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.
Schools, colleges, corporate training centers, and other educational institutions provide many sorts of facilities to support the central mission of facilitating learning. They may offer shelter and surroundings that are convenient for learning…and possibly even transportation to the place, or they may extend opportunities to learners at a distance. They offer access to people, 2 information, and equipment. They typically provide motivational elements such as grades and mentors. They often provide services to support instructors and their professional development. In short, although they are educational institutions they engage in many functions that are not directly educational or instructional. Nevertheless, learners and learning occupy the central position, and this project is concerned with the processes that are most directly connected with learning.
Learning goals in educational settings, which may be set both by institutions and by individuals, are often complex, difficult, and protracted. Throughout history, inventive educators have devised means to help people learn that are easier, faster, surer, and/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 first proposed by John Kenneth Galbraith (1967, p. 12). 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.
Recent years have brought many changes and challenges to the theory and practice of educational technology. New understandings of the processes of human learning and of the nature of knowledge itself have challenged educators to rethink basic concepts underlying teaching methods. Advances in information and communications technologies (ICT) have altered and expanded the possibilities for supporting learning in the classroom and at a distance. As more learning resources become digitized, the ease and economy of their transmission increases, thus challenging long accepted notions of how resources are created, stored, and used. In short, the times have created a new context for thinking about the meanings of educational technology. This project aims to provide a conceptual framework adequate for these changing times.