"In any list of explanations for the errant passion for technology by educators (but not necessarily teachers), a solid candidate would be this dream of increasing productivity, that is, students acquiring more information with the same and even less teacher effort. This dream has persisted from the invention of the lecture centuries ago to the early decades of this century when reformers sought efficiency through film, radio, and television. The dream persists into the 1980s with promoters boosting desk-top computers for each student. In the insistent quest for increased productivity and efficiency, the lecture, film, radio, television and microcomputer are first cousins." (p. 3, includes footnote reference to Callahan, ch. 4-7).
"The promises implied in these [technological] aids caught educators' attention: individualized instruction, relief of the tedium of repetitive activities, and presentation of content beyond what was available to a classroom teacher." (4)
"Claims predicting extraordinary changes in teacher practice and student learning, mixed with promotional tactics, dominated the literature in the initial wave of enthusiasm for each new technology. Seldom were these innovations initiated by teachers." (4)
"The exhiliration/ scientific-credibility / disappointment / teacher-bashing cycle described here drew its energy from an unswerving, insistent impulse on the part of non-teachers to change classroom practice." (5-6)
Quoting Thomas Edison from 1922: "I believe that the motion picture is destined to revolutionize our educational system and that in a few years it will supplant largely, if not entirely, the use of textbooks.." (p. 9; the quotation is taken from Henry A. Wise, Motion Pictures as an Aid in Teaching American History (Yale UP, 1939), p. 1)
Reasons for infrequent use of film:
"Finally, a six-year foundation-supported study sponsored by the [FCC] ..... concluded in 1943 that "radio has not been accepted as a full-fledged member of the educational family." The authors observe that radio spread rapidly in homes but "remains a stepchild in education." (24)
"A survey of almost 2,000 Ohio principals, conducted in 1941, produced the following list of reasons cited for lack of classroom radio use and the percentage of respondents who gave each reason:
"The Ford Foundation and its Fund for the Advancement of Education underwrote the initial use of the medium in schools and colleges, especially as a tool for relieving the crushing shortage of teachers that resulted from ballooning enrollments." (28)
"Television was hurled at teachers. The technology and its initial applications to the classroom were conceived, planned, and adopted by non-teachers, just as radio and film had captured the imaginations of an earlier generation of reformers interested in improving instructional productivity." (36)
"Teachers as technician would be a fair description of the role envisioned and carried out in the early decades of television's entry into classrooms." (36)
"The impact of any technology pivots upon its accessibility, purpose, and use." (37)
"Early research on the impact of television upon the classroom, then, was preoccupied with comparisons between televised lessons and conventional teacher approaches, as measured by standardized achivement tests. Generally, the findings concurred: There was not substantial difference between the amount of information learned from televised lessons and information conveyed through conventional instructional approaches used by the classroom teacher -- again, as measured by standardized achievement tests." (38)
"In a carefully designed study of teacher use of video lessons in West Virginia in the year 1977-1978, teachers were asked why they didn't use instructional television more. Four reasons captured over three-quarters of the teachers' responses to the question:
"Thus, the simplicity, versatility, and efficiency of those aids such as the textbook and chalkboard in coping with problems arising from the complicated realities of classroom instruction far exceed the limited benefits extracted from using machines." (59)
"... because teachers believe that interpersonal relations are essential in student learning, the use of technologies that either displace, interrupt, or minimize that relationship between teacher and child is viewed in a negative light." (61)
"One teacher, maybe two, meet with elementary children for the entire instructional day. Coherence in instruction and clarity in goals is far more possible with children. At the secondary level, any student will face five to seven teachers, all differing in style and expectations and presenting various subject matter. External demands for performance press secondary-school students far more than elementary ones..... Such structural differences in school organizations help shape teaching practices." (64)
"Remember, for example, that whole group instruction was a nineteenth-century innovation, an efficient way of coping with student diversity. The introduction of worksheets for students to complete in class while the teacher worked with one or more students was a practical solution to a classroom management problem that all teachers faced. .. Some of what were once innovations for earlier generations of teachers became conventional and durable practices for later ones." (65)
"Teachers have altered their practices when a technological innovation helped them do a better job of what they already decided had to be done and matched their view of daily classroom realities." (66)
"For hospital administrators to order surgeons to use a new machine or munipal officicals to direct city plumbers to use a new tool would, I believe, be viewed as inappropriate. Yet, that is what has occured in the nation's classrooms ..." (67)
Quoting Papert from an 1984 article in Popular Computing: "There won't be schools in the future .... I think the computer will blow up the school." (72)
"The marriage of efficiency experts and educational administrators produced by the 1920s a mindset among scholars and practitioners that schools could be managed like corporations." (86; footnote citing Callahan).
"The periodic surges of interest in introducing video, film, radio, and computers overlap these larger efforts to bureauocratize schooling and rationlize teaching. Promoters believe that these machines give teachers additional tools for enhancing productivity. The unexamined assumption, of course, is that policy makers committed to viewing instruction as a technical process believe that student learning is mechanical; that is, what teachers do skillfully will cause predictable student outcomes. No persuasive body of evidence exists yet to confirm that belief." (88)
"Classrooms are steeped in emotions. In the fervent quest for precise rationality and technical efficiency, introducing to each classroom enough computers to tutor and drill children can dry up that emotional life, resulting in withered and uncertain relationships." (89)
Quoting Dewey from Experience and Education: "Perhaps the greatest of all pedagogical fallacies is the notion that a person learns only the particular thing he is studying at the time." (95)
Predictions for computer use in schools. (99)
"Given the current organizational settings, classroom computers should be used by teachers to cope with the routine, often tedious, student learning problems that machines can do patiently. Such use is neither sinister nor wasteful, as some computer boosters suggest. Such use meets teacher-defined problems well. As unimaginative as drill, simulations, games and enrichment software may strike reformers, these uses do fit well teachers' needs in adapting to the restless, unpredictable nature of classroom life." (100)
"In reviewing the literature on schools and classrooms over the past century, changes, both intended and unintended, can be detected. These changes occur as a result of stable processes of change, ways that schools and classroom teachers respond to their environments. Only a tiny part of these changes are the designs of policy makers." (106)
"Those who have tried to convince teachers to adopt technological innovations over the last century have discovered the durability of classroom pedagogy." (109)