ABSTRACT

4Research and practice in educational technology are rooted in a primordial human drive to find ways of teaching in ways that are more efficient. Every civilization has developed formal methods of education more efficacious than the trial-and-error of everyday living. In the first decades of the 20th century, individuals and, later, groups of affiliated professionals made that quest a central focus, thus establishing educational technology as a field. Their first activities aimed at enriching the learning experience with visual and later audio-visual resources. As radio broadcasting grew in the 1930s and then television in the 1950s, these mass media were accepted as ways to reach even larger audiences, in and out of school, with educative audio-visual programs. In the 1960s, the wave of interest in teaching machines incorporating programmed instruction based on behaviorist psychology engulfed the field, engendering a shift in identity. The proper study of the field expanded from audio-visual technologies to all technologies, including psychological ones. By the 1980s, the center of gravity had shifted to the design of instructional systems, especially the adroit application of instructional methods, enlivened by fresh insights from cognitive and constructivist perspectives. As computers became ubiquitous in the 1990s, they became the delivery system of choice due to their interactive capabilities. With the rapid global spread of the World Wide Web after 1995, networked computers took on communication functions as well as storage and processing functions. The 21st century began with educational technology increasingly focused on distance education, the latest paradigmatic framework for its ageless mission to help more people learn faster, better, and more affordably.