Who are the Learning Technologists? (Part 2)

In part 1, I looked at the shifting definition of educational (or learning) technology. This is the second in a series of short posts concerning the field of educational (or learning) technology and the people who are practitioners and theoreticians within the field.

A Brief History of Educational Technology

The field of educational technology has, in fact, a long history that can trace its modern-day origins back to the “visual education movement” in the US during the late 1920s and early 1930s and, as such, can be considered as an “essentially twentieth-century phenomenon” (Hlynka & Nelson, 1985). The field, which started out as audio-visual technology, such as slides, radio and motion pictures, had “piggy-backed” itself on to educational psychology, starting with behaviourism, then cognitivism, and finally constructivism.  Such alumni like B.F. Skinner, Jean Piaget, Edward Thorndike (in particular, “connectionism“) and Seymour Papert were influential in the early development of educational technology (de Vaney, 1998; Luppicini, 2005; Gur, 2007; Hudson, 2009).

There was an expectation that these “audiovisual machines” would deliver better education on a much larger scale. There was clearly a market that could be tapped by the corporate sector looking to capitalise on producing audiovisual hardware and materials for the potentially lucrative education sector. Furthermore, the US military had come to “recognise the power” of the motion picture in the delivery of patriotic propaganda to the American children (de Vaney, 1998). Thus began the early stages of the commodification of knowledge that Lyotard (1984) would warn the world against.

However, in the UK, educational technology (as it was known then) began to emerge as a distinct field around the late 1960s and early 1970s, most notably at the Open University, much of the early ground work was heavily influenced by the work in the US (Harris, 1976; Hawkridge, 1976; Lawless & Kirkwood, 1976; Macdonald-Ross, 1976; McCormick, 1976). Whilst educational technology was big business States-side, it was very much perceived as a “cottage industry” in the UK, but by the 1990s this was going to change the face of UK education in the most profound and dramatic way.

The Follett (HEFCE, 1993), Dearing (NCIHE, 1997), Atkins (HEFCE, 1998) and Booth (CVCP, 1998) Reports and a string of ambitious UK Government projects, schemes and initiatives (DfEE, 1997, 1998; DfES, 2003a, 2003b, 2005; HEFCE, 1997, 1998, 2001, 2005b) involving information and communication technologies (ICTs) were thrust upon the educational sector and society as a whole, which would eventually give rise to the so-called “Digital Britain” (DfBIS, 2009). It is around this time that the term “learning technology” started to become part-and-parcel of the discourse within UK Higher Education. The role of the “learning technologist” began to emerge as a “distinct group” (Conole, 2004) who were largely “hybrid, marginal and yet central to institutional processes of change” (Oliver, 2002) and were mostly funded through the Teaching Quality Enhancement Funds (TQEF).

For a detailed history of educational technology, do take a look at Alison Hudson’s (2009) doctoral thesis for more information. In part 3, I will begin to explore how learning technologists began to emerge in UK HE discourse from the mid-1990s.

References

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