Social and Cultural Foundations of American Education/Chapter 10/How has technology impacted instructional design? 2
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[edit] How has technology impacted instructional design?
By: Thomas Grose
What is education?
Education is the act or process of imparting or acquiring general knowledge, developing the powers of reasoning and judgment, and generally of preparing oneself or others intellectually for mature life (dictionary.com). Every day, in every part of life, there is a teacher and a student. Whether a parent is teaching his/her child, or a lioness teaching her cub, a day does not go by without someone learning something new. Even, through mistakes, people can learn.
Changes in Education
Throughout the years, the means of education and the subjects which have been taught, and are being taught, have changed. Technology has played a big part in changing the way students are being educated today. When you think of the seventeenth and eighteenth century classrooms, you might think of children in a small room sitting impatiently with their hornbooks, waiting for the teacher to begin the lesson for the day. Back during those times, the hornbook, which is a single page protected by a thin see-through layer of horn, was one of the most important tools a student would use. Fast forwarding to the twenty-first century, students learn through big, heavy textbooks, lessons that could be viewed on a television set or a computer, and the biggest resource for information, the internet. Technology has taken education to its highest level ever.
What is technology?
Well, one might ask “What is technology?”. According to the Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, technology can be defined as the practical application of knowledge, especially in a particular area. From the Stone Age to the Space Age, technology is becoming more and more advanced at an incredible speed. Technology has changed entertainment from radios to television shows, from playing sports outside to playing sports in the living room on TV! It is not so far-fetched to think that technology will be used to educate the youth in the world.
Technology in the Classroom
There are many tools for students to use in the classroom. There are the traditional pencil and notebook, there is the laptop notebook which can be used to type and save notes without writer’s cramp, and some students will record the lecture using an audio recorder! This way, students can listen to the lecture again and recapture the information learned in class. Not only has it changed the way of taking notes, but technology has even changed the way we take quizzes and tests. “Clickers” are used to send answers of questions to a sensor that picks up the waves emitted by these remote control-looking tools.
The most important tool for students is the computer. Not only can you store notes, as stated before, but you can use CDs and DVDs to store information, e-mail to send letters to others, instant messaging to chat with others, and the internet to look for information. With the use of CD-Roms, DVDs, and telecommunications, computers are extremely valuable in the development of higher-order thinking skills. Computers can gather and process information in the forms of documents, photographs, transcripts, etc. that can easily be accessible.
E-mail and other electronic discussions allow electronic pen pals, student-to-student projects, and class-to-class projects. E-mail and other forms of telecommunications permit students the ability to communicate with anyone else in the world, providing they have access to the web. There are some advantages and disadvantages for using email. It can be used to find a certain person or group of people to answer questions and receive help with technical difficulties. It can be used to make, change, or break appointments (this is especially good for extremely busy people). Something that e-mail can do that makes it stand out is that it can allocate messages to more than one person in the same time it takes to send it to just one person. But, like most good things, e-mail also has its disadvantages. Checking and reading e-mail can be long and drawn out. To conserve time, one must learn to decide which messages are important and which are not. Those that are not worthwhile could be deleted and save the time it would take to read it. Not to mention spam mail. Viruses can be sent through e-mail messaging. Confidential information can be accidentally sent to others and risk the security of organizations. E-mail can also be misunderstood or perceived as unfriendly because the recipient cannot hear the actual dialogue that was meant by the sender. Even after these setbacks that are caused by this, e-mail has become a way of life. And, it is easy to see how it can be a great asset to students in their education.
Instant messaging, or IM, is another technological advance that can aid students. While working on assignments, instead of tying up phone lines and using minutes on cell phones, students can receive help from other classmates using IM. It is, basically, having a phone conversation over the computer. Unlike phones, you can virtually talk to an unlimited number of people. There are also chat rooms and discussion boards that are pretty much the same.
The internet is the biggest resource of all. It contains texts, pictures, videos, software, and practically an infinite amount of information. People can create websites and post them on the internet. Just like libraries, however, the internet is too big to just walk in and find a certain website. There are search engines like Google to help sort through all that you are looking for, just as there are particular ways to find certain books in a library.
IPODs can be used by instructors to hold massive amounts of information that can easily be accessed through a computer. IPODs, Interface Protocol Option Devices, can store up to two gigabytes of memory. That is one thousand megabytes!
Some classes use virtual simulations for their curriculum. Through virtual simulations, which can guide the user(s) with suggestions, students can develop reasoning and problem-solving skills to solve real world problems. Pupils act as partners in developing learning experiences and generating knowledge, and students’ collaborative construction of meaning is enhanced via different perspectives on shared experiences (Journal of Curriculum).
Even though it can give suggestions, it is important that [computers] should not use its artificial intelligence to guide and structure learning processes, but rather should create situations and offer tools that stimulate students to make maximum use of their own cognitive potential (Scardamalia et al., 1989).
Conclusion
With all the tools provided to us through the use of technology, students can go so much further than just learning the three "R's" (Reading, 'Riting,' and 'Rithmatic'). These present day students could push technology further forward, inventing new tools for the future students to learn with.
[edit] Sidebar
"As teachers, we should use technology for education to its fullest extent, as long as it is for the best for our students!"--Tom Grose
[edit] Questions
Multiple Choice
1) What is the biggest information resource?
a) The library b) The internet c) Albert Einstein d) A college professor
2) What does IPOD stand for?
a) Interface Protocol Option Devices b) Internet Pod c) International Patient Organism Depositary d) Image Processor for Optical Data
3) What was the single piece of paper that children used in the seventeenth and eighteenth century called?
a) A reference book b) A work book c) A hornbook d) A textbook
4) If a student wanted to chat about an assignment while on the computer, he/she might use...
a) e-mail b) instant messaging c) a sibling's cell phone d) a chat room e) b and d
5) Which one is an advantage for e-mailing?
a) Finding a certain person or group of people to answer questions. b) Used to make, change, or break appointments. c) Allocate messages to more than one person. d) All of the above.
Answers
1) b) the internet
2) a) Interface Protocol Option Devices
3) c) a hornbook
4) b) instant messaging or d) a chat room
5) d) all of the above
Essay
How has technology changed education? Give examples of what students used to use and what they use now inside and outside of class.
[edit] References
education. (n.d.). Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.0.1). Retrieved September 23, 2006, from Dictionary.com website: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/education
hornbook. (n.d.). The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. Retrieved September 21, 2006, from Dictionary.com website: http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=hornbook&x=31&y=25
Routledge, part of the Taylor & Francis Group. (2000). Journal of Curriculum Studies, Volume 32, Number 2. 281-303
Scardamalia, M., Bereiter, C., McLean, R. S., Swallow, J. and Woodruff, E. (1989). Computer-supported learning environments and problem-solving, Berlin: Springer-Verlag.
Tam, Maureen. (2000). Constructivism, Instructional Design, and Technology: Implications for Transforming Distance Learning. Educational Technology & Society, 3(2)
technology. (n.d.). Merriam-Webster, inc. (2004). Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary Eleventh Edition. 1283
Wikibooks. The Computer Revolution/Internet/Communication. http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/The_Computer_Revolution/Internet/Communication
Wilson, B. G. (2005). Broadening our foundation for instructional design: Four pillars of practice. Educational Technology, 45 (2), 10-15. Special issue on cultural studies edited by Ellen Rose.
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