Educational Technology: A Theoretical Discussion

IN THIS ARTICLE we offer a theoretical framework for understanding current trends in educational technology. During the past fifteen years, there have been many and varied attempts in American public schools to transform the educational process through machinery. Concerned parents, students, and educators themselves have often been confused by these developments; and the profit motive behind them has aroused the suspicions of some. We try to supply three perspectives to help overcome the confusion. First, we think it important to see educational technology in relation to the pattern of technological change in other American industries during the past 150 years. Second, we argue that the new educational technology must be rigorously compared with other kinds of educational technology-both those used in earlier periods and those used now in other countries. And, third, as is implied by our calling education an industry, we think that the new technology is best understood as a to education. After sketching our framework, we will examine some attempts to establish the new technology in a variety of educational arenas. Then we will contrast the business approach taken here in the U.S. to some educational crises with the approaches to similar crises in two socialist countries. We conclude with a discussion of the current state of educational technology and with what we see as the implications for teachers and their organizations. Our own understanding of educational technology grew out of our experience as staff members in a left educational group. As organizers and activists, we often found the new educational technology changing the very relationships of teachers, staff, and students to their institutions. The available literature took little account of such change: it was given over to promises and possibilities, many of which served to obscure the experiences of those we met in our work. We came to see educational technology as neither a panacea nor a harmless fad. Instead, it seemed to us that the new techology was one of the key forces making the work of faculties and students similar to the labor of other workers in this society. In school, students are taught that one purpose of technology is to free human beings from the drudgery of monotonous labor. Yet the workers in today's auto