Information Technology and Educational Amnesia

Waves of enthusiasm for technological innovations that promise to revitalize teaching and learning are at least a century old. Unfortunately, the record of accomplishment for the many varieties of hardware and software introduced into schools over the decades is remarkably thin. Today's promoters of technology in education tend to forget similar efforts in the past, launching forth with initiatives that use the latest hardware and software, as if such projects were unprecedented. While initiatives like the iClass network in Europe show considerable promise, their development would benefit from recalling the history of earlier attempts to develop and market sophisticated technical instruments for the schools. Reflection up basic philosophical questions about teaching and learning can help us decide which technical devices are of genuine value and which are not. No one can say for certain when the modern enthusiasm for educational technology began. But as good a date as any is 1909 when the public health commissioner of Queensland, Australia suggested to Thomas Edison that the inventor's motion picture machine could be used to make educational films. Edison immediately warmed to the idea. 'The introduction of kinetoscope pictures in the schools,' he exclaimed, 'would be an epoch in the common school ... . You couldn't keep the children away even by the police.' Edison went on to establish an educational film division in his company, experimenting with classes that used movies as the only learning materials. 'I am spending more than my income getting up a set of 6000 films to teach 19 million children in the schools of the United States to do away with books,' he explained, not specifying how many police would be required for an orderly implementation of the plan (Conot, 1979, p. 503). Over the decades since Edison's flash of entrepreneurial insight there have been recurring attempts to revitalize education through infusions of hardware and software. Computers and the internet are among the most recent candidates in a very long list of information technologies that includes movies, radio, film strips, tape recorders, language labs, broadcast television, programmed learning machines, cable television, portable video cameras, VCRs, multi-media electronics, CD- ROMs, laptops, and large-screen 'SMART' boards. The iClass network, Intelligent Distributed Cognitive-Based Open Learning System for Schools, now under development in several European countries, is an ambitious attempt to realize this promise yet again.(1) In its day, each of these technologies has been praised an essential tool for students and teachers. Indeed, these technical systems have often been heralded as wellsprings of a marvelous 'revolution' that would change the basic processes of education. To a great extent, what we find in the schools today is the residue and an ongoing sequence of technological changes aimed at bringing quick and effective results. But despite the intense promotional campaigns and billions of dollars invested in extensive re-tooling, there is scant evidence during the decades from Edison to the present day that any of the heavily touted varieties of equipment introduced into schools and colleges over the years has done much to improve education at all. In today's scholarly discussions and policy debates about the effects of recent infusions of information technology, there is often frank admission that little has actually been accomplished. Thus, Lamont Johnson's review article echoes many earlier surveys, noting 'the lack of solid evidence to support claims that inserting