Handbook of Research on Educational Communications and Technology

A Project of the Association for Educational Communications and Technology

J. Michael Spector, M. David Merrill, Jeroen van Merrienboer, Marcy P. Driscoll, David Jonassen, Michael J. Spector, Marcy Driscoll, M. David Merrill, Jeroen van Merrienboer, Marcy P. Driscoll

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781135596903
• Edizione: 3
• Argomento: Éducation
• Categoria: Éducation générale

First Published in 2008. Sponsored by the Association of Educational Communication and Technology (AECT), the third edition of this groundbreaking Handbook continues the mission of its predecessors: to provide up-to-date summaries and syntheses of recent research pertinent to the educational uses of information and communication technologies. In addition to updating, this new edition has been expanded from forty-one to fifty-six chapters organized into the following six sections: foundations, strategies, technologies, models, design and development, and methodological issues. In response to feedback from users of the second edition, the following changes have been built into this edition. More Comprehensive topical coverage has been expanded from forty-one to fifty-six chapters and includes many more chapters on technology than in previous editions. Restructured Chapters this edition features shorter chapters with introductory abstracts, keyword definitions, and extended bibliographies. More International more than 20% of the contributing authors and one of the volume editors are non-American. Theoretical Focus Part 1 provides expanded, cross-disciplinary theoretical coverage. Methodological Focus an extended methodological chapter begins with a comprehensive overview of research methods followed by lengthy, separately authored sections devoted to specific methods. Research and Development Focus another extended chapter with lengthy, separately authored sections covers educational technology research and development in different areas of investigation, e.g., experimental methods to determine the effectiveness of instructional designs, technology-based instructional interventions in research, research on instructional design models.

Part I
Foundations

This Foundations part of the Handbook was led by Marcy P. Driscoll with assistance from J. Michael Spector. The Foundations are expected to remain fairly stable over the years. The relevant Foundations include historical, theoretical, and methodological developments, theories, and perspectives. This initial part of the Handbook is aimed at the various sets of assumptions that underlie research in educational communications and technology. Some of these assumptions are based on what has gone before. Others are based on developments in other disciplines. The goal in this part of the Handbook is to make these assumptions explicit, summarize key developments, and provide pointers to exemplary work that has implications for research in educational communications and technology. This part of the Handbook consists of seven chapters covering: (1) historical foundations, (2) theoretical foundations, (3) complexity theory, (4) experiential perspectives, (5) empirical perspectives, (6) contextualistic perspectives, and (7) philosophical perspectives.

1
Historical Foundations

Michael Molenda
Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana

CONTENTS

Introduction

Historical Foundations of What?

The Very Beginning

Precursors of the Modern Era

Early Visual Media

Slide Projection

Silent Films in Education

Visual Instruction Movement

Audio-Visual Instruction

Educational Radio

Initiation of Radio Services

Educational Radio in Japan

Educational Radio in North America

Educational Radio Programming

Educational Media in World War II

Educational Media in the Post-War Period

Research on Media

Basic Research

Audio-Visual Instruction in Practice

Educational Television (ETV)

ETV in Europe

ETV in North America

ETV Programming

ETV in Developing Countries

The Communication Paradigm

Information Theory

Semantics

A New Paradigm for Audio-Visual Education

Radical Behaviorism

Application to Instruction

Impact of Teaching Machines

Emergence of Educational Technology Paradigm

Behavioral Technologies

Systems Approach to Instructional Design

Evolution of Systems Approach

Instructional Systems Development Models

A Model for Schools

A Model for the Military Services

A Generic ISD Model

ISD as a Paradigm Shift

Critical Questioning of ISD

Advent of Computers in Education

Mainframe Era

Minicomputer Era

Cognitivist and Constructivist Theories

Cognitivism

Constructivism

Constructivist Movement

Constructivism as a New Paradigm

Emerging Syntheses

The Digital Age

Microcomputers and Personal Computers

School Adoption of Computers

Internet and World Wide Web

Distance Education

The British Open University

Mega-Universities

Web-Based Courses

Virtual Schools

Computer-Based Residential Courses

Conclusion

References

ABSTRACT

Research and practice in educational technology are rooted in a primordial human drive to find ways of teaching in ways that are more efficient. Every civilization has developed formal methods of education more efficacious than the trial-and-error of everyday living. In the first decades of the 20th century, individuals and, later, groups of affiliated professionals made that quest a central focus, thus establishing educational technology as a field. Their first activities aimed at enriching the learning experience with visual and later audio-visual resources. As radio broadcasting grew in the 1930s and then television in the 1950s, these mass media were accepted as ways to reach even larger audiences, in and out of school, with educative audio-visual programs. In the 1960s, the wave of interest in teaching machines incorporating programmed instruction based on behaviorist psychology engulfed the field, engendering a shift in identity. The proper study of the field expanded from audio-visual technologies to all technologies, including psychological ones. By the 1980s, the center of gravity had shifted to the design of instructional systems, especially the adroit application of instructional methods, enlivened by fresh insights from cognitive and constructivist perspectives. As computers became ubiquitous in the 1990s, they became the delivery system of choice due to their interactive capabilities. With the rapid global spread of the World Wide Web after 1995, networked computers took on communication functions as well as storage and processing functions. The 21st century began with educational technology increasingly focused on distance education, the latest paradigmatic framework for its ageless mission to help more people learn faster, better, and more affordably.

KEYWORDS

Constructivism: In learning theory, a set of assumptions about human learning emphasizing the central role of the mind’s active construction of new knowledge.

Distance education: An educational program characterized by the separation, in time or place, between instructor and student and in which communications media are used to allow interchange.

Technology: The application of scientific or other organized knowledge to practical tasks.

INTRODUCTION

The area of research surveyed in this handbook—educational communications and technology—is broad and complex. The constructs on which the individual chapters focus sometimes have vague boundaries and often overlap with other constructs. The research surveyed is rooted in many different disciplines, each with its own history and subculture. Any attempt to impose a coherent story line on such a variegated drama must necessarily be a bit complicated, with plot lines that crisscross frequently. This brief history makes no claim to originality or heterodoxy. It strives for the opposite effect: to tell the story of the evolution of educational communications and technology as it is understood by mainstream observers. It draws heavily on well-known sources, such as Saettler’s (1990) comprehensive history and the most recent overview of the main constructs of the field (Januszewski and Molenda, 2008). It is animated by the editors’ goal of beginning this handbook by making explicit the assumptions on which research has been based. It takes the vantage point of the membership and readership of the Association for Educational Communications and Technology (AECT) and its predecessors over the past century. For simplicity’s sake, the term educational technology will be used as the name of the field whose story is being told.

HISTORICAL FOUNDATIONS OF WHAT?

The Very Beginning

Humans have succeeded as a species largely due to their ability to learn from their experiences and to pass along their wisdom to succeeding generations. Much learning and acculturation happens spontaneously, without planning or structure. Through the ages, as human society has become increasingly complex and organized, communities have consciously set up particular arrangements, such as apprenticeships, schools, and other educational institutions, to help their members develop the cognitive and functional skills needed to survive and flourish.

The history of organized education and training can be viewed as a long struggle to extend opportunities to more people and to devise means of helping those people learn better than through the events of everyday life. Institutions established for education and training revolve around activities intended to help people learn productively, individually or in groups, in classrooms or at a distance. Schools, colleges, corporate training centers, and other educational institutions provide many sorts of facilities to facilitate learning.

Learning goals in educational settings are often complex, difficult, and protracted. Throughout history, educators have devised means to help people learn that are easier, faster, surer, or less expensive than previous means. Some of these means could be classified as technological, by which we mean applying scientific or other organized knowledge to the attainment of practical ends, a definition proposed by John Kenneth Galbraith (1967). These developments may take the form of hard technologies, including materials and physical inventions, or soft technologies, including special work processes or carefully designed instructional templates that are applicable beyond a single case. This chapter aims to recount some of the milestones in the history of these developments.

Precursors of the Modern Era

The ideas that have propelled educational technology during its modern history have their roots in philosophical, pedagogical, and psychological theories stretching back to the 5th century B.C., when Athenian culture was at its zenith in the West and when Confucius was establishing his philosophy, which came to dominate East Asian thinking. (Confucian thought, however, was not known in the Western world until the translations of Italian Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci around 1600.)

In classical Athens, the Sophists taught provocative, often relativistic, notions of epistemology. The works of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle in organizing philosophical thought can be seen as a reaction against the Sophists’ position that a good argument is one that prevails, if only through rhetorical manipulation, regardless of truth value. Their frameworks for discussion of cognition and knowledge were largely lost during the Dark Ages in Europe but were gradually rediscovered and reexamined as medieval scholars gained access to texts saved in Arabic. During the 15th century, Yi T’oegye in Korea was developing a neo-Confucian philosophy that focused on moral principles but also treated epistemology. His Steps of Practical Self-Cultivation, procedures for thinking through problems, are comparable to the maieutic method of Socrates. (Socrates considered his educational practice to be similar to midwifery in that he helped individuals deliver ideas; see Kim, 2003.)

By the Renaissance era, European philosophers of education such as Comenius were elaborating pedagogical principles and practices that are recognizable to the modern educator—for example, arranging the classroom for efficient management, systematically incorporating visuals into text presentations, organizing the curriculum according to the developmental stages of learners, and engaging children in playful activities instead of punishing drills.

Advances in communications media came to education slowly in the 18th and 19th centuries. Maps, globes, and scientific apparatus were standard equipment in the better schools and colleges in the 18th century, but it was not until early in the 19th century that a new general-purpose media format—the blackboard—came into widespread use. The Scots claim that the blackboard was invented by James Pillans, headmaster of the Old High School in Edinburgh in the early 1800s, who used a blackboard and colored chalks to teach geography (Scots Community, 2007). By 1830, the blackboard, usually locally made by painting planks with black paint, had become an essential part of classroom furnishings. Its ability to make teacher or student writing or drawings visible to a large group expanded the teacher’s capabilities exponentially. Bumstead (1841, p. viii) proclaimed that the “inventor or introducer of the blackboard system deserves to be ranked among the best contributors to learning and science, if not among the greatest benefactors of mankind.”

The hand-held stereoscope became popular in education in the mid-1850s, promoted by Sir David Brewster in England, who carried out basic research in stereoscopy and became a firm advocate of its value in visualizing the curriculum (Anderson, 1962).

EARLY VISUAL MEDIA

Slide Projection

The origins of the modern field of educational technology can be traced to the efforts of practitioners in the late 19th and early 20th century to use projected visual images to supplement lectures. Slide projection evolved from 17th-century handpainted slides illuminated by oil lamps. The so-called magic lantern provided entertainment for paying audiences throughout the 19th century (Petroski, 2006). The use of slide projection in education was restricted by the high cost of purchasing and operating these early devices. They ran on gas, oil, or hydrogen combined with lime (so-called limelight, first used in the Covent Garden Theatre in London in 1837), all of which had a high cost per hour of use. Edison’s invention in the 1890s of incandescent lighting powered by electricity made slide projection affordable, and by the end of the 19th century lantern slides were in common use in education.

Silent Films in Education

The direct ancestors of educational films were the non-theatrical short films that began to emerge around 1910. British and French cinematographers exhibited films showing amazing sights such as microscopic creatures, insects in fli...

Indice dei contenuti

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• DEDICATION
• FOREWORD
• PREFACE
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• CONTRIBUTORS
• CONTRIBUTING AUTHORS
• PART I FOUNDATIONS
• PART II STRATEGIES
• PART III TECHNOLOGIES
• PART IV MODELS
• PART V DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT
• PART VI METHODOLOGICAL ISSUES
• GLOSSARY OF TERMS