ABSTRACT
In 1922 Thomas Edison predicted that “the motion picture is destined to revolutionize our educational system and . . . in a few years it will supplant largely, if not entirely, the use of textbooks”. Twenty-three years later, in 1945, William Levenson, the director of the Cleveland public schools’ radio station, claimed that “the time may come when a portable radio receiver will be as common in the classroom as the blackboard”. Forty years after that, the noted psychologist B. F. Skinner, referring to the first days of his “teaching machines”, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, wrote, “I was soon saying that, with the help of teaching machines and programmed instruction students could learn twice as much in the same time and with the same effort as in a standard classroom.”1
