The Development of Instructional Technology

By

Tri Hari Nurdi (1507042029)

Technology has changed from a peripheral factor become more central in all forms of teaching. However, arguments about the role of technology in education go back at least 2,500 years. One of the earliest means of formal teaching was oral speech or oral communication – even though over time, technology has been increasingly used to facilitate or ‘back-up’ oral communication. In ancient times, histories and news were transmitted and maintained through oral communication. In the ancient Greeks, oratory and speech were the means of people learned and passed on learning. To learn, they had to memorize by listening, not by reading, and transmitted by recitation, not by writing.

In the fifth century B.C, written documents existed in considerable numbers in ancient Greece.

Development

Print Technology

Audio Visual Technology

Computer Based Technology

Integrated Technology

Written communication/ Print Technology

The role of text or writing in education has a long history. Even though Socrates is reported to have arguing against the use of writing, written forms of communication make analytic, lengthy chains of reason and argument much more accessible, reproducible without distortion, and thus more open to analysis and critique than the speech. The invention of the printing press in Europe in the 15th century was a disruptive technology, making written knowledge much more freely available, very much in the same way as the Internet has done today. As a result of the explosion of written documents from the mechanization of printing, many more people in government and business were required to become literate and analytical, which led to a huge expansion of formal education in Europe. There were many reasons for the development of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, and the reason of science over superstition and beliefs, but the printing technology was a key agent of change.

Broadcasting and video/ audio visual Technology

In the 1920s, The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) broadcasted educational radio programs for schools.  in 1924, The first adult education radio broadcast from the BBC was a talk about  Insects in Relation to Man, and in the same year, the new Director of Education at the BBC, J.C. Stobart, mused about ‘a broadcasting university’ in the journal Radio Times (Robinson, 1982). In the 1960s, Television was first used in education for schools and for general adult education (one of the six purposes in the current BBC’s Royal Charter is ‘promoting education and learning’).

The British government established the Open University (OU) In 1969, which worked with the BBC to develop university programs open to all, using a combination of printed materials specially designed by OU staff, and television and radio programs which is made by the BBC but integrated with the courses. It should be noted that although the radio programs involved mainly oral communication, the television programs did not use such as lectures, but focused more on the common formats of general television, such as documentaries, demonstration of processes, and cases/case studies. In other words, the BBC focused on the unique ‘affordances’ of television. Along the time, live broadcasting, especially radio, was cut back for OU programs as new technologies such as audio- and video-cassettes were introduced, although there are still some general educational channels broadcasting around the world (e.g. the History Channel, the Discovery Channel in the USA and TV Ontario in Canada; PBS).

The use of television for education quickly spread around the world, being seen in the 1970s by some, particularly in international agencies such as the World Bank and UNESCO for education in developing countries.  The hopes for which quickly faded when the realities of cost, lack of electricity, security of publicly available equipment, climate, resistance from local teachers, and cultural issues and local language became apparent. In the 1980s, Satellite broadcasting started to become available and similar hopes were expressed by delivering ‘university lectures from the world’s leading universities to the world’s starving masses’, but these hopes also quickly faded for similar reasons. In the 1990s the cost of creating and distributing video dropped dramatically due to digital compression and high-speed Internet access.

Computer-based learning/ Computer-based Technology

In essence the development of programmed learning aims to computerize teaching. The forms are structuring information, testing learners’ knowledge, and providing immediate feedback to learners without intervention of human other than in the hardware and software design and the selection and loading of content and assessment questions. In 1954, Skinner started experimenting with teaching machines that made use of programmed learning based on the behaviorism theory. Skinner’s teaching machines were one of the first forms of computer-based learning. Since machine based testing scales much more easily than human-based assessment, There has been a recent revival of programmed learning approaches as a result of MOOCs,

In the mid-1980s, Attempts to replicate the teaching process through artificial intelligence (AI) began with a focus initially on teaching arithmetic. The results generally have been disappointing although large investments of research in AI for teaching through the last 30 years. It has proved difficult for machines to cope with the extraordinary variety of ways in which students learn (or fail to learn.) Recent developments in cognitive science and neuroscience are being watched closely but the gap is still great between the basic science, and analyzing or predicting specific learning behaviors from the science.

Computer networking / Integrated technology

In 1982, Arpanet in the U.S.A was the first network to use the Internet protocol. Murray Turoff and Roxanne Hiltz at the New Jersey Institute of Technology were experimenting with blended learning using NJIT’s internal computer network In the late 1970s. They combined classroom teaching with online discussion forums, and termed this ‘computer-mediated communication’ (CMC) in 1978. An off-the-shelf software system called CoSy was developed in the 1980s that allowed for online threaded group discussion forums At the University of Guelph in Canada, a predecessor to today’s forums contained in learning management systems.

The World Wide Web was officially launched in 1991. The World Wide Web is basically an application running on the Internet that enables ‘end-users’ to create and link videos, documents or other digital media without the need for the end-user to transcribe everything into some form of computer code. Mosaic, the first web browser, was made available in 1993. Before the Web, it required length and time-consuming methods to load text, and to find material on the Internet. Since 1993, Several Internet search engines have been developed such as Google which was created in 1999, emerging as one of the primary search engines.

Social media

Social media is a sub-category of computer technology, but their development deserves a section of its own in the educational technology history. Social media cover a wide range of different technologies, including wikis, blogs, You Tube videos, mobile devices such as handphones and tablets, Twitter, Facebook and Skype .

Andreas Kaplan and Michael Heinlein (2010) define social media as

a group of Internet-based applications that …allow the creation and exchange of user-generated content, based on interactions among people in which they create, share or exchange information and ideas in virtual communities and networks.

Social media are generally associated with young people and ‘millennial’ – in other words, many of the students in post-secondary education. Today, social media can be integrated into formal education, and to date their main educational value, it has been in non-formal education, such as fostering practice online communities, or around the edges of classroom teaching, such as ‘tweets’ during lectures or rating of instructors. Though, it will be argued that they have much greater potential for learning.

References

Hiltz, R. and Turoff, M. (2011) The Network Nation: Human Communication via Computer Reading MA: Addison-Wesley

Kaplan, A. and Haenlein, M. (2010), Users of the world, unite! The challenges and opportunities of social media, Business Horizons, Vol.  53, No. 1, pp. 59-68

Manguel, A. (1996) A History of Reading London: Harper Collins

Robinson, J. (2000) Broadcasting Over the Air London: BBC

Saettler, P. (2012) The Evolution of American Educational Technology Englewood CO: Libraries Unlimited