HISTORY OF
EDUCATIONAL TECHNOLOGY
BISCAST
ORAL COMMUNICATION
One of the earliest means of formal teaching was
oral – through human speech.
• In ancient times, stories, folklore, histories and
news were transmitted and maintained through
oral communication, making accurate
memorization a critical skill.
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.
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
• 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).
• 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.
WRITTEN COMMUNICATION
• Ancient civilizations used
pointed sticks to inscribe
signs and symbols on leaves
then knives on the bark of
trees.
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.
BROADCASTING AND VIDEO
• Photography was invented,
giving way to a movement
called “Visual Instruction”
• The British Broadcasting
Corporation (BBC) began
broadcasting educational
radio programs for schools in
the 1920s.
Television was first used in
education in the 1960s, for
schools and for general adult
education
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.
During the 2nd World War: movies, filmstrips, radio, and other
pictorial devices were used in military trainings
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.
In the 1990s the cost of creating and distributing video
dropped dramatically due to digital compression and high-
speed Internet access. This reduction in the costs of recording
and distributing video also led to the development of lecture
capture systems. 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 OpenCourseWare 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 TECHNOLOGIES
Computer-based learning
• B.F. Skinner started experimenting with teaching
machines that made use of programmed learning in 1954,
based on the theory of behaviourism
• PLATO was a generalized computer assisted
instruction system originally developed at the University
of Illinois, and, by the late 1970s, comprised several
thousand terminals worldwide on nearly a dozen different
networked mainframe computers
Attempts to replicate the teaching process through artificial intelligence
(AI) began in the mid-1980s, with a focus initially on
teaching arithmetic. It has proved difficult for machines to cope with
the extraordinary variety of ways in which students learn (or fail to
learn.)
More recently we have seen the development of adaptive learning,
which analyses learners’ responses then re-directs them to the most
appropriate content area, based on their performance. Learning
analytics, which also collects data about learner activities and relates
them to other data, such as student performance, is a related
development.
Computer Networking
Arpanet in the U.S.A was the first network to use the
Internet protocol in 1982.
At the University of Guelph in Canada, an off-the-shelf
software system called CoSy was developed in the 1980s
that allowed for online threaded group discussion forums,
a predecessor to today’s forums contained in learning
management systems.
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.
Social Media
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.
At the time of writing social media are only just being integrated
into formal education, and to date their main educational value has
been in non-formal education, such as fostering online communities
of practice, or around the edges of classroom teaching, such as
‘tweets’ during lectures or rating of instructors.
Sources:
- A Short History of Educational Technology by Tony Bates
- Educational History Presentation by Lorna T. Soriano
