ABSTRACT
Research 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.