New Psychological Technology

Edi Sukmara

Technology as product will certainly drive the trends of instructional technology in the future. This will be followed by another dimension of technology that is technology as process or some experts term it psychological technology. Until recently, the development of teaching approaches significantly gives tangible impact in the practices of instructional technology. Later, some experts say that new trend of psychological technology will remain hand in hand in driving the trend of instructional technology.

One of important discoveries in psychological technology is accelerated learning. This approach which is founded by psychologist Georgi Lozanov tries to make teaching and learning as relaxing as possible. Through the integration of multimedia such as classic music and attractive visuals, the students are expected to take part in the learning process relaxingly. This is believed to help them master the materials effectively.

To make the learning more effective, experts also develop the integration of computer intelligence which is adapted from human intelligence. They call this artificial intelligence. Chess game, for example, is a good example how human brain is adapted in computer game. This will help students train themselves without having ‘real’ partner. This experiment led to the development of another program called expert systems. These are software packages that allow the collective wisdom experts in a given field to be brought to bear on a problem. One of the first such system to be developed is called MYCIN, a program that helps train doctors to make accurate diagnose of infectious diseases on the basis of tests and patient information fed into the computer.

Bibliography

Hsieh, I.-L. & O’Neil, H. F. Jr. (2002). Types of feedback in a computer-based collaborative problem solving group task. Computers in Human Behavior, 18(1), 699-715.

Miwa, K., & Terai, H. (2012). Impact of two types of partner, peceived or actual, in human-human and human-agent interaction. Computers in Human Behavior, 28, 1286-1297.