The author surveys the history of efforts to automate teaching from various perspectives. For each technology, he discusses its history, influences, contexts, and impacts; the lives and personal influences of the innovators; the historical context; the theoretical consensus on their design, efficacy, and adoption; economic, business, and political aspects; and technological developments. Rather than looking at every technology, he focuses on learning technologies that try to supplant the role of the school or teacher and combine content knowledge with pedagogy. He discusses technologies that replicate traditional learning experiences, such as the classroom lecture and books, including correspondence courses in the late 19th century, educational radio and television, online videos, and screencasting; programmed instruction, through the perspectives of Sidney Pressey and B.F. Skinner, and their teaching machines and how companies were formed to address perceived deficits in the educational system in the 1960s; what happened when computer scientists took the reins of teaching machines from psychologists and created machines like PLATO, the Logo programming language, CD-ROMs, and tutoring systems; the role of the internet, including learning management systems, immersive experiences like simulations and Second Life, the Khan Academy, e-learning, and MOOCs (massive open online courses); and issues in designing future teaching machines. Annotation ©2015 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)
The allure of educational technology is easy to understand. Classroom instruction is an expensive and time-consuming process fraught with contradictory theories and frustratingly uneven results. Educators, inspired by machines’ contributions to modern life, have been using technology to facilitate teaching for centuries.
In Teaching Machines, Bill Ferster examines past attempts to automate instruction from the earliest use of the postal service for distance education to the current maelstrom surrounding Massive Open Online Courses. He tells the stories of the entrepreneurs and visionaries who, beginning in the colonial era, developed and promoted various instructional technologies. Ferster touches on a wide range of attempts to enhance the classroom experience with machines, from hornbooks, the Chautauqua movement, and correspondence courses to B. F. Skinner’s teaching machine, intelligent tutoring systems, and eLearning.
The famed progressive teachers, researchers, and administrators that the book highlights often overcame substantial hurdles to implement their ideas, but not all of them succeeded in improving the quality of education. Teaching Machines provides invaluable new insight into our current debate over the efficacy of educational technology.
