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Contrary to popular belief, ed tech did not begin with videos on the internet. The idea of technology that would allow students to "go at their own pace" did not originate in Silicon Valley. In Teaching Machines, education writer Audrey Watters offers a lively history of predigital educational technology, from Sidney Pressey's mechanized positive-reinforcement provider to B. F. Skinner's behaviorist bell-ringing box. Watters shows that these machines and the pedagogy that accompanied them sprang from ideas—bite-sized content, individualized instruction—that had legs and were later picked up by textbook publishers and early advocates for computerized learning.
Watters pays particular attention to the role of the media—newspapers, magazines, television, and film—in shaping people's perceptions of teaching machines as well as the psychological theories underpinning them. She considers these machines in the context of education reform, the political reverberations of Sputnik, and the rise of the testing and textbook industries. She chronicles Skinner's attempts to bring his teaching machines to market, culminating in the famous behaviorist's efforts to launch Didak 101, the "pre-verbal" machine that taught spelling. (Alternate names proposed by Skinner include "Autodidak," "Instructomat," and "Autostructor.") Telling these somewhat cautionary tales, Watters challenges what she calls "the teleology of ed tech"—the idea that not only is computerized education inevitable, but technological progress is the sole driver of events.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
August 3, 2021 -
Formats
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Kindle Book
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9780262363754
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9780262363754
- File size: 738 KB
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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August 13, 2021
Sal Khan has stated that his website Khan Academy was one of the first resources to use technology to personalize education, and that prior to the development of home computers and the internet, education was more or less static--claims that education journalist Watters takes issue with. She begins this powerful treatise by countering the mythology that computers jump-started 20th-century American educational innovations and reforms. Earlier in the 20th century, teaching machines were developed in fits and starts, decades prior to the advent of computers and the internet, and she offers a fascinating glimpse into the "science of teaching and learning" that emphasized machine-based content mastery through incremental learning. Devices such as the Teaching Machine, AutoTutor, Didak, Automatic Teacher, TEMAC, and Markograph were intended to free up a teacher's time from mundane scoring tasks to devote individualized attention to students and allow time for "real teaching." Later, instructional materials were designed for some of the machines, providing individualized instruction with prompt feedback mechanisms. Notably, programmed instruction was used as part of literacy efforts related to the civil rights movements and voting rights outreach. Watters stresses that a full understanding of teaching machines requires an examination of how "corporations dragged their feet, slowed the development of products, stalled the market, resisted the latest sciences, and, in many ways, balked at educational change." VERDICT Historians of educational technology and education reform will relish this thoroughly researched and well-referenced work.--Elizabeth Connor, Daniel Lib., The Citadel, Military Coll. of South Carolina, Charleston
Copyright 2021 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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