"Educational Technology 1"
this blog was made by Jason Lee D. San Jose
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Throwback Time!!!!
Charlton Heston as Moses. Are the tablets of stone an educational technology?
Technology has always been closely linked with
teaching. According to the Bible, Moses used chiseled stone to convey the ten
commandments, probably around the 7th century BC. But it may be more helpful
to summarise educational technology developments in terms of the main
modes of communication.
Oral
communication
One of the earliest means of formal
teaching was oral – though human speech – although over time, technology has
been increasingly used to facilitate or ‘back-up’ oral communication. In
ancient times, stories, folklore, histories and news were transmitted and
maintained through oral communication, making accurate memorization a critical
skill, and the oral tradition is still the case in many aboriginal
cultures.
For the ancient Greeks, oratory and speech were the means by
which people learned and passed on learning. Homer’s Iliad and the Odyssey were
recitative poems, intended for public performance. To be learned, they had to
be memorized by listening, not by reading, and transmitted by recitation, not
by writing.
Nevertheless, by the fifth century B.C, written
documents existed in considerable numbers in ancient Greece. If we believe
Socrates, education has been on a downward spiral ever since. According to
Plato, Socrates caught one of his students (Phaedrus) pretending to recite a
speech from memory that in fact he had learned from a written version. Socrates
then told Phaedrus the story of how the god Theuth offered the King of Egypt
the gift of writing, which would be a ‘recipe for both memory and wisdom’. The
king was not impressed. According to the king,
‘it [writing] will implant forgetfulness in
their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they will rely on what
is written, creating memory not from within themselves, but by means of
external symbols. What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for
reminding. And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only its
semblance, for by telling them many things without teaching them anything, you
will make them seem to know much, while for the most part they will know nothing.
And as men filled not with wisdom but the conceit of wisdom, they will be a
burden to their fellow men.’ "Phaedrus, 274c-275,
translation adapted from Manguel, 1996"
I can just hear some of my former colleagues
saying the same thing about social media.
The term ‘lecture’, which comes from the Latin
‘to read’, is believed to originate from professors in medieval times reading
from the scrolled manuscripts handwritten by monks (around 1200 AD). Because
the process of writing on scrolls was so labour intensive, the library would
usually have only one copy, so students were usually forbidden direct access to
the manuscripts. Thus scarcity of one technology tends to drive the
predominance of other technologies.
Slate boards were in use in India in the 12th
century AD, and blackboards/chalkboards became used in schools around the turn
of the 18th century. At the end of World War Two the U.S. Army started using
overhead projectors for training, and their use became common for lecturing,
until being largely replaced by electronic projectors and presentational
software such as Powerpoint around 1990. This may be the place to point out
that most technologies used in education were not developed specifically for
education but for other purposes (mainly business.)
Although the telephone dates from the late
1870s, the standard telephone system never became a major educational tool, not
even in distance education, because of the high cost of analogue telephone
calls for multiple users, although audio-conferencing has been used to
supplement other media since the 1970s. Video-conferencing using
dedicated cable systems and dedicated conferencing rooms have been in use since
the 1980s. The development of video compression technology and relatively
low cost video servers in the early 2000s led to the introduction of lecture
capture systems for recording and streaming classroom lectures in 2008.
Webinars now are used largely for delivering lectures over the Internet. None of these technologies though changes the
oral basis of communication for teaching.
Written communication
The role of text or writing in education
also has a long history. Even though Socrates is reported to
have railed against the use of writing, written forms of communication
make analytic, lengthy chains of reasoning and argument much more accessible,
reproducible without distortion, and thus more open to analysis and critique
than the transient nature of speech. The invention of the printing press
in Europe in the 15th century was a truly 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 resulting
from the mechanization of printing, many more people in government and business
were required to become literate and analytical, which led to a rapid expansion
of formal education in Europe. There were many reasons for the the
development of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, and triumph of
reason and science over superstition and beliefs, but the technology of
printing was a key agent of change.
Improvements in transport infrastructure in
the 19th century, and in particular the creation of a cheap and reliable postal
system in the 1840s, led to the development of the first formal correspondence
education, with the University of London offering an external degree program by
correspondence from 1858.
This first formal distance degree program still
exists today in the form of the University of London International Program. In
the 1970s, the Open University transformed the use of print for teaching
through specially designed, highly illustrated printed course units that
integrated learning activities with the print medium, based on advanced
instructional design.With the development of web-based learning
management systems in the mid-1990s, textual communication, although digitized,
became, at least for a brief time, the main communication medium for
Internet-based learning, although lecture capture is now changing that.LESSON 1 - MEANING OF EDUCATIONAL TECHNOLOGY
"EDUCATIONAL TECHNOLOGY"
What is Educational Technology ?
Educational Technology - is the effective use of technological tools in learning. As a concept, it concerns an array of tools, such as media, machines and networking hardware, as well as considering underlying theoretical perspectives for their effective application.
Educational technology is not restricted to high
technology. Nonetheless,
electronic educational technology, also called e-learning, has become an important part of society today,
comprising an extensive array of digitization approaches, components and
delivery methods. For example, m-learning emphasizes mobility, but is otherwise
indistinguishable in principle from educational technology.
Educational technology includes numerous types of media
that deliver text, audio, images, animation, and streaming video, and includes
technology applications and processes such as audio or video tape, satellite
TV, CD-ROM, and computer-based learning, as well as local intranet/extranet and
web-based
learning. Information and communication systems, whether free-standing or
based on either local networks or the Internet in networked learning, underlie many e-learning
processes.
Theoretical perspectives and scientific testing influence instructional design. The application of
theories of human behavior to educational technology derives input from instructional theory, learning theory, educational psychology, media psychology and human performance technology.
Educational technology and e-learning can occur in or out
of the classroom.
It can be self-paced, asynchronous learning or may be instructor-led, synchronous.
It is suited to distance
learning and in
conjunction with face-to-face teaching, which is termed blended learning.
Educational technology is used by learners and educators in homes, schools
(both K-12 and higher education), businesses, and other settings.
ACTIVITY:
A. Work in a small groups, Explain what educational technology is by using this spider web organizer. |
