Select a different paper
Download a copy of the entire paper
This paper will look to understand the functions of the professionals in Educational Technology from its beginnings up to today. As Educational Technologists, does our own lack of definition for what we do contribute to a lack of understanding by the public? If so, how does this affect what we do?
Part 1 presents a brief history of the field. Part 2 explains job descriptions and some resources for finding work in the profession of Educational Technology followed by a summary conclusion.
It would seem logical at the beginning of a discussion about Educational Technology to present a definition of it. Indeed, there have been many definitions suggested based on many issues and much research, and yet ET suffers from an identity crisis. Is it a process? A product? The point of this paper is not to attempt to write the ultimate definition, but rather to try to understand the scope of Educational Technology as a process, based on what its practitioners literally do. A complete understanding must begin with a brief description of what its practitioners have done in the past.
If a generic view of technology is taken, it could be argued that whenever a systematic plan is developed and carried out in order to successfully communicate facts, ideas, beliefs, behaviors, or knowledge, the process of educational technology has occurred. Although technology must have been taking place since the beginning of time, general recognition and documenting of it in education began in the 5th century B.C. with the Elder Sophists.
The Elder Sophists were a group of ancient Greeks who believed that knowledge helped society evolve slowly but progressively toward an egalitarian and democratic state where morality and law were determined by societal consensus, rather than divine authority or a priori absolutes. The Sophists were first to use the teaching technology of group discussion or "Sophistic dialogue".
The Sophistic methods influenced European education until the 11th century when Abelard's Scholastic method was developed. At this time, society was becoming generally more skeptical and less willing to accept things at face value, especially in the area of religion. Abelard felt any subject or thought could be analyzed for the purposes of understanding, verification, or qualification so he developed 158 questions about theological writings and a procedure for analyzing the material. The Scholastic method, later revised by St. Thomas Aquinas, was an inquiry method where the learner continually questioned material and postulated theses which could then be proven or rejected.
In the 17th century, the technological advancement of the printing press affected educational technology by shifting theories of education toward empiricism. Johann Comenius' Orbitus Pictus was the first use of a printed book to help teach. This is perhaps the beginning of the confusion between ET as a process and ET as a medium. Comenius designed his book as an instructional aid to help sequence content from simple to complex, according to the natural stages of development of each learner, a theory which was reiterated in the 18th century by Jean Jacques Rousseau's educational essay Emile.
Later in the 17th century, John Locke's tabula rasa (blank slate) theory proposed a shift in instructional beliefs, seeing the process of learning more akin to habit formation than as an intellectual exercise. Locke's theory could be seen as a forerunner to B. F. Skinner's behaviour modification theories, appearing almost two hundred years later.
Around the beginning of the 1800's, two significant educational developments occurred in Germany. The first systems approach to instruction was designed by Johann Friedrich Herbart as a four step learning plan:
Around the same time as Herbart another German named Friedrich Froebel presented his philosophy that education should nurture children's growth of creativity, socialization, self-motivation and activity, and motor skills. Froebel developed the kindergarten system to address these goals, comparing the educator's role to that of a gardener.
One of the first influential works linking education with science was the 1886 Teacher's Handbook of Psychology written by James Sully of Scotland. He believed that successful instruction should take into account the general nature of psychological principles and systematically apply them in practical ways.
At the turn of the twentieth century the pace of educational technology, as with technology in general, began to quicken yet many of the theories put forth in the last hundred years are deeply rooted in the past.
The main principles of Maria Montessori's methods of the early 1900's included adapting and sequencing content for each individual learner and complete freedom for learners with an emphasis on education through all the senses. The following decade witnessed the work of Edward Thorndike. Thorndike purported that schools should provide experiences that "pursue prespecified, socially useful goals" (Shrock 1995), a philosophy that was furthered by others such as Franklin Bobbitt, and Mary Ward and Frederic Burk whose instruction plan of the early 1920's at San Francisco State Normal School was one of the first to be characterized by clearly pre-defined objectives and individualized instruction. Later in the United States two associates of Burk's, Carleton Washburne and Helen Parkhurst, established the Winnetka Plan and the Dalton Plan respectively, which also centered on objective driven, mastery learning using self instructional materials allowing students to work at their own pace with minimum teacher direction. These early plans of the 20th century influenced the work of Skinner and his famous "Skinner Box" of the 1950's.
In 1933 Ralph Tyler, while working on a study from Ohio State University, developed a method for measuring the effectiveness of the intended learning outcomes (objectives). Tyler qualified these outcomes based on students' behavior thereby created the behavioral objectives that are used today in instructional design. Tyler also made another contribution to modern day instructional design methods. He used the results of his behavioral objective assessments to continually revise the curricula of the study until desired achievement levels were attained -- what we now call on-going or formative evaluation.
The onset of World War II introduced a huge instructional problem: how could thousands of military personnel be quickly and effectively trained ?The answer at the time was an enormous global influx of mediated learning material: film, slides, photographs, audio tape, print material, and more. As a result a need was created for professionals with expertise in education to work with subject matter experts and media producers to help create the materials and oversee their implementation. The war experience raised the profile of mediated education showing the world what could be achieved with well funded research and development efforts in education. Critics, however, asked the question whose answer seems to be as far away now as it was then: "Was the war training effort simply using sophisticated media to deliver unchanged instructional strategies, or did the design and implementation of the mediated learning itself signal an advancement in educational technology?"
The end of World War II does not bring the history of educational technology quite up to date but from this time on there seemed to be a polarization of the field into two camps: the practical based audio-visual camp and the other more theory driven camp who followed a more scientific, systems approach to education. Both philosophies found acceptance and prospered even though they seemed to directly contradict each other. Audiovisual instruction, exemplified by the emergence of television, targeted a mass audience while programmed learning was designed specifically for individualized instruction. But in the 1960s the American Department of Audiovisual Instruction (DAVI), under the leadership of Dr. James Finn, published several seminal works in attempts to progress the Audiovisual field past a simple focus on products and toward including systematic design and assessment principles in the development of those products. In his forward to one DAVI publication, Teaching Machines and Programmed Learning, Finn states:
The editors of Teaching Machines and Programmed Learning , Robert Glaser and Arthur Lumsdaine, agreed:
Later publications of the DAVI confirmed the push toward a merging of the audiovisual and theory based camps. 1963's The Changing Role of the Audiovisual Process in Education: A Definition and a Glossary of Related Terms defined audiovisual communications as:
As we follow the history of ET it is clear that many changes have occurred yet similarities in general philosophies of education can also be seen carried over from one century to the next and spreading around the world. In North America in 1971 DAVI changed its name to the Association for Educational Communications and Technology (AECT) to reflect changes in its perspective of the field of Educational Technology. Although efforts of the AECT and others to merge practical and theoretical viewpoints have helped create a paradigm shift in ET practice over the past 30 years, there still remains clearly drawn lines and resulting communication gaps between proponents of each philosophy.