Edcational Technology

One of the more demanding challenges of educational is the selection of the right combination of technology for multiple educational objectives. Every place is different. Every student has his or her individual needs and interests. Various curricula require different technological approaches. We still think that the only way to educate is to put an adult in a room with 20 or 30 students, but with educational technology a great deal can be done with machines, particularly in higher education, where students have already learned the initial, fundamental intellectual skills. For example, how do people learn? By action they themselves perform, sometimes by thinking, sometimes by practicing, often by a combination of both thinking and motor coordination. In most cases, teachers cannot perform those actions for students; students must teach themselves, and teachers can only stand by to offer assistance. With Educational technology its enhances the learning opportunities by demonstrating how certain actions should be done so that students can imitate them, and diagnosing student's errors and making suggestions which help modify their actions so as to correct those errors. New technologies link classrooms to the world and provide students with far more intelligent tools of inquiry and teachers with much more comprehensive resources of response and stimulation.

Let us speculate on how educational technology carries out higher education in the future without benefit of faculty or campuses. Let us particularly focus on the home television (TV) set equipped to play digital versatile disk (DVD); they may not turn out to be the optimal educational technology, but it will do for the purpose of the moment. DVD's could be produced by commercial, universities and individuals on every subject under the sun. Anyone could learn anything by renting the appropriate DVD's and playing them on his own TV set. Assisting this form of learning would be a nationwide institutional structure which shall call the Video University. The Video University it would clarify possible learning opportunities for students, make such opportunities available, and verify and record what is learned by students for various purposes of the students themselves and of society.

The Video University would achieve several desiderata that are not possible with our present system. The foremost is equality of educational opportunity with respect to age. Related to that kind of equality of opportunity are several other considerations: the need for schedules to fit the individual's free time; minimal personal expense; freedom from institutional barriers to learning such as the requirement of a high school diploma, course prerequisites, entrance exams, and transcripts; and freedom form psychological barriers. These desiderata point to individual learning in the home as the primary mode of education in the past the medium for individual learning has been correspondence course, but they have not been able to hold the students' interest.

Now we must reconsider individual learning because it is about to be revolutionalized by the arrival of DVD's and other technology. Textbooks are, indeed, poor motivators of students; even on campus, though students are hounded by the steady exhortation of professors, they mostly find textbooks too utterly boring to open. Professionally produced films can be fascinating and, considering the huge potential market, entrepreneurs will make sure that they are. Certainly they can be made as attractive as the fatuous TV programs which have no difficulty in holding people's attention for hours on end.

With all these courses, segmentations, levels of depth, and level of student preparation, there will soon be thousands, and eventually tens of thousands, of DVD's to choose from. The catalog of DVD's my be somewhat larger than present catalogs of long playing DVD, which now list some 50,000 items and provide only title of the composition, composer, performer, and manufacturer, number and type of DVD and price. A DVD for educational purposes will require more extensive specification, including not only the data mentioned but also paragraph describing content similar to the course descriptions in college catalogs, and so on. Some of the data will be highly codified, as in the DVD catalog; if cleverly designed, the code will become valuable learning tool.

The computer is an excellent educational technology tool for learning. Since the introduction of computers in the 1970s, there has been little doubt that a new age of technology had dawned (Walker). The age of technology promised a computer revolution that would dramatically affect the management, storage, and exchange of information and greatly influence the social and economic aspects of society. The business and industrial communities were very receptive to the many ways computers facilitated management, manufacturing, and trade, embracing their use wholeheartedly. The educational community, on the other hand, generally failed to appreciate the potential of the computer as a powerful instructional agent. Although the more curious teachers were eager to try out the computer in their classrooms and eventually realized its capabilities as an instructional tool, most teachers viewed the computer somewhat suspiciously, if not fearfully. Many educators felt threatened by the very idea of computerized instruction, and some even imagined their replacement by teaching machines. Resistance to change, fear of the unknown, and the threat of having to relinquish authority perhaps are the most significant reasons for teachers' reluctance to welcome computers into their classrooms.

One vision of the place of computers in education is as a perfect vehicle for carefully tailored contingent instruction, whereby each student could be taught at his or her own level and pace (Walker). The dictionary defines a mechanical tool like a screwdriver or hammer as "a contrivance for doing work." The computer, although primarily electronic, is a tool as well (Walker). For example, Adobe Photoshop, a photograph can be manipulated. Its contrast can be raised or lowered, colors can be added, and focus can be sharpened or blurred, and so on. With a word processor, words and articles can be written, spelling and grammar checked, and pages typeset. With a database, information can be compiled, sorted, and manipulated in many different ways.

Another way of looking at the advantage of the use of computers in education is to see them as assisting with the organization and development of thinking structures in the mind of students. Concept maps offer one specific answer to the challenge of creating effective navigational schemes for educational software, while at the same time facilitating the organization of the user's thinking. For example, using mind