It is the pedagogical use of all the instruments and equipment generated by technology, as a means of communication, which can be used in pedagogical processes, in order to facilitate the teaching-learning process. Today we could say that high information technologies are also included.

When trying to locate the historical antecedents of Technology we find references (Saettler, 1968) 1 that go back to the sophists and cave paintings, or, closer to us, to the proposal of the president of the APA in 1899 of a science bridge between Psychology and its applications, specifically between Psychology and Teaching.

The existence of an interest in individual learning differences in the 1950s, citing military educational research, in the development of devices for self-instruction (Pressey, 1950; Briggs, 1960), the branching programs of Crowder (1959 ), computer applications to teaching, etc.

For Chadwick (1983, 99) "the concept of Educational Technology began to be used in the sixties".

However, the expression "Educational Technology" was already used in previous years; According to Colom (1986, 22) Educational Technology is initially identified with the media, after the Second World War.

Later and under the influence of research on behavior analysis and modification, an Educational Technology is proposed as the design of strategies, use of media and control of the communication system.

In any case, Chadwick notes in another publication (1978, 13) that "the most important advances in Educational Technology have occurred in the last 30 years."

Gagné and Briggs (1976) historically frame Educational Technology from a growing number of influences. Quoting Lumsdaine (1964), he groups the first influences in three lines:

1) The existence of an interest in individual learning differences in the 1950s, citing military educational research, in the development of devices for self-teaching (Pressey, 1950; Briggs, 1960), Crowder's branching programs (1959), computer applications to teaching, etc.

2) Behavioral science and learning theory, giving Guthrie's contiguity theory (1935) as a previous reference and Skinner as a prominent exponent.

3) The technology represented by modern film, television and videotape equipment. Let us remember that it was at the end of the 50's that Ampex produced the first magnetic recording system for the video signal.

Although Thorndike at the beginning of the century had already established some of its principles and Pressey had developed teaching machines in the 1930s, for many (Salinas, 1991) Educational Technology was born in the 1950s with the publication of the works of Skinner "The science of learning and the art of teaching" and "Teaching machines", where proposals for linear programmed teaching are formulated (later with Crowler it will be branched) under behavioral scientific assumptions based on operant conditioning. Psychology and Educational Technology are coming together again.

Skinner's contributions from the perspective of a technological application of the science of behavior and his interesting contributions in relation to a "technification" of teaching by machines are reflected in writing in 1954, in his famous article "The Science of Learning and the Art of Teaching ", published in" Harward Educational Review ", although it goes unnoticed. In 1958 he published "Teaching Machines" which is received with the greatest interest (Skinner, 1979, 7).

Taking a tour through the history of Educational Technology, we note that its conceptualization has undergone many changes over time, as a consequence of the evolution of our society (which is experiencing a stage of rapid technological development) and the changes that have occurred in the sciences that support it.

For this reason, among other changes, we can highlight: the evolution of its conceptualization "from an instrumentalist approach, through a systemic approach to teaching focused on problem solving, to a more focused approach on the analysis and design of media and resources. of teaching that not only speaks of application, but also of reflection and construction of knowledge "(PRENDES, 1998), the step from wondering about the way in which the devices are used to wondering about the educational processes that are developed, to consider techniques applicable to any situation and group to attend to individual differences and assume the importance of context, and the evolution from a behavioral psychological foundation to a cognitivist perspective.

• First concretions
  
  

Following Cabero (1989) and Saettler (1968) when reviewing the contributions to the theoretical and methodological foundations related to Educational Technology throughout History, we find some notable precursors of this field of knowledge: the Greek sophists (5th century , give importance to systemic group instruction and pedagogical materials and strategies), Socrates, Saint Thomas Aquinas, Comenius (the latter, from the seventeenth century, and according to the Aristotelian maxim "nihil is in intellectu quod prius non fuerit in sensu ", gave great importance to illustrations in Latin manuals), Rousseau (eighteenth century, with his paidocentric vision), Pestalozzi, and Herbart. (19th century, which strengthen this paidocentric line and highlight the importance of the means and instructional methods).

• Approaches from the technical-empirical perspective: instructional means, programmed teaching, instructional technology.
  
  

The theory of education, seeking to give scientific rank to educational activity, relied for years on an empirical-analytical approach, whose epistemological assumptions from the Natural Sciences were transferred to the field of Social Sciences. For this reason, the technological proposal in this field was also linked to a positivist conception (specified in formulations by authors such as Skinner, Briggs, Chadwick, Gagné, Merrill, RomIszowski ...) that sought to know the laws that govern the dynamics of reality. educational and maintained an instrumentalizing vision of science where Educational Technology assumed the prescriptive dimension.

• Focus on instructional media.
  
  

In the second quarter of the twentieth century, Psychology was devoted more to theoretical issues, adopting the model of Natural Sciences, and Educational Technology dealt with practical problems of teaching, focusing especially on materials, devices and media. instruction (thus, at this time, in the United States, courses are designed for military specialists with the support of the audiovisual media).

• Programmed teaching. Behavioral and neo-behaviorist approach.
  
  

Although Thorndike at the beginning of the century had already established some of its principles and Pressey had developed teaching machines in the 1930s, for many (Salinas, 1991) Educational Technology was born in the 1950s with the publication of the works of Skinner "The science of learning and the art of teaching" and "Teaching machines", where some proposals for linear programmed teaching are formulated (later with Crowler it will be branched) under behavioral scientific assumptions based on operant conditioning.

ATI DESIGNS, A MODEL FOR MEDIA RESEARCH (Escudero, 1983).

The ATI designs seek to determine the ideal means for each learning situation, depending on the characteristics of the students and the tasks to be carried out.However, from this perspective, the problems related to the pragmatics of the means and their definitive effectiveness in school contexts since, although all studies are carried out in classrooms, there is still a preferential attention to the "unique interaction with the environment" ignoring the complex exchanges that take place in the classroom.

The cultural, social, and instructional context of learning is forgotten and how the subjects situate their cognition is not taken into account

In recent years, approximately since the mid-seventies, other perspectives have gained strength in the educational field in general and in the curriculum in particular, well differentiated approaches to the structure of technical-scientific rationality that has covered Educational Technology.

This emergence of other rationalities is generating what in a few words we could describe as the loss of academic and intellectual hegemony of a conception of education characterized by the search for positivist rationality, systematization and scientism.

This does not fall within the objectives of this work, and this has already been done by other authors of greater importance (see Escudero, 1984; Carr and Kemmis, 1987; Guarro, 1987; Kemmis, 1988; Gimeno, 1988; Marrero, 1990 to cite some of the most representative works that can be found in Spanish).

ARGUMENTATIONS

1. The context of emergence and use of ET is typical of academic instances and environment, not of schools. It has been instructional psychologists, educational researchers, and teaching experts who have shaped the principles and procedures of the field. Neither the teaching staff nor the members of the support and guidance services have participated throughout the short history of TE.

   
   

2. Teachers and educational centers have been considered as mere consumers of ET, not as agents with decisional responsibility over it. That is to say, its technical nature imposes that those who are the subjects who possess the knowledge and power to use ET are external agents to the schools.

   
   

3. Underlying TE is a conception of the nature of the instructional process of a standardized and unidirectional nature. That is, if we accept the multidimensional characterization of the teaching processes in the classrooms (Doyle, 1983; 1986).

   
   

4. TE totally disregards the thought and pedagogical cultures of teachers. For TE to generate an instructive or material design for an educational system is to create a product. The adequacy or not to reality is given by the congruence and internal goodness of the design.

In conclusion, the disciplinary field called Educational Technology has represented and represents within the curricular panorama an option on the curriculum and teaching characterized by the attempt to modernize and rationalize the phenomena and instructional processes.

This field in its first moments concentrated its attention on how to incardinate and introduce the teaching aids in order to increase the communicative efficiency between the teacher and the students, but it is in the decade of the seventies when it reached its greatest production and extension to the refocus your interest on instructional design.