rate with a minimum of teacher direction, and (2) self-instruction materials, produced and distributed on a mass scale, took the place of teacher-centered instruction.

Individualized instruction introduced several important ideas to the technology of instruction. Perhaps the most important was that it emphasized teaching to specific objectives and individualizing instruction for learners with different abilities and levels of a prior knowledge. It was a precursor of the programmed instruction of the 1950s. In addition, the idea of criterion-referenced, mastery learning grew in favor of norm-referenced, mass education.


Stages of Cognitive Development

In the early twentieth century, educators and psychologists also began to look more closely at cognitive processes and how they develop along with physiological growth in human beings. They observed that young children seem to learn somewhat differently than do older children and adults. Maria Montessori (1870-1952) and Jean Piaget (1896-1980) are credited with developing the idea of stages of cognitive development corresponding to brain and nervous system development in children and adolescents.

Among other contributions to the art and science of teaching and learning, their work suggested the importance of assessing learner attributes, particularly their stage of cognitive development, and provide corresponding learning activities. For example, young children learn best through activity and direct experience, and from each other through social interaction. They learn almost exclusively by doing.


Jean Piaget (1896-1980)

While adults learn by doing as well, they are also capable of what Piaget called "formal operational" thought. They can think abstractly, form hypotheses, consider "what if" situations, and solve problems systematically.

Montessori discovered that providing tools appropriate to learners in different stages of development fostered the natural process of self-education. She based her technology of instruction on predicting what the learner was trying to do at a given time in their interaction with their environment, and then attempting to provide relevant materials and experiences.


Visual Education

The visual education movement began in the adult education of the late 19th century and was most popular between World War I and the onset of the great depression in 1928. It was consistent with the conceptual change models of Thorndike, Dewey, Montessori and others, and was in many ways a reaction to the predominantly verbal methods of teaching then in practice.

Proponents of visual education classified instructional experiences in terms of their degree of concreteness or abstraction. More concrete experiences included contrived activities (such as laboratory experiments), demonstrations, field trips, exhibits, motion pictures, stereographs, still pictures, and visual symbols. At the abstract end of the continuum were verbal symbols, or words.

The idea was to connect or associate the more concrete experiences with the abstract verbal symbols. Students could then further manipulate these verbal symbols to enlarge their understanding.

Educators soon began creating "school museums," repositories of instructional artifacts like stereographs and models. Teachers and students could access these collections as needed. These museums were the forerunners of school media centers.

By the 1920s, teacher education programs began to include courses in visual education to train new teachers how to use these new media effectively.


Educational Film

While some of the early inventors of motion pictures, like Thomas Edison, envisioned film as an educational medium, few filmmakers produced formal educational or instructional films until after World War I.

The US Government was the most prominent producer and consumer of educational films between the wars. Government films recorded public activity, such as war films; demonstrated agricultural, business and other techniques and procedures; influenced public opinion through dramatic or documentary programs, such as the films of the WPA and other depression-era agencies; and provided public relations or information vehicles for agencies such as the National Park Service.

During this period, research on the use of film in formal education showed that well-produced films can sometimes be used as the sole means of teaching some types of performance skills and factual data. Researchers found that teachers should (1) tell students what to look for in the film and warn that a test will be given, (2) give students study guides for films, (3) discourage student note-taking during films, as it distracts from attention to the film itself, (4) show a given film several times, (5) summarize the main points of the film after showing it, and (6) provide follow-up activities to promote transfer of general principles learned in the film.

Research also indicated that filmmakers should (1) limit training films to less than an hour, (2) show tasks from the demonstrator’s point of view, rather than from that of the student, (3) slow the pace of the film enough to allow time for learners to process the material adequately, (4) avoid paring subject matter down too much, or covering it too rapidly, (5) present objectives at the beginning of the film to help learners get what they’re supposed to from the instruction, (6) use clear, concise, and complete summaries as repetition and review for learners, and (7) adjust the number of words per minute in the sound track to optimize learning.


Instructional Systems Design

Educational film and educational technology in general really came of age during World War II. The crisis created the need to train millions of soldiers and civilians in thousands of techniques, skills, and ideas in a very short time. New training programs required more effective instruction based on psychological research, and a systematic approach for putting content, methods, and media together.

This combining of research, with a systematic approach of designing instruction, became known as instructional systems design, or ISD. It combined the psychology of learning with the systems approach to design, and frequently incorporated the use of some type of media to improve cost-effective delivery, from printed books and workbooks to radio and audiotape, slides and filmstrips, motion pictures, television and videotape. Based on its success during the war, much of this new systematic approach to instruction made its way from the military into postwar public and corporate education and training.

This, in turn, fostered greater interest in research on learning and on how to use media in education. A further boost came when the Soviet Union launched the Sputnik satellite, triggering the space race and sparking intense interest in the west in education and training.


Behaviorism

Following the war, educational psychology and technology grew in several directions at once. One of the most important influences was behaviorism, championed by American psychologist B.F. Skinner. The term "behaviorism" reflected an emphasis on observing actual behavior rather than attempting to infer what goes on inside people’s heads as they learn. Behaviorists demonstrated that they could foster learning by skillfully designing the stimulus presented to the learner and judiciously rewarding or punishing the learner’s responses. Behaviorism found its way into educational practice in a variety of ways.

One popular method became known as programmed instruction. In the early 1960s my eighth grade mathematics teacher drew me aside one day and asked me to try out a new textbook. The book was on set theory, an entirely new domain to me. Instead of paragraphs explaining the concepts with practice problems at the end of the chapter, this book was laid out in "cells." Each cell contained one very simple idea with perhaps an example or illustration of that idea. For example, a cell might contain the definition of a "set."

Following each information cell (or perhaps each small cluster of cells) was an equally small practice cell, asking me, for instance, to complete a blank in a sentence stating the important attributes of a set. After responding to the question, I turned the page to check my answer. If my answer was correct, the feedback cell directed me to continue on to the next information cell. If I missed the answer, the program directed me to a remedial loop of cells or perhaps to a review of the original material.

I liked the book. It was very methodical and it gave me a singular sense of satisfaction and accomplishment, since the chunks of information were so small that I almost never gave a wrong answer. The small chunks built up gradually until, almost before I knew it, I really understood quite a bit about set theory. If the authors of that textbook are still around, and still care, I can testify to the long term effectiveness of their program. I can still give a fair explanation of the basics of set theory, though I’ve seldom encountered it since, either in school or out.

Behaviorism also found its way into education and training in other ways. One is the idea of behavior modification, or "shaping" behavior by ignoring undesirable responses and reinforcing desirable ones. Many public school teachers weaken pupils’ undesirable behavior with a "time-out" to temporarily remove positive reinforcement. Managers and teachers alike often negotiate contracts with workers or students to reward learning or other performance. Computer assisted instruction (CAI) is, in its most elementary form, programmed instruction delivered by a computer.


Humanism

In the 1970s humanist psychologists Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers, and others provided additional insight into how people learn. Maslow pointed out that people grow by making choices. Learning to make good choices results in what he called self-actualization --a well-adjusted, self-confident individual with high self esteem. Maslow advised educators to help learners make constructive choices on their own, rather than attempt to teach specific choices. Rogers championed the idea of a learner-centered approach to learning, with the teacher as a facilitator and students developing the skills and self-confidence to educate themselves without relying on teachers and formal instruction.


Cognitivism

Cognitive psychologists earned the title by their willingness to theorize about internal thinking processes rather than limit their observations to overt behavior. They trace their roots to the Gestalt psychologists of prewar Germany, who discovered that people perceive things differently depending on their experiences and interests, on how stimuli are arranged, and how we "fill in" missing information. They described learning as achieving insight by perceiving new relationships. For example, my eighteen month old daughter quickly notices the relationship between buttons on things like radios, TVs and VCRs, and the occurrences with which they are associated. She generalizes her experiences with buttons to new devices all the time and carefully notices the results. Gestalt psychology emphasizes learning by actively solving problems.

Piaget’s theories came to the fore in the late 1960s and early 1970s with a method of instruction called open education. Behaviorists viewed education as a process in which teachers ask questions and reinforce correct answers. Open education is based on the premise that children are constantly asking their own questions and that the teacher’s job is to provide an environment in which the student can find answers. It features rich environments with lots of manipulatives, peer and cross-age tutoring, negotiation of learning objectives and methods, individualized instruction, and team teaching.

Jerome Bruner extended the cognitive approach to education with the discovery method, in which teachers introduce problems and encourage students to find their own answers. This in turn led to the current interest in constructivism, the recognition that learners inevitably do construct their own understanding, and that educators should strive to provide cognitive "scaffolding," or support, for the process of making meaning. Learners engage in problem solving, mind-mapping, and metacognitive skill-building.

Examples of constructivist approaches to education and training include anchored instruction, case based learning, and problem based learning (PBL). A good example of anchored instruction is the video-based Jasper Woodbury upper elementary school mathematics series developed at Vanderbilt University. PBL is used widely in medical schools and a growing cadre of other professional training organizations. All three approaches pose significant, contextualized, real-world problems for learners, who acquire basic skills as needed to solve problems. Anchored instruction features a narrative, or story, in which all the data (but not the tools and methods) needed to solve the problem are embedded. Case based learning features analysis of authentic cases with either known or unknown outcomes. PBL emphasizes problems carefully designed to stimulate basic skills acquisition with the help of tutors and other resources.


Performance Technology

Meanwhile, the intense focus on education and instruction as solutions to all problems began to wane. Corporate trainers discovered that the traditional method of evaluating their effectiveness, "butts in seats," no longer stood the test of the bottom line. When desired improvements failed to materialize, managers simply ordered more training. What failed the first time, usually failed the second and third times as well. What was going wrong?

Corporate and military trainers found that, too often, people participated in courses, enjoyed them, demonstrated that they had learned their lessons well, but returned to their workplaces lacking appropriate tools and the support of the "system" to implement the desired change. School teachers attended workshops, showed enthusiasm, performed admirably, but returned to classrooms without adequate time to prepare the new materials they needed and without the active support and encouragement of their principal.

The solution was a paradigm shift. Instead of looking at every need only in terms of the lack of a skill or a knowledge deficit, educational technologists started to look at other factors as well. They found that people only put new skills and knowledge into practice if the environment supported them. They need the right tools and opportunities to put new techniques to work. They need motivation from within themselves and incentives from the "system" to make the effort to implement changes. Instead of focusing on a particular solution training -- the new approach looks at human performance more broadly and tries to uncover all the factors that influence people to do things one way rather than another.

Many organizations are making the shift from an emphasis on training to performance, even renaming their trainers "human performance technologists," or just "performance technologists." This new breed of educational technologists often has greater opportunity and broader responsibility to help people make desired changes.


New media

Along with performance technology and constructivist learning theories, the latest change in educational technology is the convergence of media delivery systems in the personal multimedia computer, and, even more recently, the coming of age of the Internet with the advent of the World Wide Web.

One of the challenges for educational technologists is to develop effective learning and teaching strategies that take advantage of the capabilities of these new media. For example, the World Wide Web, fairly bursting at the seams with information, is not an educational organization. You can prove that to yourself pretty quickly by connecting a classroom to the Internet, putting learners in front of the computers, and watching what happens. A lot may happen, actually, but only a small percentage will have anything to do with what we call education or training.

On the other hand, the new media appear to lend themselves extraordinarily well to a constructivist approach to learning. Organized appropriately, multimedia and the World Wide Web can help provide abundant access to information, opportunities for collaboration, and rich, real-world contexts in which to solve problems. The possibilities seem limitless and the payoff in learning and teaching promises to be commensurate with the effort we expend.

Module 02: Apply 

We've built a quiz for you from information in the Connect section. The results of this quiz have no impact on your course grade. But you can use the quiz to see if you gained some of the knowledge from this section.  Also, this is a good opportunity to check out the Blackboard quiz tool, since we will be using it for the course final exam.

Link to the quiz in the Content Modules page in Blackboard, just below this Module 02 link.

Module 02: Reflect

Have you contributed to last week's Discussion Board topic by describing how you came upon EDTEC 540 - or what you hope to accomplish through your studies here?  If not, please do so early this week.

 Once you do, take some time to read through your classmates responses.  I'd like each of you this week to read through the postings and reply to at least one.  Perhaps someone has a career goal similar to yours.  Perhaps someone's career goal is a position with which you are already familiar.  Use this opportunity to "get to know" others in our class, and to begin networking with one another.  I'll continue to add my thoughts as well.

As you get to know the other students, think about two or three other people with whom you would like to work in a group.  Coming up, we will have a couple group assignments.  These will be short exercises designed to prepare you for the course assignments.  While I can form the class into groups, I'd much rather you come to me with a preformed group of folks with whom you would like to work.  Should you form a group, please email me and let me know.

Module 02: Extend 

Overview of this section

People in action

Barbara's background included a year of teacher education. During this time she was exposed to a variety of teaching techniques that involved both behavioral and cognitive psychology. As she thinks back over the past 15 years, it's apparent to her that she has incorporated ideas within both fields: often using behavioral tendencies for lower level thinking skills, and cognitive psychology for higher level thinking skills. Although she was never schooled in the ideas of constructivism, she wonders "Maybe constructivism explains the success I had last year when my students created hypermedia science activities for Mrs. Garretson's fourth grade classroom. Although we created them for the younger students, my students were the ones that did the most learning."

For Roberto, recent advances in computer technologies and the World Wide Web have had an intoxicating effect. But the first instructional material he created for new sales trainees were not an overwhelming success, even though he knew the information and generated a multimedia presentation. "I guess I need more than bells and whistles for this to work. It looks like the ideas of psychology may provide some of the answers. I wonder what the book meant by systems approach?"

Main points of Module 02

  1. A simple definition of educational technology is the systematic design of instruction integrated through a combination of educational psychology and communicational media.
  2. In the late 1800s, components of learning began to be scientifically investigated.
  3. Edwin Thorndike proposed the idea of connectionism, which states that learning depends on improved nerve impulses in the nervous system, and that these impulses can be strengthened if the environment rewards the desired behaviors.
  4. Thorndike's prescription for successful instruction included encouraging the learner to initiate the activity; adding motivational techniques to the instruction; activating the learner's prior knowledge; creating individualized instruction for the learner; and providing the instruction in natural, social settings.
  5. John Dewey promoted the idea that learning occurs best through reflection, with the teacher serving more as a guide on the side in an interdisciplinary classroom rather than one who manipulates specific stimuli to alter a behavior.
  6. Also shaping the field of educational technology was the idea of individualized instruction; that students learn best when objectives are specifically tailored to the skills and knowledge needed to perform.
  7. Maria Montessori and Jean Piaget studied the cognitive growth process of children and adolescents, and stated that learning activities are most appropriate when they correspond to the learner's state of cognitive development.
  8. The field of visual education influenced educational technology by incorporating various media and activities into the learning process.
  9. The US Government was an early proponent of educational films, and found that although films could be used as a sole means of instruction, results were improved when teachers taught in conjunction with the film.
  10. The Instructional Systems Design (ISD) field evolved during and after World War II by infusing knowledge from educational research with a systematic approach to designing instruction.
  11. Championed by Skinner, behaviorism focused on shaping learning by arranging rewards and punishments according to a learner's responses.
  12. Programmed instruction and computer assisted instruction both gained their foothold due to the principles of behaviorism.
  13. Maslow and Rogers proposed a field called humanism, in which learners were more responsible for their learning, with the teacher facilitating the learner's growth.
  14. Cognitive psychology focuses on how people think, rather than focusing on their behaviors. They believe that people perceive things differently depending on their experiences and interests, on how stimuli are arranged, and learn by perceiving new relationships.
  15. Constructivism states that learners construct their own understanding, and that the role of teachers is to provide cognitive support for the learner's growth.
  16. Anchored instruction, case based learning, and problem based learning all developed out of the constructivist philosophy in that they pose significant, contextualized, real-world problems for learners.
  17. Many corporations are now moving away from instruction as an all encompassing answer, and instead are looking at human performance issues more broadly to identify how to support their needs.
  18. A final component to shape educational technology are advances in new media and communicational technologies, including the personal multimedia computer and the Internet.
  19. The challenge for new educational technologists is to merge our understanding of how people learn with the enhanced capabilities being offered through new media not just to create information, but to engage the learner in meaningful interactions to improve their performance.

Next step

In this module we explored the evolution of what has become known as the field of educational technology. Although pressures on the field appear to be accelerating due to the rapid changes in technology, there are still constants with which most educational technologists find themselves engaged. In the next chapter we'll explore these constants, and see how educational technologists analyze, design, develop, implement, and evaluate projects and products.

For more information

Biehler, R., & Snowman, J. (1986). Psychology applied to teaching. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company.

Montessori, M. (1955). Childhood education. New York: New American Library.

Saettler, P. (1990). The evolution of American educational technology. Englewood, CO: Libraries Unlimited, Inc.

 

Introduction Connect Apply Reflect Extend

Page authors: Bob Hoffman & Donn Ritchie & James Marshall Last updated: Spring, 2006

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