Technology for Teaching

and Learning I
Questions
1. What is technology?
2. What is educational technology?
3. Recall specific ways by which the
use of educational technology
helped you learned? When it
became not useful to you?
What is technology?

 Technology comes from the Greek

word “TECHNE” means craft.
 Technology refers to “all the ways
people use their inventions and
discoveries to satisfy their needs and
desires” (The World Book
Encyclopedia, Vol 19)
Short history of educational system
 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 summarize
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.
 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.
 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).
 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
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.
Broadcasting and video
 The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) began
broadcasting educational radio programs for schools in the
1920s.
 The first adult education radio broadcast from the BBC in
1924 was a talk on Insects in Relation to Man, and in the same
year, J.C. Stobart, the new Director of Education at the BBC,
mused about ‘a broadcasting university’ in the journal Radio
Times (Robinson, 1982).
 Television was first used in education in the 1960s, for schools
and for general adult education (one of the six purposes in
the current BBC’s Royal Charter is still ‘promoting education
and learning’).
 In 1969, the British government established the Open
University (OU), which worked in partnership with the
BBC to develop university programs open to all, using a
combination originally of printed materials specially
designed by OU staff, and television and radio programs
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 lectures as such, but focused more
on the common formats of general television, such as
documentaries, demonstration of processes, and
cases/case studies (see Bates, 1985).
 Over time, as new technologies such as audio- and video-
cassettes were introduced, live broadcasting, especially radio,
was cut back for OU programs, although there are still some
general educational channels broadcasting around the world
(e.g. TV Ontario in Canada; PBS, the History Channel, and the
Discovery Channel in the USA).
 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, as
a panacea for education in developing countries, the hopes for
which quickly faded when the realities of lack of electricity,
cost, security of publicly available equipment, climate,
resistance from local teachers, and local language and
cultural issues became apparent.
 Satellite broadcasting started to become available in
the 1980s, and similar hopes were expressed of
delivering ‘university lectures from the world’s leading
universities to the world’s starving masses’, but these
hopes too quickly faded for similar reasons.
 However, India, which had launched its own satellite,
INSAT, in 1983, used it initially for delivering locally
produced educational television programs throughout
the country, in several indigenous languages, using
Indian-designed receivers and television sets in local
community centres as well as schools.
 India is still using satellites for tele-education into the poorest
parts of the country at the time of writing (2014).
 In the 1990s the cost of creating and distributing video
dropped dramatically due to digital compression and high-
speed Internet access.
 The development of lecture capture technology allows
students to view or review lectures at any time and place with
an Internet connection.
 The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) started
making its recorded lectures available to the public, free of
charge, via its Open Course Ware project, in 2002. YouTube
started in 2005 and was bought by Google in 2006.
 YouTube is increasingly being used for short
educational clips that can be downloaded and
integrated into online courses.
 The Khan Academy started using YouTube in 2006
for recorded voice-over lectures using a digital
blackboard for equations and illustrations.
 Apple Inc. in 2007 created iTunesU to became a
portal or a site where videos and other digital
materials on university teaching could be
collected and downloaded free of charge by end
users.
Computer-based learning
 In essence the development of programmed learning aims to computerize
teaching, by structuring information, testing learners’ knowledge, and
providing immediate feedback to learners, without human intervention
other than in the design of the hardware and software and the selection
and loading of content and assessment questions.
 B.F. Skinner started experimenting with teaching machines that made use of
programmed learning in 1954, based on the theory of behaviourism
 Skinner’s teaching machines were one of the first forms of computer-based
learning.
 There has been a recent revival of programmed learning approaches as a
result of MOOCs, since machine based testing scales much more easily than
human-based assessment.
 Attemptsto replicate the teaching process
through artificial intelligence (AI) began in the
mid-1980s, with a focus initially on teaching
arithmetic.
 Despite large investments of research in AI for
teaching over the last 30 years, the results
generally have been disappointing. It has proved
difficult for machines to cope with the
extraordinary variety of ways in which students
learn (or fail to learn.)
Computer networking
 Arpanet in the U.S.A was the first network to use the Internet
protocol in 1982. In the late 1970s, Murray Turoff and Roxanne
Hiltz at the New Jersey Institute of Technology were
experimenting with blended learning, using NJIT’s internal
computer network.
 They combined classroom teaching with online discussion
forums, and termed this ‘computer-mediated communication’
(CMC) (Hiltz and Turoff, 1978).
 The Word Wide Web was formally launched in 1991. The World
Wide Web is basically an application running on the Internet
that enables ‘end-users’ to create and link documents, videos
or other digital media, without the need for the end-user to
transcribe everything into some form of computer code.
 The first web browser, Mosaic, was
made available in 1993.
 Before the Web, it required lengthy and
time-consuming methods to load text,
and to find material on the Internet.
 Several Internet search engines have
been developed since 1993, with
Google, created in 1999, emerging as
one of the primary search engines.
Online learning environments
 In 1995, the Web enabled the development of the first learning
management systems (LMSs), such as WebCT (which later became
Blackboard).
 The first fully online courses (for credit) started to appear in 1995, some
using LMSs, others just loading text as PDFs or slides.
 The materials were mainly text and graphics. LMSs became the main means
by which online learning was offered until lecture capture systems arrived
around 2008.
 By 2008, George Siemens, Stephen Downes and Dave Cormier in Canada
were using web technology to create the first ‘connectivist’ Massive Open
Online Course (MOOC), a community of practice that linked webinar
presentations and/or blog posts by experts to participants’ blogs and
tweets, with just over 2,000 enrollments.
Social media

Social media are really a sub-

category of computer technology,
but their development deserves a
section of its own in the history of
educational technology.
 Social media cover a wide range of different
technologies, including blogs, wikis, You Tube
videos, mobile devices such as phones and tablets,
Twitter, Skype and Facebook. Andreas Kaplan and
Michael Haenlein (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.
References
 Hiltz, R. and Turoff, M. (1978) 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. (1982) Broadcasting Over the Air London: BBC
 Saettler, P. (1990) The Evolution of American Educational Technology
Englewood CO: Libraries Unlimited
 Selwood, D. (2014) What does the Rosetta Stone tell us about the Bible? Did
Moses read hieroglyphs? The Telegraph, July 15
What is Educational Technology?
 From the definition of Corpuz and Lucido 2012,
based on the etymology of the word “technology,
the term educational technology, therefore,
refers to the art or craft of responding to our
educational needs.
 Educational technology “consists of the designs
and environments that engage learners.. And
reliable technique or method for engaging
learning such as cognitive learning strategies and
critical thinking skills (David H. Jonassen, et all
1999)
 EducationalTechnology is a field involved in
applying a complex, integrated process to
analyze and solve problems in human
learning (David H. Jonassen, et al 1999)
 Educational Technology is a profession like
teaching. It is made up of organized effort
to implement the theory, intellectual
technique, and practical application of
educational technology (David H. Jonassen,
et al 1999)
INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATION
Information and Communications
Technology (ICT) can impact student
learning when teachers are digitally
literate and understand how to
integrate it into curriculum.
Schools use a diverse set of ICT tools to
communicate, create, disseminate,
store, and manage information
 In some contexts, ICT has also become
integral to the teaching-learning
interaction, through such approaches as
replacing chalkboards with interactive
digital whiteboards, using students’ own
smartphones or other devices for
learning during class time, and the
“flipped classroom” model where
students watch lectures at home on the
computer and use classroom time for
more interactive exercises.
When teachers are digitally literate
and trained to use ICT, these
approaches can lead to higher order
thinking skills, provide creative and
individualized options for students to
express their understandings, and
leave students better prepared to deal
with ongoing technological change in
society and the workplace.
ICT issues planners must consider
include: considering the total cost-
benefit equation, supplying and
maintaining the requisite
infrastructure, and ensuring
investments are matched with
teacher support and other policies
aimed at effective ICT use.