History of Educational Technology

By j.harrington
  • 450 BCE

    Sophists

    The Sophists honored all technology. They believed man evolves through technology and social organization. This evolution is continuous.
  • 1180

    Abelard

    Pierre Abelard thought that any subject or thought could be reasonably examined for the purpose of understanding, verification, and qualification. He had a series of five steps which ended with using inquiry to discover why the previous statements were made, which reminded me of the change models we studied last month.

  • Comenius

    Johann Amos Comenius believed in "pansophia" or a system of universal knowledge in which a methodological procedure could be applied to all problems of humankind, including technology. He believed that schools must be equipped with real and illustrative​ materials, which could be the beginning stages of educational technology.

  • Pestalozzi

    Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi developed a system to organize instruction in accordance with the laws of natural human development. He believed in the development of the learner. This method meant that the teacher should break down the content into its simplest building blocks and then move on to more complicated exercises​ that are based on the study of objects, not words.

  • Lancastrian Monitorial Instruction

    Joseph Lancaster believed in a systematic theory of learning. His ideas led to school buildings being designed to accommodate hundreds of children. The Lancasterian plan had systematic instruction, a body of content, training, control, grouping, testing, and administration.

  • Froebel

    Friedrich Wilhelm Froebel believed that education was the organic unity of all things in God's plan of creation. The purpose of the educator was to control the growth of a child into an adult, which meant instruction had to be a controlled development by which the learner came to realize his or her place in the world.
    His ideas led to the first US Kindergarten.

  • Herbartian Method of Instruction

    Johann Friedrich Herbert believed in a systematic psychology of learning. Learning was a process of relating new ideas to old ones and combining them into a total. There were three levels of learning, according to Herbert, level 1: sensory activity, level 2: previously formed ideas were reproduced, and level 3: conceptual thinking or understanding occurs.

  • School museums

    The first school museum opened in St. Louis in 1905 and served as a central administrative unit for visual instruction.

  • The visual instruction movement and instructional films

    The first catalog of instructional films was published in 1910 and the first school system in New York adopted films for regular instructional use.

  • The audiovisual instruction movement and instructional radio

    In the late 1920s and 1930s, there were advances in technology such as radio broadcasting, sound recordings, and sound motion pictures.

  • World War II

    Audiovisual devices were used extensively in the military services and in industry. The US Air Force produced training videos that were shown to more than four million service members. Overhead projectors and slide projectors were also used to teach. Audio equipment made its way into teaching aircraft and ship recognition.

  • Post-World War II Developments and Media Research

    A lot of post-WWII research dealt with how media can influence learning. The new instructional methods that were used by the military​ began to be pushed to the mainstream educational sphere.

  • Computers

    Computer-assisted instruction (CAI) was developed to be used in public schools.

  • Instructional television

    The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) made a decision to set aside 242 television channels for educational purposes.
    By 1955, there were 17 educational television stations, and by 1960 there were more than 50.

  • Skinner

    B.F. Skinner believed that programmed instructional materials should present information in small steps, require responses to questions, provide immediate feedback, and allow for learner self-pacing.

  • Bloom

    Benjamin Bloom created the Taxonomy of Educational Objectives which classified learning outcomes and categorized them according to the type of learner behavior that was described in the outcome. These two had a hierarchical relationship.

  • Mager

    Rober Mager was interested in teaching educators how to write learning objectives. He said an educator needed a description of the desired learner behavior, the conditions under which the behavior should be performed, and the standards by which the behaviors should be judged.

  • Gagne

    Robert Gagne came up with the nine events of instruction, which is also referred to as teaching activities. He believed that these events were crucial​ for grasping mastery of any type of learning outcome.

  • Scriven

    Michael Scriven thought that there needed to be drafts of instructional materials before there was a final form. He thought that this process would allow teachers to evaluate how effective their materials were and make necessary​ changes.

  • Shifting terminology

    The Department of Audiovisual Instruction changed to the Association for Educational Communications and Technology (AECT). The terms of educational technology and instructional technology began to replace audiovisual instruction.

  • Internet

    The increase of the use of the internet has allowed for distance education.