The history of ET

I really enjoyed reading the Molenda chapter (Molenda, M. (2008). Historical foundations. In J. M. Spector, M. D. Merrill, J. van Merrienboer & M. P. Driscoll (Eds.), Handbook of research on educational communications and technology (3rd ed., pp. 3-20). New York, NY: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. [ereserve]) on the historical foundations of educational technology. Too often, especially in today's parlance, we equate technology with computers and we forget that educational technology is anything that people design and use to facilitate instruction. It was cool to discover the history of blackboards, of all things.

One concept that really got me thinking was in the history of educational radio (and later television) - the fact that because of the nature of the medium, the educational content was slightly altered. Because radio signals crossed borders and school district boundaries, it was impractical for educational radio programs to be curriculum-specific. So, instead of direct transmission of specific lectures and courses of study, the medium kind of naturally became more general and thus supplementary to instruction rather than all-inclusive. The text also mentioned that there was also a corollary with the fact that teachers didn't welcome a full takeover of their classroom duties.

My question is - how did this shape the nature of educational programming and then did that in turn shape future advances in pedagogy?

I wonder this because I grew up on PBS. I absolutely loved Reading Rainbow, 3-2-1 Contact and Square One TV as a child. These were the fun, after-school programs that I enjoyed, and I never had a problem with the fact that education kept going after class was out for the day. In fact, I never knew that I was supposed to be being educated while I watched them. To me, that was entertainment - especially Reading Rainbow. I would go to the public library on weekends and look for the books I had seen on the show, then pick my own favorites and daydream about the day that they'd let me be on the show and give a report on my favorite book. It was fun; I don't know that a curriculum-specific pre-recorded talking head would have been. I wonder if the fuzzy nature of broadcast technology that then led to a more supplementary approach to educational radio and television didn't just save the genre. Because they were supplementary, they were able to overlap with entertainment, and because educational things started becoming entertaining I was able to adapt to a culture of learning at home and on the weekends that then favorable affected my attitude towards school.

Not that I credit capitalism with this development of educational media that merged with pop culture - it's interesting to note that the commercial broadcast entities never seem to produce anything of much substance. It was the national corporations abroad - the BBC, CBC and NHK, for example - that had a civic conscience to fulfill and it was the privately funded but morally motivated PBS and NPR that filled that role in the United States. It's interesting that only those entities with some sort of moral or civic obligation that seem to promulgate educational media in the mainstream.

As far as the effect of these early media on pedagogy, I depart a little bit from the article in my musings but still appreciate how the authors illustrate the link between shifting pedagogical beliefs and the evolution of corresponding technologies. I imagine that the types of media we have available today are having a considerable impact on pedagogical approaches. I hesitate to take the gung ho "Computers enable Constructivism" approach that I see taken for granted in so much of the contemporary literature (I'm currently working on a research project on technology integration and it's nearly ubiquitous, this belief that computers will turn teachers into Constructivists), but I definitely see a link between the media available and the common approach to how to teach it.

But even outside of the classroom and the teacher's direct control, I wonder what internet technologies, which are the ultimate example of "supplementary" ET rather than strictly curriculum-controlled, will do to our approaches to teaching and learning. Is the universality of Wikipedia, for example, vastly re-shaping the way students look for information? Will there be other educational entities, outside of the control of the school systems, that succeed in educating the next generation the way that I was educated by Mr. Rogers and the Bloodhound Gang? I'd be fascinated to do further research and find out.