Stella Porto's List: general DE technology

"Over a series of posts, I want to examine issues around the selection and use of technologies for teaching and learning. The aim is to provide some frameworks or models for decision-making that are both soundly based on theory and research and are also pragmatic within the context of education.

I want to stress here that the selection and use of technologies for teaching and learning is driven as much by context and values and beliefs as by hard scientific evidence or rigorous theory. So there will not be one ‘best’ framework or model. On the other hand, without some guiding principles, and given the fast escalating range of technologies, educators are open to technological determinism or the total rejection of technology for teaching without some models to guide the selection and use of media."

"Models for selecting and using technology: 2. A (very) brief history of educational technology
June 13, 2011 By Tony Bates 5 Comments
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Socrates with students: note that Socrates disapproved of writing; only oral communication could represent 'true knowledge'.

There are several scholarly texts on this topic. Paul Saettler’s ‘History of Instructional Technology‘ is a classic, but only goes up to 1968. A lot has happened since then. What you will get here is the postage stamp version.

However, my point in doing this is to show how education has adopted and adapted technology over a long period of time. There are some useful lessons to be learned from this, even though the term ‘paradigm shift’ is justifiable regarding the invention of the Internet and its impact on education.

Table 1 The development of technologies used in teaching up to 1990"

"Models for selecting and using technology: 3. Broadcast or communicative?
June 18, 2011 By Tony Bates 4 Comments
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The transmission tower at Alexandra Palace London, from where the BBC broadcast the first Open University television programs

This is the third post in a series on selecting and using technology for teaching and learning.

The first two were Models for selecting and using technology: 1. the challenge, and Models for selecting and using technology: 2. A (very) brief history of educational technology.

Why categorize technologies?

In Models for selecting and using technology: 2. A (very) brief history of educational technology, I stated that in drawing up a simple list of technologies that have been used in education, we find that there are different categories of technology. For instance, is computer-mediated communication a sub-category of the Internet, or is it a category on its own, as although it now uses the Internet, it actually existed before the Internet (at least in its current state)? Television is delivered using a variety of technology: satellite, cable, DVDs, terrestrial broadcasting. Is it the technology used to deliver that matters in education, or the general characteristic of ‘television’ (or video) that matters, irrespective of the delivery method? I also argued that the invention of the Internet changed everything; it was a true paradigm shift for educational technology. However, what are the reasons for thinking that the Internet is a paradigm shift? What are the characteristics of the Internet that made it so different from what went before?"

"Models for selecting and using technology: 4. Synchronous or asynchronous?
June 29, 2011 By Tony Bates 1 Comment
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an asynchronous technology

This is the fourth post in a series on selecting and using technology for teaching and learning. The first three were Models for selecting and using technology: 1. the challenge, 2. Models for selecting and using technology: 2. A (very) brief history of educational technology and 3. Models for selecting and using technology: 3. Broadcast or communicative?

In the last post, I looked at the dimension of broadcast or communicative technologies. In this post I will look at another critical dimension of communications technologies: whether they are synchronous or asynchronous, as we shall see that this is a critical consideration for teaching and learning.

Synchronous or asynchronous

Synchronous technologies require all those participating in the communication to participate together, at the same time. Asynchronous technologies enable participants to access information or communicate at different points of time, usually at the time of choice of the participant.

Other terms can be used to describe this dimension, such as scheduled or on-demand, transient or permanent, live or recorded, but they basically have the same features as synchronous or asynchronous."

The development of new communication technologies has led to a push for greater technology use for teaching and learning. This is most true for distance learning education, which relies heavily on new technologies. Distance learning students, however, seem to have very limited time available for studying and learning because of work and/or family commitments. This paper focuses on the actual use by distance learning students of different teaching and learning resources and their associated teaching technologies (learning tools). The organisation of one module has been conceptualised as a toolbox, encompassing all the learning tools provided to students. This toolbox also explicitly includes an embedded priority system for the examination of available learning resources, conceptualised as a traffic-light toolbox in this paper. Results from a survey on the resources actually used by students show that students are indeed time-constrained. Students consequently follow the priority system embedded into the module and do not use non-examinable resources much. This paper concludes that students’ specific needs or situations need to be considered for the design of an effective learning toolbox, as opposed to just providing a bundle of learning tools that may be effective on their own.