Technology in Education

A Twenty-Year Retrospective

Cleborne D Maddux, D Lamont Johnson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781317825289
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Computer Science General
• Index: Computer Science

Examine the history of the microcomputer and its impact on education!

Under the editorship of D. LaMont Johnson, PhD, a nationally recognized leader in the field of educational computing, Computers in the Schools has been a powerful tool in educational settings. Now, after 20 years, Professor Johnson muses on how far information technology has come. Technology in Education: A Twenty-Year Perspective brings you a retrospective look at the trends and issues relating to the integration of computers into the school curriculum covering 25 years. He joins several other colleagues to follow the historical journey of the dream machine to the technological wonder it has become.

Technology in Education: A Twenty-Year Perspective will leave you better informed on such topics as:

• the obstacles slowing the integration of information technology in educationwhy are computers still collecting dust in many classrooms?
• the predictions that were made by early computer enthusiasts, and how close or off the mark those predictions came
• how information technology has impacted education and society so far
• historical advances in education that should be celebrated, such as the advent of the World Wide Web
• the student's perspective of computers in education
• and much more!

Computers in the Schools is the one of the oldest academic journals dealing directly with the integration of information technology into the educational setting. Technology in Education: A Twenty-Year Perspective provides an important overview by some of the leading experts in the field. From the earliest predictions and opinions to the latest trends and findings, this book, celebrating the journal's twentieth anniversary, is a vital research tool for students and professors of information technology in education.

General Articles

Jerry Willis

Instructional Technologies in Schools: Are We There Yet?

Summary. Some predictions made by the author 20 years ago, in the first issue of Computers in the Schools, are revisited. The author explains how he didn’t see some trends that developed and how he predicted things that never came to pass. A distinction is made between empirical and ideological arguments for using technology in the schools. Numerous problems associated with relying on empirical evidence to make the case for educational technology are iterated. Ideology, not empirical evidence, drives most of the debate on whether technology can improve teaching and learning, and various ideologies are discussed. [Article copies available for a fee from The Haworth Document Delivery Service: 1–800-HAWORTH. E-mail address: <[email protected]> Website: <http://www.HuworthPress.com> ©2003 by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved.]

Keywords. Instructional technology, empirical, conservative, progressive, critical theory, ideological, critical theory of technology

In 1984 I was a confident young professor who had just made the transition from educational psychologist to educational computing specialist. The field was new and I was novice enough to agree to write a paper for the new journal, Computers in the Schools. My paper was titled “Educational Computing: Current Status and Future Directions” (Willis, 1984). In it, I talked about the status of computing in general and said we were in the middle of a transition from a high priest model of computing dominated by computer scientists to what I called the citizen participant model By 2000 that transition was so complete that even talking about the high priest model of computing seems a little archaic.

I also talked about the revolution in microcomputer technology, particularly LSI, or large-scale integration, that makes personal computers possible. Today we take for granted advances in integration that allow a few million more transistors to be placed in an integrated circuit. I also talked about the revolution in software that would make computers user friendly. I was not accurate about that. I did not anticipate how far the possibilities of computing would take us in the 20 years since I wrote that paper. We have traded user friendliness for sophistication. If we want the power of a program like PhotoShop or Adobe Premier, we must pay for it by giving up some ease of use. Even the most popular program, Microsoft Word, is not really easy to learn and use, in part because it has grown fat and heavy with features that were not even dreamed about in 1984.

In that 1984 paper I also talked about the three main thrusts of computers in schools: computer literacy, drills, and use of computers to teach strategies (e.g., the Logo movement). I also tried to tell the future and predicted that computer literacy would be a standard expectation for high school graduates and that the emphasis would be on “learning to use applications programs rather than programming” (p. 11). That comes close to being true. Most students do graduate from high school today computer literate, and only a small percentage today take programming classes.

I also predicted that computers would be much more widely used “throughout the school curriculum” (p. 10). That is also true, but computers have not become ubiquitous in American schools. It is still unusual for a teacher to regularly integrate technology into the learning experience. I was wrong when I predicted that “the computer will play a central role in the curriculum.” Information technology is important, but it is still not “central” in most schools today.

Another prediction I made was that “by the turn of the century the American school system will play a smaller role in society than it does today. Education will be a lifelong task for most citizens; and learning will increasingly become a regular part of life in the home, the office, and the factory” (p. 11). That prediction seems to have been fulfilled (Hiemstra, 2002). Most of us are involved in many types of informal and formal learning long after we leave school and university classes. Many workers, including auto mechanics and brain surgeons, must regularly update their skills through formal professional development training. This trend also means there are many types of jobs available today for specialists in teaching, learning, and computers. They work in schools, in higher education, in industry, in government, and in a diverse range of organizations from museums to military combat groups.

I am fairly satisfied with the predictions I made 20 years ago, but I am disappointed in what I did not see or did not understand. I missed completely at least three major uses of computers in education today. For example, I did not foresee the use of computers and information technologies to provide information. To cite just one personal example, about 40% of the citations in this paper refer to papers and books that are online. None of the papers in the first issue of Computers in the Schools in 1984 cited a single online paper.

A second trend I missed was use of information technology for communication. The idea of the World Wide Web and the creation of a language for formatting documents, hypertext markup language (HTML), began with the work of Tim Berners-Lee in 1989 while he was working at CERN, the European Center for Particle Physics. By 1991 Berners-Lee had all the rudimentary components of his electronic system of document sharing, and the World Wide Web was born. He created it for his colleagues around the world, but it has become the foundation for a revolution that may be more influential than the original invention of the personal computer. Today the Web is not only a source of information, it is a major means of personal and professional communication. The World Wide Web is also the foundation for the rise of another movement-distance education. Today thousands of colleges and universities offer everything from individual courses to complete undergraduate and graduate degree programs “over the Web.” Virtual schools and virtual universities are discussed widely today and are also becoming a reality.

There are other trends and issues I missed in that 1984 article, but I want to focus on one of them in this paper. In the original paper I pointed out that there were already theoretical debates about the proper role of computers in education. As I saw it then, “The debate pits the behaviorally oriented learning theory group against the Piagetian cognitive developmentalists. Behaviorists view drill and practice programs and tutorial software as desirable and beneficial” (p. 7). I then discussed the work of Papert and the Logo movement. Today the Piagetian group would be called constructivists and the behaviorists would be called “direct-instruction” advocates, or in the words of one advocate, Diane Ravitch, “instructionalists.” In 19841 argued that we should not let theory get in the way of creative development. “Theories, by their very nature, are unproved, usually unprovable, and thus are often more troublesome than helpful in the birth of a new field. Now is the time for experimentation, for creative efforts to expand the range and type of applications for computers in schools. It is not a time for bickering over how well a project or program meets the requirements of a particular theory” (p. 8). I still believe that, but I also think such a statement is incredibly naive. The debates between constructivists and behaviorists are examples of a much broader and more fundamental debate about the nature of learning, even about the nature of knowledge and knowing. Then, as now, the approaches and perspectives we take on the role of computers in education derive from ideology much more than from research. It is that point I want to discuss in this paper. In the following section I will contrast two opposing views of computers in education. The optimistic perspective is based on modernism. As Hlynka and Yeaman (1992) put it, “The defining characteristics of modernity seem to be a faith in science, in the positive benefits of technology, and in the belief that progress is inevitable and good.” Confidence in the usefulness of computers in schools is, to a great extent, an expression of a modernist perspective or ideology. On the other hand, skepticism about the roles and relevance of computers in schools is often an expression of a “postmodern” ideology. Hlynka and Yeaman describe a postmodern perspective on educational technology this way: “Educational technology can no longer be perceived as neutral or as leading inevitably to progress” (p. 8). In this paper I want to make two major points-that there is no possibility that we will make decisions about the proper role of computers in schools by relying on “objective research” for answers, and, conversely, we cannot avoid bringing ideology into the discussion. I will end the paper with a discussion of what we, as consumers of ideas about computers in schools and as creators and advocates of those ideas, can do.

Some Background

In 1984, when the first issue of Computers in the Schools was published, the landscape of computing in America was quite different. Four of the most popular computers of the day were the VIC-20, the Commodore 64, the Apple II, and the Atari. Compared to today’s models these machines were pitifully weak. They were slow and had very little memory. The VIC-20 had only 5K of RAM, but even the 65,536 bytes of RAM in the Commodore 64 was only l/4000th of the RAM in a typical middle-range computer today. Other components including the disk drive, the video display, and the sound system are all far superior in today’s models.

In spite of the limitations of computers being sold the first year Computers in the Schools was published, they were very popular. Twenty-two million Commodore 64s were sold in 1983. Computers were such a phenomenon that instead of naming a man of the year for 1982, Time magazine named a “machine of the year”-the personal computer. The magazine (Friedrich, 1983) began their tribute to the computer with the comment, “By the millions, it is beeping its way into offices, schools and homes” (p. 6). Time magazine waxed eloquent about the potential of computers, but even their predictions about computers fell far short of what really happened over the past 20 years. In 1982 there were approximately 5.5 million computers in use, and Time estimated that 80 million would be in use “by the end of the century.” Actually, the figure was 600 million, more than seven times the optimistic estimate of Time. Of those 5.5 million computers in 1982, only about 100,000 were in schools, one for every 400 students. By contrast, in 1998 there are almost nine million computers in schools (The Future of Children, 2001).

We’ve Come So Far: Are We There Yet?

In the 20 years since Computers in the Schools began publication, the equipment has become amazingly more sophisticated, cheaper, and easier to use. And, there are more than 90 times the number of computers in schools! Add to those facts the Internet revolution and the growing number of multimedia resources for education, and we should be fulfilling Seymour Papert’s 1984 prediction that

There won’t be schools in the future … I think the computer will blow up the school. That is, the school defined as something where there are classes, teachers running exams, people structured in groups by age, following a curriculum-all of that. The whole system is based on a set of structural concepts that are incompatible with the presence of the computer. … (Papert, quoted in Clark and Wentworth [1997, p. 9])

Papert’s prediction, which was probably more of a wish than a prediction, has not come to pass in the 18 years since he made it, and there are few indications that it will be fulfilled anytime in the near future. Papert’s prediction is not the first one to be “off the mark” when it comes to the impact of technology on education. Jost Lowyck and Jan Elen (1998) collected a number of quotes about technology over the past 80 years. They all reflect the optimism of the believer, and, from the vantage point of hindsight, also tell us how often we miss the mark when predicting the future. For example, in one now-famous quote in 1922, Thomas Edison predicted that in a few years virtually all education could be done with his new invention, film:

I believe that the motion picture is destined to revolutionize our educational system and that in a few years it will supplant largely, if not entirely, the use of textbooks. (Oppenheimer, 1997)

Virtually every communication technology that has become popular over the past 100 years has been touted as the technology that will revolutionize education: film, radio, television, computers. The famous Harvard psychologist, B. F. Skinner, even predicted that mechanical devices would drastically change education:

I believe that teaching machines are destined to revolutionize our educational system and that in a few years they will supplant largely, if not entirely, the use of teachers. (Skinner, 1968, p. 1)

There have always been advocates for technology in education. I remember wandering through the musty shelves of the East Carolina University library a few years ago and finding dusty volumes of the papers delivered at the National Education Association annual meetings in the mid-1800s. There, in one paper, the author spoke enthusiastically about the impact information technology would have on education. He was talking about steam-powered printing presses.

At the same time there have been advocates, even evangelists, of technology in education there have also been critics who doubted either the effect or the purpose of technologies in education. Larry Cuban and Michael Apple are two contemporary critics, but there are many. Cuban’s two books, Teachers and Machines: The Classroom Use of Technology Since 1920 (1986) and Oversold and Underused: Computers in the Classroom (2001), are strong critiques of the roles computers play in education. The view of many critics is aptly summed up in a quote from Todd Oppenheimer’s (1997) paper, “The Computer Delusion”:

There is no good evidence that most uses of computers significantly improve teaching and learning, yet school districts are cutting programs–music, art, physical education–that enrich children’s lives to make room for this dubious nostrum, and the Clinton Administration has embraced the goal of “computers in every classroom” with credulous and costly enthusiasm.

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• General Articles
• Index