“What man can make of man” B. K Skinner
It is remarkable to note, how the psychologist took the first steps to build technology to improve teaching with a Teaching Machine that is automatic and self-controlling. This made way for the learner to answer back to the information and a way of feedback of correctness offered to the learner’s response. Nevertheless, with the Automatic Teacher, it tried to free the teacher from the burden of hard work that directed this more towards real teaching and adequate guidance to the learner (Watters 2018).
The biggest challenge that the educators and the learners faced was the freeing from the monopoly of the book as a teaching aid (Friesen, 2017) and gaining access to information from everywhere. Technology becomes a powerful tool that transforms learning and the ongoing innovation adding on as streaming video online and lectures becoming either in the form of MOOC (massive open online courses), by TED Talks, or lecture capture. Most technology used in education is not developed for education but mainly for business, technology has a more central factor in all forms of teaching (Bates, 2014). The Web aided in the development of a learning management system (LMS’s) to provide an online teaching environment while social media tools for education which has a greater potential for learning. Digital badges give a key for challenges for the learner to foster social awareness, scalable technology, and easy to use. (Weller, 2018). The teaching process was attempted to replicate through artificial intelligence (AI) however it has proved that machines cannot cope with the extraordinary ways the student learns or fail to learn.
The foundation set the grounding that technology is a tool that helps to teach and learning to be more meaningful that could enhance the relationship between the teacher and the students. The teacher is still needed to set the instructions in moving forward and to effectively integrate technology and be the role of adviser, content expert, and a coach for guidance (Watters, 2018). Education is complex in this global knowledge base society and technology will continue to elaborate in major ways that bring challengers to the educators and the learners.
References
Bates, T. (2014) A short history of education technology https://www.tonybates.ca/2014/12/10/a-short-history-of-educational-technology/ (Links to an external site.)
Friesen, N (2017) The Lecture and the Textbook-Education in the Age of New Media https://www.researchgate.net/publication/321497056 (Links to an external site.)
(n.a.), 2017, Reimaging the Role of Technology in Education https://tech.ed.gov/files/2017/01/NETP17.pdf (Links to an external site.)
Watters, A (2018) History of Teaching Machines http://teachingmachin.es/timeline.html
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