The Meanings of Educational Technology

Background

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, though, as human society has become increasingly complex and organized, communities have consciously set up particular arrangements, such as apprenticeships, schools, 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, arduous struggle to extend opportunities to more people and to devise means of helping those people learn better than through the serendipitous events of everyday life. Institutions established for education and training revolve around activities intended to help people learn productively, whether individually or in groups, in classrooms or at a distance. We use the term “education” to refer broadly to activities and resources that support learning. We use the term “instructional” to refer to activities structured by someone other than the learner and oriented toward specific ends. From this perspective, education is not limited to institutional settings. It can include guidance given by parents to children, knowledge and attitudes fostered by mass media, and other such cultural influences conveyed to community members. Likewise, reading books in a library or “surfing the Web” to explore a personal interest can be regarded as educational activities. On the other hand, instructional activities imply an external agency that is guiding the learner toward a goal by means of some specified procedures. Reading an assigned chapter in a textbook or using the Internet to gather information to fulfill a class assignment are examples of instructional activities. This project is concerned with both education and instruction.

Read more...