Technology and Education

TECHNOLOGY AND EDUCATION

Educational Television

In the fall of 1961 on the opening day of school, educational instruction literally took off on the wings of an elaborately equipped plane which became the equivalent of an eleven thousand-foot-high broadcasting tower. This was the Midwest Program of Airborne Televised Instruction (MPATI), which served six midwestern states with carefully taped programs of the nation's finest teachers, encompassing key subjects in the curriculum from grades one to twelve. The projected cost of this state-of-the-art technology per student, per year was estimated to be about that of a single textbook. Although by 1960 the University of Michigan had already studied the effectiveness of televised instruction for fifteen years, few districts had access to such well-crafted programs as those offered by MPATI. However, when the time came to shift the financial burden from the Ford Foundation, which had developed MPATI, to the state and local systems it served, the districts were unable to agree on paying their admittedly modest shares. The entire project foundered, and by the end of the 1960s the great boom in classroom instructional television that had begun with so much promise lost momentum.

Professors on Screen

Higher education made use of televised instruction in a different way. On hundreds of campuses, professors taped their lectures so that students could receive instruction via closed-circuit television. At the University of Miami, for example, most freshmen and sophomores received the bulk of their education via television, taking notes from a screen in a 330-seat auditorium. Professors, located in studios with projectors and tape recorders, could teach eighteen hundred students simultaneously and eighteen hundred more via tape replay. At Pennsylvania State University, researchers examined results of four hundred experiments comparing televised instruction at the college level with conventional teaching and determined that the screen conveys information at least as effectively as a live professor. Despite the fact that the practice appeared pedagogically sound, most universities resorted to televised instruction as a tool to get through tough times occasioned by soaring enrollments, not as permanent delivery systems.

HOW THE NORTH SEES THE CASE FOR THE SOUTH

South Carolina newspaper editor William Workman's book The Case for The South, explaining why some southerners opposed desegregation, was reviewed in the Spring 1960 Harvard Educational Review by Thomas Pettigrew. His synopsis of Workman's argument is as follows:

Racial discord accompanies the Negro, whether the situation is segregated or integrated, just so long as he is present in substantial numbers (see p. 98). "Negro children have measurably lower standards than white contemporaries in terms of academic standing, intellectual standing, intellectual background, personal hygiene, and morality" (see p. 239).

Further, "Negro men obviously find white women desirable" (p. 217), and so 'amalgamation' of the races—not improvement of the Negro race—is the real aim of the integrationists" (p. 226).

Thus, says Workman, for these and other reasons, "literally millions of intelligent, informed, articulate, and perfectly sincere Southerners favor racial segregation" (p. 68).

Source:

Harvard Educational Review, 30 (Summer 1960): 298-302.

Teaching Machines and Programmed Learning

As early as 1960 the American Association for the Advancement of Science held a symposium on "Data Processing Machines and Educational Research." Later that same year, the National Education Association published Teaching Machines and Programmed Learning, a collection of forty-seven papers, all with a messianic tone, given by psychologists, educators, and engineers. The products ranged from stimulus-presentation devices costing over one thousand dollars each to fifty-cent "sit and spit" test-scoring devices. (Digital application of saliva to a treated card revealed which multiple-choice letter—a, b, c, or d—was correct.) The field expanded rapidly, and by 1961 psychologist and scientist B. F. Skinner was writing in the Harvard Educational Review explaining the teaching machines he had designed "as examples of technological applications of basic science." Skinner argued that these machines must have control over the consequences of student action so that paying attention would be effectively reinforced. It was crucial to development of thinking, he claimed, that the machines provide for branching and decision making, not the mere discrimination among responses in an array. Skinner had already tested one such programmed-learning machine on thirty-four eighth graders, who completed a year of introductory algebra in one semester or less. On an achievement test, all of the students tested to the eighth-grade level or better, with 50 percent of them getting ninth-grade scores.

Computers and Education

Computers were commonplace in higher education as early as 1960, but they were not being used for instruction at that time. A typical example of computer technology at the beginning of the decade was the 1960 concordance of William Wordsworth's poetry that Cornell computer programmers punched out on an IBM system in 197 hours. The 956-page analysis of word usage in poetry had taken sixty-seven people six years to accomplish in 1911. Similar research projects were relatively common, but teaching with computers was an innovation. However, it was but a short leap to computer-assisted instruction which used the logic of Skinner's programmed learning. By 1968 computers were being used for individual drill-and-practice systems to supplement the regular curriculum taught by a teacher. By this time a computer with two hundred terminals could accommodate up to six thousand students. At Dartmouth, for example, students (most of whom were taught computer programming as freshmen) could go to one of sixteen computer stations around campus, type out a math problem, and receive the reply in a few seconds. The next type of application was more complex—a tutorial system responsible for introducing a concept and then providing examples so that students could develop skill in its use. This type of computer-assisted instruction was highly popular, especially in the study of languages. At Stanford, for example, the Russian tutorial was totally computerized, eliminating classroom instruction altogether. Computer experts wrote in 1968 about the possibility of a dialogue system, in which the students interact with the computer, but this plan was merely conceptual at the end of the decade.

DOGS BANNED FROM CAMPUS

When the Cornell University comptroller issued an edict banning dogs from campus, students rose as one in protest. A long-standing Cornell tradition had allowed pets not only on campus but also in classrooms with their owners. Prof. Clinton Rossiter, who found dogs no more distracting than coeds knitting during lectures, said, "Why ban dogs? Who knows, like coeds—they might learn something."

Source:

"Dogs at College," Newsweek (4 January 1960): 39.

Sources:

Philip Hall Coombs, The World Crisis in Education: The View from the Eighties (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 127-128;

Newsweek (15 February 1960): 67;

Newsweek (2 March 1964): 77;

Max Rafferty, "An Overview of ETV," Phi Deita Kappan, 51 (December 1960): 136;

Patrick Suppes, "Computer Technology and the Future of Education," Phi Delta Kappan, 49 (April 1968): 420-423.