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Educational Technology as a pedagogical field of study - Coggle Diagram

- - - - 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.
        
        However, these authors get a bit carried away by their own point of view.
        Originally, Educational Technology was born linked to the educational use of modern audiovisual media, and this is how it is included in the Unesco definition (Unesco, 1984, 43). Thus, in 1960 James Finn proposed the name "Instruction and Educational Technology" instead of the "Department of Audiovisual Instruction" (DAVI).
        The name change will take place in 1970. In England in 1967 the "National Council for Educational Technology" had been created.
        Only later, the Unesco text points out, a new meaning is accepted, understood Educational Technology as a systematic way of conceiving, applying and evaluating the set of teaching and learning processes.
        
        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).
        
        In summary and following Chadwick (1978) we can say that the three areas that form the cradle or the basic environment of Educational Technology are Learning Psychology, the systematic approach and the development of the media. Subsequently, this last aspect must be linked with the study of Communication Theory and its application to the educational field.
- - - - For this reason, CABERO (1999) points out that Educational Technology is an integrating term (insofar as it has integrated various sciences, technologies and techniques: physics, engineering, pedagogy, psychology ...), alive (due to all the transformations that it has undergone originated both due to the changes in the educational context and those of the basic sciences that support it), polysemic (throughout its history it has been welcoming different meanings) and also contradictory (it provokes both radical defenses and frontal oppositions).
      - 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.
        
        Educational Technology: decrease in school failure, increase in the number of people who could access knowledge, reduction of costs and improvement of the quality of teaching, promises, more than realities, soon began to seem like this, and (...) originate a series of movements, concerned with a theoretical foundation of the decisions that were being taken and the revision of the philosophical and epistemological bases on which it was based "
        
        Approaches from the mediational perspective: symbolic interaction, contextualized curricular approach.
        
        With the influence of didactic currents of an interpretive type, new more subjective and comprehensive conceptualizations are proposed for Educational Technology, which becomes based on cognitive psychology and that, in its purpose of improving the teaching and learning processes through the application of Technological resources is more interested in the cognitive characteristics of students and their internal processes, in the context in which educational activities take place and in the symbolic aspects of the messages conveyed in the media, than by the media themselves.
        
        Symbolic interaction.
        
        The change from behavioral views to cognitive ones, which recognize the interaction between external stimuli presented by any means and internal cognitive processes that support learning, led to the development of this approach that studies the interactions between the symbolic systems of the media and the cognitive structures of the students, considering their cognitive effects, the ways of understanding and codifying the reality that they promote and the cognitive styles.
        The media, through their symbolic systems, interact with the cognitive structure of students and cause the development and impersonation of certain skills (SALOMON, 1977, 1979, 1981).
        
        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
        
        Critical-reflective approach.
        
        In the 1980s, the interest raised by Critical Theory, which emphasizes the fact that educational communications are not neutral since they take place in a socio-political context, fosters a movement called Critical Educational Technology that, connected to various currents of reflection (philosophical analyzes such as poststructuralism, literary studies linked to semiotics, sociopolitical analyzes such as feminist theory, etc.), the dominant social values are questioned and the role that technological processes and especially teaching media and materials should develop.
- - - - 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.
        
        Even one of the most representative authors in the field, Derek Rowntree (1982), closed his work Educational Technology in Curriculum Development stating the following:
        "My last question is whether it is not about time we stopped using the term educational technology. Educational technology is one of the possible means to an end. Perhaps we would overcome many of the understandable misgivings our colleagues have towards us at the same time. time we would have a more open vision if we emphasize the end more than the means and we rename our profession as educational development "