Page 1

LESSONS TO BE LEARNED

Mal Lee and Arthur Winzenried

in Schools

The Use of

Technology

Instructional

LESSONS TO BE LEARNED

in Schools

The Use of

Technology

Instructional

Mal Lee and Arthur Winzenried

ACER฀Press

First published 2009

by ACER Press, an imprint of

Australian Council for Educational Research Ltd

19 Prospect Hill Road, Camberwell

Victoria, 3124, Australia

www.acerpress.com.au

sales@acer.edu.au

Text © Mal Lee and Arthur Winzenried 2009

Design and typography © ACER Press 2009

This book is copyright. All rights reserved. Except under the

conditions described in the Copyright Act 1968 of Australia

and subsequent amendments, and any exceptions permitted

under the current statutory licence scheme administered by

Copyright Agency Limited (www.copyright.com.au), no part

of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval

system, transmitted, broadcast or communicated in any form

or by any means, optical, digital, electronic, mechanical,

photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written

permission of the publisher.

Edited by Ronél Redman

Cover design by Polar Design Pty Ltd

Text design based on design by mightyworld

Typeset by Polar Design Pty Ltd

Printed in Australia by Hyde Park Press

Cover photographs (l to r): images 1–3 courtesy Peter Dalwood; image 4

courtesy Camberwell High School (photograph by Guy Lavoipierre);

image 5 courtesy Promethean, Inc; image 6 by Stockbyte.

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

Author:

Lee, Malcolm, 1944-

Title:

The use of instructional technology in schools : lessons to

be learned/Mal Lee, Arthur Winzenried.

ISBN:

9780864318886 (pbk.)

Notes:

Includes index.

Bibliography.

Subjects:

Educational technology--Australia.

Teaching--Australia--Aids and devices.

Other Authors/Contributors:

Winzenried, Arthur, 1949-

Dewey Number: 371.330994

iii

CONTENTS

Figures and tables

iv

Acknowledgements

vi

Foreword—Emeritus Professor Phillip Hughes

vii

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

1

CHAPTER 2

Instructional technology—the nomenclature

19

CHAPTER 3

The impact of the technology corporations and

vested interests

25

PART I: Discrete instructional technologies

35

CHAPTER 4

Teaching boards

37

CHAPTER 5

Film—the ‘first revolution’

42

CHAPTER 6

Radio—the ‘second revolution’

48

CHAPTER 7

Visual tools—the exceptions

53

CHAPTER 8

Television—the ‘new saviour’

61

CHAPTER 9

Video and audio recording—removing the barriers

66

CHAPTER 10

Computers as discrete teaching tools—the

‘great revolution’

74

PART II: Integrated instructional technologies

99

CHAPTER 11

The technology of the home

101

CHAPTER 12

The role of the school library

113

CHAPTER 13

Networked teaching and the information superhighway 123

CHAPTER 14

The digital toolkit

151

CHAPTER 15

Interactive whiteboards

166

CHAPTER 16

Digital take-off—the historical significance

185

CHAPTER 17

Total teacher use—case studies

192

CHAPTER 18

The life cycle of instructional technology

209

CHAPTER 19

The lessons to be learned

215

Appendix: The research methodology

245

Bibliography

248

Index

259

iv

FIGURES AND TABLES

Figures

Figure 4.1

Chalkboard of today

40

Figure 5.1

Early 16-mm projector

43

Figure 5.2

Hanimex 16-mm projector

44

Figure 6.1

Three-in-one hi-fi system with radio

51

Figure 7.1

Magic lantern

53

Figure 7.2

Slide projector with 35-mm filmstrip facility

54

Figure 7.3

Kodak Carousel projector

55

Figure 7.4

A 35-mm camera kit, with single reflex camera,

alternative lenses and filters, tripod and flash lighting

56

Figure 7.5

Overhead projector

58

Figure 7.6

A 3M overhead transparency maker

59

Figure 8.1

TV in use with a class in the 1970s

64

Figure 9.1

Sony Sports Walkman audio cassette player/recorder

68

Figure 9.2

Shibaden reel-to-reel black-and-white video recorder

68

Figure 9.3

JVC U-matic video recorder

69

Figure 9.4

Panasonic black-and-white studio camera of the 1970s

70

Figure 9.5

Common school U-matic recording set-up of the 1970s

71

Figure 10.1 Commodore 64 keyboard

77

Figure 10.2 Apple II computer laboratory of the 1980s

78

Figure 10.3 Apple PowerPC of the 1990s

79

Figure 10.4 Toshiba notebook of the 1990s

80

Figure 10.5 Apple ‘clamshell’ laptops of the early 2000s

85

Figure 10.6 Primary classroom pod of iMacs of the 2000s

93

Figure 12.1 Contemporary Australian primary school library with

digital technologies

120

Figure 14.1 Toshiba data projector of the mid 2000s

160

Figure 15.1 Promethean interactive whiteboard of the mid 2000s

168

Figure 17.1

Ngunnawal Primary School

197

Figure 17.2 SMART interactive whiteboard in use at Ingle Farm

Primary School

200

Figure 17.3 Emmanuel College

202

Figure 18.1 Life cycle of instructional technology

209

FIGURES AND TABLES

v

Tables

Table 11.1

Forms of technology in the home, 1999

106

Table 19.1

Attributes of proactive and reactive schools, education

authorities and governments

217

vi

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The authors would like to thank the many people who have assisted in

the researching of this book, and in particular those who agreed to be

interviewed.

Barrett, T.

Harvey, R.

O’Brien, D.

Beamish, P.

Hay, L.

O’Brien, M.

Bellenger, J.

Hodgkinson, J.

Paton, I.

Bonanno, K.

Hughes, P.

Price, B.

Boyle, M.

Joliffe, K.

Richardson, K.

Brewster, D.

Kent, P.

Robinson, P.

Burfitt, H.

King, G.

Sandery, P.

Cribb, P.

King, S.

Schnetker, P.

Croft, M.

Knowlton, N.

Shanley, J.

Dalwood, P.

Lambert, P.

Shaw, A.

Dillon, K.

Langford, T.

Shaw, D.

Duffle, P.

Lee, B.

Simpson, D.

Dunnett, C.

Leo, G.

Smith, C.

Elliot, C.

Lowe, A.

Shanley, J.

Finger, G.

Macarthur, J.

Tolley, R.

Flannery, D.

Macaulay, V.

Walker, G.

Grantham, C.

Meally, L.

Webb, I.

Griffin, J.

Messenger, C.

Wharton, S.

Hounsell, D.

Morrow, J

Williams, M.

Jones, B.

Muirhead, B.

Wright, G.

vii

FOREWORD

It is a special pleasure to write this foreword for The Use of Instructional

Technology in Schools, a book whose message is very timely. Education

everywhere is under pressure, seeking to find more effective means of

meeting the diverse needs of individuals and of societies. In such a search,

this book has an important message. Mal Lee and Arthur Winzenried,

from their diverse experience, are ideally placed to handle such a theme.

Appropriately for this task they combine varied and long experience

in schools and education systems with a genuine familiarity with the

technology of which they write so relevantly. I have had the pleasure in

the past of working with Mal Lee in helping to build a new education

system in Canberra and admire his capacity to contribute in all aspects of

such systems.

What makes my task even more pleasant is that this book will make

a significant contribution to an aim that is of real urgency: to achieve a

successful education for all students at a period when such success is vitally

important to their lives and to their societies.

AN UNRESOLVED PARADOX

There is a paradox in educational technology that needs to be resolved

urgently. Education is the source of technological advance, providing the

knowledge and the people so necessary for that purpose. At the same

time, the basic processes for schooling remain largely unaffected by that

advance. Technology has altered irrevocably the means of operation

of most social agencies, governments, hospitals, libraries, shops and

factories, entertainment and the media. Schools, however, operate now in

much the same way as they have always done, with the teacher and the

classroom as the setting for learning and with technology playing only a

minimal role.

This book addresses that paradox, recognising the failure of past

many attempts to make major differences in the operation of schools and

classrooms, and pointing to developments that promise real advances.

FOREWORD

viii

THE URGENT NEED FOR EFFECTIVE EDUCATION

FOR ALL PEOPLE

This issue is of paramount importance. Education is the key to successful

development, whether that development is individual or national. The

United Nations (UN) has included Education For All (EFA) in the eight

Millennium Development Goals to be achieved by 2015. The UN has

assigned the task of achieving EFA to the United Nations Educational,

Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) as its major priority for

the immediate future. The reason for this priority is not difficult to see.

Education is one of the great human enablers: those individuals with an

effective education are more likely to be successful in diverse aspects of

life, their work, their contribution to the wider society, their health and

their personal development. On the contrary, those people who miss

out on an effective education suffer long-term disadvantage in all these

aspects. The importance of education to individuals is repeated on the

large scale for nations: those nations with effective and efficient education

systems have the strongest basis for their progress, their prosperity and

their wellbeing.

THE SEARCH FOR IMPROVEMENT

As emphasised earlier, while almost every other major social agency has

changed fundamentally in their means of operation, schools have not done

so. A hospital today would be unrecognisable to Florence Nightingale;

however, if Jean Jacques Rousseau were to return to observe schools, he

would see essentially the same pattern that he criticised more than 200 years

ago. Schools are one of the oldest forms of organisation in our societies—

from their origins many thousands of years ago to achieve religious and

cultural aims, to today’s current role as agents for universal education. The

processes for the operation of schools remain fundamentally the same:

communication from an individual teacher to a group of students.

The Use of Instructional Technology in Schools demonstrates vividly that

this essential sameness is not a matter of intent. Education has been

willing—perhaps even too willing—to try new technological approaches

and new teaching approaches. From the traditional blackboard, the focus

has moved to film, to radio, to teaching machines, to television and,

more recently, to computers. Schools and their administrators have not

FOREWORD

ix

been unwilling to try new developments. Nor have other institutions.

The Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC) was itself a major player

in earlier attempts to assist teachers by bringing technology into the

classroom. The ABC had a significant education section with many

permanent staff plus other seconded educators, beginning with radio in

the 1930s and continuing with television in the 1960s. Their regular

programs were used in primary and secondary schools throughout the

country. This initiative was dropped by the ABC. The Commonwealth

Secondary Schools Libraries Program was introduced in the 1970s,

sponsored by the Australian Government, and made a major effort to

provide school libraries that could act as centres for the use of books and

technology in schools. That strong emphasis has faded, at least for the

time being. Currently, with the arrival of computers in accessible forms,

all schools are involved in the search to find ways in which this new

technology can fundamentally assist education, as it is helping so many

other areas of our society. However, as revealed by research in many

countries (much of it referenced in this book), the new media have not yet

materially altered the work of schools and teachers.

THE URGENCY

The lack of impact of technology in schools would not be a problem if

there were not an urgent need for the successful education of all students.

We now know the extent of loss, for the individuals concerned and for

the societies to which they belong, from an education that does not work

for all. This is the most important area where education must improve,

both in Australia and more widely. In Australia, research by the Business

Council of Australia shows that 35 000 students every year leave school

without the qualifications to enable them to take a useful part in society.

This is an enormous penalty for them and a heavy burden for the wider

society. Schools need to have available to them every means by which

education can be improved for all students, including those who currently

do not succeed.

Can technology help in this search? The answer might well have

been negative, given our past experience. Technology as yet has not made

the hoped-for impact. There are real indications provided in this book

of effective options for the future. It points out that schools are now at a

critical decision time in their processes for using technology.

FOREWORD

x

By 2008, there was a wide and growing divide between the extent of the

digital technology and its use in the home and the classroom. Schools

and education authorities had largely chosen to ignore the technological

development of the young in their homes, particularly in the period

1995–2008, and have rarely factored that development into any holistic

or networked educational development. Schools and education authorities

have invariably continued to work on the assumption that the only ‘real’

education occurs in the classroom. (pp. 223–4)

What is encouraging in this book is that the argument does not stop at this

depressing conclusion, but points the way ahead for uses of technology

that will take account of the realities of schools and classrooms. It also

recognises the potential bounty from such technology as the interactive

whiteboard (IWB) that can accommodate the needs of schools and also of

students and can fit so powerfully into the regular classroom.

The authors have not been content to merely point out the failings and

go no further, they have used the experience from many case studies that

show the prospect of real change. It is significant that the schools featured

in the case studies in Chapter 17 have all chosen a whole-school approach

that focuses centrally on enhancing the teaching and simultaneously

addresses a range of variables that relate to whole-school development.

REAL HOPE FOR THE FUTURE

Mal Lee and Arthur Winzenried point out the great disjunction between

the use of technology in the home and in the classroom. One reason they

give is that all the instructional technology introduced in the last 50 years in

teaching has, with one major exception, been available for use in the home,

and indeed was designed originally for home use. That major exception is

the IWB. This offers real promise to provide a major breakthrough if linked

in a whole-school effort. The authors see the school library, revitalised,

as playing a central role in the provision of resources that can be a major

factor in utilising the potential of the IWB. Whole-school information

management and information services are also a vital part of the process

recommended. Most essentially, the authors see the teacher as the key

to any advance: ‘The teacher is the gatekeeper who has to be convinced.

In fact, it is every teacher, whether working full-time or part-time in the

school, who has to be convinced’ (p. 226). It is this whole-school approach,

FOREWORD

xi

combined with recognition of the power of the individual teacher, that they

see as breaking the logjam that has prevented technology in the past from

making the impact that is necessary.

This book is not a remote study of the problem. It is a major achievement

through its use of the experience that has accumulated in many schools

over the past seven years. It is also powerful in its understanding of the

possibilities of technology in that setting. I can only recommend it strongly

to all those who wish to see major advances for education in the future.

Currently in Australia, education has become a major political priority and

technology features strongly in that priority. The authors provide invaluable

directions for the use of technology in schools, directions that can make

the political priority a real benefit to those schools and, through them, to

Australian society.

Phillip Hughes

Australian National University

1

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

The desire to use technology to enhance teaching and learning has been

evident at least since the early years of the Industrial Revolution, if not

earlier. Since then, numerous moves have been made to use different

types of technology to markedly enhance teaching and, in particular,

student learning. Over the last century, particularly since the introduction

of electricity into schools, there have been concerted efforts to use the

emerging technology to revolutionise teaching.

With the advantage of hindsight it is now apparent that none of

those revolutions occurred and that only in the last few years have any

significant breakthroughs been made and the way forward identified. What

we now know is that in the twentieth century teachers were not provided

with electric or electronic instructional technology which they could

readily use to assist their everyday teaching. Nor, in general terms, did the

school, education authority or government leadership provide the desired

direction setting or support required to ensure that the instructional

technology was used to best educational advantage.

It was not until the start of the twenty-first century that a confluence of

technological and human developments enabled a group of pathfinding and

visionary schools, education authorities and governments to finally begin

harnessing the undoubted capacity of the digital instructional technology

in order to provide teachers with the tools and support they required to

enhance their teaching and improve student learning.

It is also disturbing—as will become increasingly apparent—that in

2008 the combination of astute leadership and appropriate technology was

limited to a relatively small proportion of situations. The most commonly

used instructional technologies—that is, ‘any device available to teachers

for use in instructing students in a more efficient and stimulating manner

than the sole use of the teacher’s voice’ (Cuban, 1986, p. 4)—throughout the

developed world were still the pen, paper and teaching board. That said, in

THE USE OF INSTRUCTIONAL TECHNOLOGY IN SCHOOLS

2

different parts of the world there were schools and education authorities

finally using digital instructional technology in everyday teaching to

enhance student learning, with insights into what is required for everyone

to use that technology successfully.

In the early 2000s, a small group of pathfinding schools finally succeeded

in getting all their teachers and students to use digital technologies as

a normal part of everyday teaching. Most of those schools opted for an

approach that built upon the placement of interactive whiteboards (IWBs)

and a complementary suite of digital technologies in every classroom.

Virtually overnight, the teachers in those schools moved from occasionally

using the technology as a supplement to their paper-based teaching to

a mode of teaching that was predominantly digitally based. Indeed, so

dramatic and rapid were the uptake and everyday use of the interactive

whiteboards that the authors have referred to the phenomenon and

the surge in use as a ‘digital take-off’ (Chapter 16). After decades of the

purported disinclination by teachers to embrace all manner of electronic

instructional technology, it was suddenly common in these schools to see

all the teachers and students not only using the interactive whiteboards but

also other digital tools.

In the mid 1990s, a similarly small, prescient group of national

governments recognised the vital importance of preparing their young

people and schools for a digital future and embarked on a concerted plan

of action to use the digital technology and the networked world to assist in

enhancing national economic productivity.

By 2008 it was apparent that the proactive pathfinding schools,

education authorities and governments had not only begun to successfully

use the digital technologies to enhance teaching, student learning, school

efficiency and productivity, they could also provide an important set of

lessons for others wanting to embark on the same quest.

However, while individual pathfinders were showing the way forward,

the majority of schools and education authorities were still tinkering with

the technology and had not adopted comprehensive strategies to use the

digital instructional technologies to enhance national productivity. Rather,

a suite of indicators suggested most were still providing the traditional

paper-based schooling and falling further behind their more proactive

competitors.

It is still very early to postulate the existence of the divide and the likely

implications if no concerted actions are taken, and it is appreciated that the

hypothesis does need to be researched more fully, but at a time when the

INTRODUCTION

3

educational opportunities associated with the digital and networked world

are emerging at such a pace, those still embracing traditional schooling

stand to continue to fall further behind and to disadvantage their students’

life chances. As will become evident throughout this study, the signs point

to growing digital divides between:

homes and schools

•฀

pathfinding and traditional schools

•฀

proactive and reactive governments and education authorities.

•฀

The message that is becoming clearer in the twenty-first century is

that the longer it takes governments, education authorities and schools

to appreciate the fundamental importance of successfully using the

emerging instructional technology, to build on the lessons of history and

the pathfinders, the further they will fall behind those who have opted to

take advantage of the digital world. What was evident in 2008 with those

who had embarked in the mid 1990s on the path to provide an education

for a digital future, and ultimately enhance national productivity, was that

they were beginning to reap the rewards of their decade’s investment and

had positioned their societies to thrive in the future.

The importance of this development in the overall history of the use

of instructional technology in schools is significant. While it will become

apparent that some governments did endeavour to use the emerging

instructional technology to enhance teacher productivity in the 1950s

and 1960s, their efforts were to little avail, and it was not until the 1990s

that a small number of governments and education authorities began

adopting concerted and well-reasoned strategies that would enable

teachers to use instructional technologies that would ultimately enhance

national productivity.

While in the end the onus will be on each school to achieve the desired

whole-school use of the instructional technology, the school’s task is made

that much easier in situations where there is a clear national vision and an

appropriate support strategy.

This book is designed to provide educators, particularly in leadership

roles, with an in-depth appreciation of how history with its successes and

failures can contribute to identifying the way forward. History cannot

provide all the answers, but it can most assuredly provide an insight into

patterns, trends and ways in which instructional technologies have and

have not impacted on teaching and learning.

What this study of the last century can do is to identify what has and has

not succeeded, and what is required for the appropriate technology to have

THE USE OF INSTRUCTIONAL TECHNOLOGY IN SCHOOLS

4

the desired positive impact on both student learning and, increasingly, on

national productivity. Historically, it is very timely in 2008—as education

authorities across the developed and developing world contemplate the

digital future—to reflect on the ways of the past and consider why no

significant breakthrough was made until the early 2000s.

In 1992, Lewis Perelman in School’s Out maintained that:

In the wake of the hyperlearning revolution, the technology called ‘school’

and the social institution commonly thought of as ‘education’ will be as

obsolete and ultimately extinct as dinosaurs. (p. 50)

While Perelman’s projected solution was extreme, misunderstood the

realities of schooling and was never likely to be accepted, he nonetheless

foresaw how the then emerging digital technology could be used to

enhance teaching and economic productivity. Sixteen years after that

observation, the digital technology remains remarkably underused in

schools despite the global surge in its everyday use and the transformation

it has brought to commerce worldwide.

Probably the most telling statement on the low-level use made of

technology in teaching at the time of writing is to contrast the use of the

various digital technologies by the young in their homes with the use of

those same technologies in the classroom. In the home, young people

have embraced all manner of digital technology and they use it very

skilfully to communicate, learn, create and entertain themselves. PCs, Web

use, iPods, USB drives and multifunction phones are part of their daily

existence. Significantly they have seemingly opted at home for a strongly

constructivist, collegial, play-oriented approach to learning. In contrast, in

most classrooms the same young people have been invariably obliged to

rely on the teaching tools of the nineteenth century, to listen to the teachers

talk and to play the formal education game if they want to secure society’s

credentials. Occasionally—and only occasionally—have they been able to

use the technology that is an integral part of their lives.

Kids lead high-tech lives outside school and decidedly low-tech lives inside

school. This new ‘digital divide’ is making the activities inside school appear

to have less real world relevance to kids.

(Illinois Institute of Design, 2007, p. 24)

In 2008, few schools appear to have endeavoured to learn what was

happening with the students’ use of the technology in the home, let alone

try to integrate that learning into the school’s activities. Indeed, in the mid

INTRODUCTION

5

to later 2000s, one saw a significant number of schools and education

authorities introducing considerable constraints on the use of the emerging

digital technologies. By the mid 2000s it was apparent that the divide

between the learning in the home and in the classroom was widening at

a pace that had the facility to markedly diminish the place of the school in

the future education of young people.

Why has formal schooling reached that stage and not used the tools of

the digital era?

Why this is so is one of the underlying questions we address in this study.

However, before addressing that question several points need to be made.

In choosing to examine the use of instructional technology, the

authors are not for a moment advocating the adoption of a technology-

driven model of teaching; others have over the years, but we do not. Good

teachers have always used (and should always use) a variety of approaches

and tools in their teaching, some of which will have been around for years

and others that are new. A well-told story can be as effective as a quality

interactive multimedia presentation. Pens, paper and whiteboards have an

important and continuing role to play in teaching for some time yet. The

teaching board—be it black, green or white—has undoubtedly been one of

the most successful of all instructional technologies. Teachers have used the

boards across the world for over 200 years. In many respects the teaching

board defines the classroom. Interestingly, an analysis of the reasons for

the boards’ continuing near-universal use provides an important insight

into what is needed with the other technologies if they are to achieve such

widespread acceptance and use.

That said, in contemporary society there are compelling reasons for

making significantly greater use of digital teaching resources, and indeed

digital student administration and communication systems. The digital can

enrich the teaching, make the learning more relevant, engage all manner

of students, individualise much of the teaching, enhance the efficiency of

the teaching, open new unexplored worlds, reduce teachers’ workload,

and when successfully used across the schools of the nation can assist to

enhance national productivity in knowledge-based economies.

The traditional paper-based mode of teaching has long since maximised

its impact. A predominantly digitally based mode of teaching has only just

begun to realise its potential.

As the title indicates, this study focuses on the use made of instructional

technology by teachers and students, education authorities and govern-

ments in the past, primarily with a view to assisting schools make wise

THE USE OF INSTRUCTIONAL TECHNOLOGY IN SCHOOLS

6

educational use of the appropriate technology in the future. It is not overly

concerned with the amount of technology in the schools or the monies

expended on it, but rather how the technology was used in everyday

teaching. If teachers do not use the technology, it does not matter how

much there is or how effective it might be in theory.

That is not to suggest that the effectiveness of the technology should

not be a concern for decision makers and researchers, but simply that

in 2008 the authors believe it is timely to adopt a different approach to

help explain why the various technologies have had such a limited impact

on teaching and learning over the past century despite the considerable

investment and effort made.

The other point is that macro studies on the limited impact of

technology—and in particular ICT—on teaching and learning have already

been published, with those by Higgins and Moseley (2002), Balanskat,

Blamire and Kefala (2006) and Becta (2007) providing excellent overviews.

However, while those studies touch upon the plethora of variables

potentially impacting upon the effectiveness of using ICT, the authors

believe it was important to use history to assist in identifying and fleshing

out the key variables that need to be borne in mind when:

framing a national, authority or school instructional technology strategy

•฀

selecting the appropriate instructional technology

•฀

implementing one’s strategy

•฀

making the best use of the technology, conscious that in an integrated,

•฀

networked school community the same technology will (and ought to

be) used for a range of reasons—some educational while others might

be administrative, logistical or for communication or enjoyment

researching the effectiveness of the digital technologies, aware again of

•฀

their likely multiple uses.

We have chosen—in contrast to Larry Cuban’s seminal study in 1986,

Teachers and Machines—to analyse all the major instructional technologies.

Where Cuban opted only to examine film, radio, educational television

and computers in his quest to ‘explain the degree of teacher use of these

technologies since the 1920s’ (Cuban, 1986, p. 6), and then only in the

United States of America, the authors suspected that telling information

could be divined by exploring the use of all the major technologies, across

the developed world.

We did, however, restrict the study to only the major instructional

technologies. As you will appreciate, there have been many other

technologies that have been tried and found wanting by teachers over

INTRODUCTION

7

the century. Over those years, there has been a plethora of distinct

technology-like teaching machines and epidiascopes, and indeed forms

of the core technology like Philips video and Sony’s Beta-format VCR,

that secured little acceptance. There has, moreover, been the specialist

instructional technology intended for use in a particular teaching niche.

Considerable use was undoubtedly made of the slide rule, computer-aided

drawing (CAD) programs, electronic keyboards, language laboratories and

the computerised sewing machines, but the belief was that an examination

of them would not contribute any more than a consideration of the main

technologies. In Australia, for example, the School of the Air has made

excellent use of specialist technologies. Formed in 1951 to cater for the

children of the outback, the School of the Air has variously used pedal-

generated radios, two-way radio, aerial patrols, four-wheel drive vehicles

and, more recently, laptops, email and the Web (http://www.assoa.nt.edu.

au/_HISTORY/history.html). However, this was a niche group of students

requiring particular solutions, with little to inform mainstream schooling.

All the main lessons can be derived from a consideration of the use of

the major technologies.

We will be concentrating on general teacher- and student-usage

patterns. Throughout the research and interviews, regular references

were made to pathfinding teachers’ very effective use of the various

technologies and the impact that the use of these tools had on student

learning. Over the years there have undoubtedly been many wonderful

teachers who have made excellent use of all the technologies, but in

retrospect those teachers have constituted but a small fraction of the

teaching force. Historically, the early adopter teachers and the pathfinding

schools have received considerable coverage. With all the new technology

the media has focused on the pathfinders. The reality is that there has

always been a considerable gap between the usage patterns of the early

adopters and the middle and late adopting teachers who constitute the vast

majority of teachers, with the gap appearing to grow wider by the day.

LIFE CYCLE OF THE TECHNOLOGY

In examining the introduction and use made of each of the instructional

technologies it soon became apparent that all had experienced a common

life cycle, and that few schools or education authorities have factored

this information into their development strategies, technology selection

or budgeting.

THE USE OF INSTRUCTIONAL TECHNOLOGY IN SCHOOLS

8

All the technologies had been launched into the schools’ market with

great hype. All were characterised by remarkably common patterns of use.

And ultimately all had a finite life. Be it film, radio, television, and more

recently personal computing in its many forms, all were proclaimed as the

magic panacea. But in the end none were widely used by most teachers

or integrated into everyday teaching. They either became occasional

supplementary aids or vanished into history.

In searching for the reasons for the poor uptake by schools of tech-

nology that was used extensively by the general populace, it is important

to examine the common elements of their life cycles and to identify the

lessons upon which future educational leaders can build.

THE BUSINESS OF INSTRUCTIONAL

TECHNOLOGY

It is also important at the outset to recognise that a very basic market

force—the desire by technology companies to make a profit—has been

behind the introduction of all the instructional technologies. One should

never forget that basic drive in considering the history of the use of the

technologies; something that does appear to have been neglected in all

previous studies.

With the exception of the interactive whiteboard (IWB) (Chapter 15),

all of what educators view as instructional or educational technologies

were in fact products developed for sale to the wider consumer market.

While both the companies concerned and many educators believed they

could be used to enhance teaching and learning, the reality is that none of

the major technologies of the twentieth century were designed specifically

for teaching. Basically, teachers had to make do with products designed for

the general consumer or office markets (Chapter 3).

The prime drivers behind each of the new electric or electronic

technologies were technology companies, be they primarily entertainment,

broadcasting or consumer electronics corporations. Their desire was to

convince the key educational stakeholders—and in particular the financial

decision makers and the major vested interests—of the wisdom of buying

the particular technology.

It should therefore come as no surprise that in the introduction of each

of the new technologies the focus has been on a particular piece of

technology, and with it came the assertion that it alone was the magic

panacea. Scant mention was made of the desirability of using the particular

INTRODUCTION

9

technology in conjunction with other teaching tools until at least the

latter part of the 1990s. One thus finds periods where the ‘in’ technology

was film, school radio broadcasts, educational television, computer-aided

learning, laptop programs, interactive multimedia CD-ROMs or the

‘information superhighway’.

With the introduction of each of the new technologies one finds

governments, senior educational bureaucrats and invariably some tertiary

educators seeking to improve their situation by supporting the introduction

of the new technology. Undoubtedly, the vast majority of the technology

corporation personnel and the vested interests genuinely believed in the

potential of the new technology, but experience would also suggest that

some—particularly governments and senior bureaucrats—used the ‘latest

bandwagon’ to further their interests.

School leaders and teachers, particularly the early adopters, were

not immune from seeking to harness the educative power of the new

technology, and were invariably willing to make a concerted effort to use

what was new to enrich their teaching.

What came as a surprise in our analysis was the ongoing acceptance of

each of the new technologies, and the general failure by educational leaders

to question the intended use of each, particularly when it was apparent by

the 1980s that most teachers were not using them. One struggles to find

educational decision makers asking if the new technology was intended

for occasional use or whether it was to be used as an integral part of a

teacher’s delivery. While from the outset education authorities put in

place rigorous buying procedures to select the desired brand, they did not

appear to question the choice of the technology until well into the 1990s.

Allied to the focus on the broader consumer market, and to education

being a secondary player, all the electric and electronic technologies used as

instructional tools in the past century—except one—have been extensively

used by the wider society. It has probably been the mass market’s increasing

acceptance of the various technologies that has gradually inclined

schooling to the stage where teachers were willing to begin using the tools

of a digital world.

On reflection, the level of ownership and use of ‘educative’

electronic technology by the average home has always exceeded that of

the average classroom. Be it film, radio, hi-fi, TV, telecommunications, video

and audio recorders, computers, PDAs or Internet access, the facilities

available in the average classroom have always lagged well behind what

has been available in the average household.

THE USE OF INSTRUCTIONAL TECHNOLOGY IN SCHOOLS

10

While the digital forms of the instructional technology might not have

been used extensively in many classrooms, ironically by the mid 1990s

the digital technology was invariably being used extensively in school

administration and by most teachers in the preparation of their lessons

(Cuban, 2001; Balanskat, Blamire & Kefala, 2006, p. 4). By the 2000s, the

vast majority of schools in the developed world were making extensive use

of the digital technology in most facets of their school’s operations except

the teaching.

THE VARIABLES

Anyone who has been associated with major organisational change

appreciates that no single factor, such as a particular type or brand of

technology, will bring about sustained change. Rather, a host of interrelated

variables need to be addressed. The authors’ analysis of the history reveals

that this is very much the case with the use of instructional technology in

everyday teaching.

In considering the use made of the technologies over the last century,

nine major factors became apparent, as did the general failure to address

those interrelated variables.

1 Teacher acceptance

The first—and clearly the most important—was the gaining of teacher

acceptance to use the technology. Time and time again throughout the

twentieth century no apparent effort was made to understand why the vast

majority of teachers were not prepared to use the emerging technologies

in their teaching. Indeed, the situation was still to be found in more

‘reactive’ schools and education authorities in 2008.

Cuban makes the telling observation that teachers were—and still

are—the gatekeepers to what technology is used in the classroom (Cuban,

1986, pp. 66, 70–71). When teachers close their classroom doors, they are

in control of what happens. That basic fact would appear not only to have

been forgotten; one notes the concerted efforts made by the ‘scientific’

educators in the middle decades of the twentieth century to decide what

was best for teacher productivity, and indeed to ‘teacher proof’ the use

of the new technologies. What will become evident as one examines the

technology introduced in the twentieth century was that virtually all of

it obliged the teachers to dramatically change their style of teaching if

they were to make extensive use of the technology. Rather than teachers

INTRODUCTION

11

being provided with tools that would assist their teaching, teachers were

obliged to change their ways to suit the tools on offer.

Little wonder therefore that all the schools featured in the case studies

in Chapter 17 succeeded because they:

consciously aimed to provide technology that would assist the existing

•฀

teaching, and

ensured that they secured teacher acceptance of the new technologies.

•฀

Unless the teachers believe the technology will enhance the students’

education, feel comfortable using the technology and are able to use the

technology as an integral part of their everyday teaching, they will generally

not use it.

2 Working with the givens

Related to securing teacher acceptance has been the failure to give due

consideration to the conditions within which teachers work. While there

have been critics and educational theorists over the years wanting to

change many of the givens, most have been in place for centuries, and are

likely to remain so for some time yet.

The kind of ‘givens’ that were invariably forgotten when selecting the

appropriate instructional technology are:

Teachers are allocated class groups to teach.

•฀

Teachers are expected to manage those classes.

•฀

Classes are allocated to a teaching room or two.

•฀

Classrooms have been designed to accommodate the class groups and

•฀

little more. The rooms have limited space.

At the front of virtually every teaching room is a black, green or

•฀

whiteboard.

Teachers want to create their own lessons, or at least incorporate their

•฀

professional insights into each lesson.

Teachers have only limited teaching time to teach a crowded curriculum.

•฀

Teachers want tools that can assist their teaching in their classrooms.

•฀

3 Teacher training and teacher developmental

support

If teachers are to use the new and increasingly sophisticated technologies

wisely and appropriately, not only do they need to be comfortable and

competent in their use, they must also understand how best to use the

tools to improve their teaching. In brief, they need training and ongoing

developmental support.

THE USE OF INSTRUCTIONAL TECHNOLOGY IN SCHOOLS

12

However, history constantly reveals that this need has largely been

forgotten except in the more astute education authorities and schools.

As the technology changes in nature more rapidly, becomes more sophisti-

cated and converges with other technologies, so the need for appropriate

and timely development grows. By the late 1990s the challenge in even

the more forward-thinking situations was considerable.

Time and again schools and education authorities have not accorded

ongoing teacher development the requisite support or funding.

4 Nature and availability of the technology

Somewhat surprisingly, over the history of the use of instructional tech-

nology little analysis has been undertaken on the nature of the technology,

its applicability for use in classrooms where teachers are obliged to work

within the aforementioned givens, or indeed the availability of appropri-

ate technology. What is even more surprising is the fact that the tech-

nologies used were not designed for teacher use and as such their suit-

ability should have come under greater scrutiny.

Ironically, if one was examining the history of the use of the tools of a

wood turner or a plumber, one would automatically consider the nature of

the tools and their appropriateness for the desired task. One would also

not contemplate focusing on one tool as the magic panacea but rather on

an appropriate suite of tools. For some reason, that has not happened with

teachers’ tools. Teachers need tools they can integrate into their teaching.

As will become apparent, it was not until the start of the twenty-first

century that one saw—with the interactive whiteboard—the development

or availability of such tools.

On reflection, it was not until the early 2000s that teachers had ready

access to a suite of digital technologies that could be integrated into their

everyday teaching. The vast majority of the earlier technologies had (as will

be seen in the following pages) major shortcomings and could at best be

used as supplementary teaching aids.

One could argue that it was not until mid 2008 and the release of the

second-generation iPhone that secondary students finally had a portable

handheld digital technology with the functionality needed that everyone

could use.

5 Appropriate content/software

A key factor is the need for teachers to have ready access to the appropri-

ate quality content and software to use with the emerging technology.

INTRODUCTION

13

Film projectors, television sets, video recorders and interactive white-

boards are somewhat limited unless teachers have the appropriate

content or programs. To be widely used, the technology needs programs or

content of immediate value that can be accessed readily. These programs

and content took nearly as long a time to assemble as did the provision

of the hardware. It was not until very recently that teachers had the ready

access to the technology—other than the teaching board—that allowed

them to construct lessons in conjunction with the class group.

6 Infrastructure

All electric and electronic instructional technology needs some infra-

structure in place before it can be used in teaching. Not least is the access

to reliable and appropriate electrical power, and the facility to secure the

teaching materials to use with the instructional technology.

In more recent years the increasingly sophisticated digital and net-

worked technology has heightened the fundamental importance of having

equally sophisticated underpinning infrastructure and support. Without it

digital schools simply cannot operate.

As will again be apparent in the following pages, historically the

underlying infrastructure has been lacking and, once again, it is not until

recently that schools have begun to be equipped adequately. Without

reliable, inexpensive high-speed broadband access within every teaching

room there will be major limitations to what teachers can do with the

instructional technology.

7 Finance

Special mention needs to be made at this point of the limited monies that

have been (and are today) available to schools to finance the requisite

technology and associated support and training. School education budgets

have always been based on a traditional, paper-based mode of schooling

where the vast proportion of the recurrent funding is allocated to staff

salaries. While undoubtedly there will be some variation across the OECD

nations, in general terms salaries have consumed approximately 85–90 per

cent of the recurrent allocation to schools. The remaining 10–15 per cent

of the monies has to pay for all the other annual expenses, be it cleaning,

utilities, books or instructional technology. Capital works monies are

usually handled separately.

It needs to be stressed—as Atkinson et al. found for the UK-based

NFER in 2005 (Atkinson, 2005)—that there is a major dearth of published

THE USE OF INSTRUCTIONAL TECHNOLOGY IN SCHOOLS

14

analyses of the nature of school budgets and in particular of the proportions

allocated for the various operational commitments. Anderson and Becker

did, however, undertake an in-depth analysis of the 1998 US education

budget and found that only 2.7 per cent of that budget was spent on ICT

(Anderson & Becker, 1999, p. 5).

That very small proportion of the total budget is consistent with the

authors’ own experience with Australian school education budgets in

the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. Interviews with former senior educational

administrators reinforce the authors’ recollections and suggest that the

same kind of allocations occurred in the 1960s.

What will become apparent as one explores the use made of each of

the technologies is that there has been an ongoing shortage of monies to

spend on instructional technology and an ever-increasing challenge put

to the schools to find the monies for the technology.

Up until the 1960s, and probably even the 1970s, the small allocation

did not have a marked impact on the school’s acquisition of instructional

technology, particularly as the supporting infrastructure needs were not

extensive. Most schools’ contribution was supplemented by some kind of

central audiovisual or A/V unit.

However, from the 1980s onwards, the pressure kept increasing as

the technology developed and the required infrastructure grew. Other

demands like photocopying and media centres placed pressures on the

same limited pool of money, and education authorities did away with

the central A/V units. By the 1990s, the obligation to install increasingly

sophisticated and extensive networks and to markedly improve

the computer-to-student ratio placed immense strain on the limited

resource allocation.

Schools turned increasingly to parents for the monies, while

governments occasionally recognised the desirability of providing one-

off infusions of monies or ‘seeding’ grants. By the mid 1990s, the more

prescient nations that appreciated the importance of national investment

in their future productivity began providing substantial supplementary

funding for ICT. Mention will be made of the kind of investment made

in the UK, Singapore, South Korea, the Clinton–Gore Administration in

the US, and New Zealand.

That said, in 2008 the authors could not find (with the possible exception

of Singapore) any OECD nation that had fundamentally changed its

traditional paper-based mode of school funding. The OECD itself notes:

INTRODUCTION

15

Financing has been identified as a central aspect of modernising school

education. The last Joint Report pointed out that ‘the necessary reforms

cannot be accomplished within current levels and patterns of investment’.

(2006, p. 110)

It would appear that schools were still largely expected to fund their

burgeoning digital technology requirements from the same minuscule

allocation as 50 years earlier or to seek supplementary funding. Reference

is made below (and also in particular in Chapter 17) to a group of

pathfinding schools that have adopted a model of using instructional

technology throughout the school with monies from the existing recurrent

funding; however, they have been able to do so only at the expense of

other activities.

As will become increasingly apparent, school education is—as

Perelman (1992) suggests—one of the last of the dinosaurs to undergo

restructuring for the use of digital technology to enhance productivity. In

the concluding chapter, the authors return to this vital issue and suggest

some ways forward. There is an undoubted need for detailed comparative

international research on this vital issue.

8 School and education authority leadership

For schools and education authorities to achieve and sustain the successful

school-wide use of instructional technology across all the nation’s schools,

it will become increasingly evident that it is imperative that the leadership

in the schools and education authorities appreciate the underlying

vision, have a macro understanding of the digital technologies and the

supporting infrastructure, and are highly conscious of addressing the

key human and technological variables of the type examined by Lee and

Gaffney (2008) in Leading a Digital School.

The role of the school principal has always been vital (and is even more

so today) to any whole-school use of instructional technology.

As one reads of the efforts made in the past century to use the various

instructional technologies in teaching, one is struck by the general lack

of leadership displayed at both the school and education authority level.

As always, there have been major exceptions, but the lack of high-level

understanding revealed in recent analyses like that of Kathryn Moyle

(2006) has been evident for the past century.

It was not until the 1990s that some of the pathfinding school and

education authority leaders and national governments questioned the

THE USE OF INSTRUCTIONAL TECHNOLOGY IN SCHOOLS

16

appropriateness of the technology on offer, identified what was desired

by the teachers and students and took the lead in specifying what was

required in the instructional technology.

9 Implementation

Closely allied to the provision of appropriate leadership is the desirability

of using systematic, well-researched, practical, holistic education authority

and school implementation strategies. Some began to appear in the latter

1990s, but they were still uncommon in the 2000s.

What one will see with the introduction of each of the emerging

technologies is a surprising lack of implementation strategies with an

underlying educational vision and building on the very considerable

research on organisational change. The successful holistic implementations

were the exceptions. Rather, what one finds are implementation strategies

that focus on the technical, with scant regard for the human change

component.

Interestingly, the authors found in the literature on each of the

technologies little specific mention of the desire to have all teachers

use the instructional technology in their everyday teaching. That total use

is implied, and critics of the teachers’ failure to use the technology also

assume all of them should be doing so. It is not until the late 1990s and

2000s that one begins to see explicit concerted efforts to have all staff

using the technology. In an interview with one of the main interactive

whiteboard providers, mention was made of the company’s concern in

the mid 2000s of governments’ preoccupation with rolling out the

equipment, paying lip-service to the human change component and, as

a consequence, seeing the technology sit idle.

RELATEDNESS OF THE KEY VARIABLES

In analysing each of the instructional technologies in the following

chapters and reflecting on how they might have been used better, it will

soon become apparent that even in 2008 many lessons had still to be

learned and that any successful total teacher use of digital instructional

technology requires schools to simultaneously address all the afore-

mentioned variables.

To illustrate the growing complexity of the challenge, one of the authors

consulted in 2007 on the development of a large, independent secondary

girls’ school as a digital school, where the teaching resources and the

INTRODUCTION

17

administration and communication systems were predominantly digital.

The school had:

a visionary principal who was strongly committed to using the digital

•฀

technology to educate the girls for the contemporary world

excellent leadership staff

•฀

a high-speed network linking every classroom to the Net, and a

•฀

support structure that had ensured the network had been working

uninterrupted for eighteen months

made a major commitment to staff development

•฀

a desktop computer-to-student ratio of 1:2

•฀

four large PC laboratories.

•฀

However, most teaching rooms had no digital technology that could

be used integrally in everyday teaching. The majority of the teachers relied

on the pen, paper and the whiteboard. The students on average used the

computers less than an hour a week. The school of 940 students had only

four digital cameras. The school still relied on the use of personal computers

as largely discrete instructional tools. While it had successfully addressed

most of the aforementioned variables, it had yet to address several key

ones, namely the availability of appropriate instructional technology in

every teaching room.

We suspect that school is not unrepresentative of many schools in the

developed world in 2008 as it relates to the use of instructional technology.

Indeed, it may well be ahead of many.

THE CHALLENGE

The above case study also illustrates succinctly the challenge that has faced

schools, education authorities and national governments as they have

sought to significantly increase the teacher use of instructional technology

and, in turn, the effectiveness of its use in teaching and learning.

For most of the twentieth century few schools made extensive use of

the instructional technology. That challenge appeared—and until this day

still appears—virtually insurmountable. However, hindsight (and a little

historical research) tells us that the widespread teacher use of instructional

technology is easy to achieve at the individual school level if several key

points are observed.

First and foremost is the necessity to secure teacher acceptance of the

appropriate instructional technology. Due consideration then has to be

accorded a set of educational givens. It is then essential to:

THE USE OF INSTRUCTIONAL TECHNOLOGY IN SCHOOLS

18

select technology appropriate for everyday teaching

•฀

provide the requisite content and software

•฀

give the teachers the ongoing training, development and support to

•฀

best use those tools in their teaching

ensure the arrangements are in place to enable the desired ready use

•฀

of the technology

provide the requisite finance

•฀

have knowing school and education authority leaders who are able to

•฀

provide teachers and students with the required direction and support

use appropriate whole-school implementation and development

•฀

strategies.

And the fundamental importance of the school principal cannot be over-

emphasised.

History also informs us that in the past, little regard has been paid to

many or most of these factors.

While in many respects the securing and sustaining of total teacher and

student use of the technology are now relatively simple at the individual

school level, the challenge is that much greater at the education authority

and national government levels, particularly at the latter: the challenge is

immense at the national level to ultimately have every school and teacher

using the appropriate instructional technology as a normal part of everyday

teaching and learning.

It may well be too great a challenge for most governments within

the present structures, and as Lew Gerstner et al. (1995) suggests later

in this study, it might be necessary to release the operation of schools

from the tight control of the educational bureaucrats.

19

CHAPTER 2

INSTRUCTIONAL

TECHNOLOGY—

THE NOMENCLATURE

Over the years the mystique—and indeed the jargon—associated with

the instructional technology and the associated infrastructure has grown.

It is therefore important to pause briefly to clarify the terms that will be

used throughout the study and reiterate what the publication will and

will not address.

USAGE

As previously indicated, this book is very much about a history of the use of

instructional technology by both teachers and students in the classroom.

Most will be aware that the use of instructional technology in teaching

over the last century has at best been limited. While homes and businesses

have embraced all manner of technology, and in particular digital tech-

nology, in their everyday operations, the vast majority of teachers in the

developed world have used little technology in their teaching; and what

they do use, teachers have used for centuries. The questions that have to

be asked are why after all this time is the use of the newer instructional

technology so low and what lessons can contemporary educators learn

from the history.

Interestingly, very little has been written about the low-level classroom

use of instructional technology in schools worldwide. One can read at

length about the wonderful initiatives by governments and industry over

the last half century in introducing superb technology in schools, the task

forces that have been created, the projects mounted and the many in-depth

studies of the educational benefits of the latest technology, but there is

THE USE OF INSTRUCTIONAL TECHNOLOGY IN SCHOOLS

20

little mention of the extent of use made of that ‘superb’ technology in

the classroom.

Not surprisingly, therefore, most parents would believe their school

is well served by the latest technology and, indeed, many would have

contributed to the purchase of that technology. Unfortunately, the rhetoric

is a long way from the reality. The tools might be in the school but most

have limited use in the classroom. The bottom line is that if the instructional

technology is not being used, it has little chance of enriching teaching or

improving learning.

Over the decades, many a discussion has taken place on the educational

merits of a particular type of technology or of particular brands. The authors

have sat through many such discussions. The same discourse can be found

on today’s mailing lists or blogs. In the end, all that discussion counts for

little if most teachers continue to use pen, paper and the board.

While ultimately consideration does have to be made about the impact

of the various instructional technologies on student learning in the first

instance, it is vital to get all the teachers using the appropriate tools as an

integral part of everyday teaching.

EVERYDAY TEACHING VERSUS

SUPPLEMENTARY USE

In selecting the term everyday teaching, we wanted a term teachers and

educational leaders could readily understand. We also wanted a loose term

that recognised the flexibility needed in good teaching, in that on certain

days—or indeed in certain blocks of study—the teachers and the students

might make extensive or minimal use of the instructional technology,

depending on the desired learning.

In using the expression making integral use in their everyday classroom

teaching, we have in mind that the way teachers use the instructional

technology will be akin to their use of a pen or a book—the use has been

normalised and indeed the technology has been de-mythologised. There

will be teaching where a particular piece of instructional technology will be

used up-front and extensively, another where it might be used incidentally,

and yet another where it will not be used at all. One should not affix a

particular time period.

The other term that is used extensively is supplementary use. One finds

many teachers over the years have used particular tools to supplement

INSTRUCTIONAL TECHNOLOGY—THE NOMENCLATURE

21

their every teaching. Film, video and more recently DVDs have typically

been used to supplement the teaching, with teachers occasionally showing

a total program to enrich their teaching.

INSTRUCTIONAL TECHNOLOGY

After much consideration, the authors found Larry Cuban’s definition of

instructional technology that he coined in Teachers and Machines in 1986 to

be the best. Cuban defines instructional technology as:

any device available to teachers for use in instructing students in a more

efficient and stimulating manner than the sole use of the teacher’s voice.

(p. 4)

Over the years, various terms have been used to describe the technology

used in the classroom; indeed, with each of the terms there was a body of

professionals and often formal associations that came together to support

the advancement of that form of technology. Interestingly, the terms

used generally reflected the state of the technology of the time, and as

the technology morphed into a new form, so the names changed. One

of the advantages of the Cuban definition is its facility to accommodate

those changes and, most significantly, the shift from the use of discrete

technologies to integrated suites of technologies.

In the early 1920s, one finds terms like ‘visual education’, ‘graphic

education’ and ‘audio education’—and with each, supporting professional

associations such as the Virtual Instruction Association of America.

In the later 1930s and in particular the 1940s onwards, one finds the

term ‘audiovisual’ or ‘A/V education’ being used. One notes ‘A/V centres’

being set up by education authorities throughout the developed world

to support the use of this technology in schools. In time, schools created

their own A/V cells and appointed ‘A/V officers’, often within the library

staff. In brief, the term reflected the shift to the integrated use of both

sound and film, be it still or moving (Saettler, 1990; Cuban, 1986).

In the 1950s and in particular the 1960s, with the growing interest in

the media and the societal belief in the power of science, one saw in

addition to the term ‘A/V’ nomenclature like ‘media education’, ‘mass

media education’, ‘mass communication’ and ‘educational technology’

being used to describe all or some portion of the instructional technology.

THE USE OF INSTRUCTIONAL TECHNOLOGY IN SCHOOLS

22

With the introduction of computers in the late 1970s and early

1980s ‘computer education’ became the ‘in’ term, and with it came the

emergence of the computer education associations. Once again, the

name reflected the nature of the use of the technology and indeed the

focus on the use of computers as discrete tools. The 1970s and 1980s also

saw a significant growth in media studies as a subject taught in schools,

the study and creation of films, videos and radio, and the emergence of

teacher mass media associations.

With the development in the 1990s of the multimedia tools, and

more significantly with the emergence of the Internet, one saw the

term ‘computer education’ being superseded by the terms ‘information

technology’ (IT) and ‘information and communications technology’

(ICT). At the same time, the school librarians began shifting away

from book-related terms like ‘the library’ (from the Latin librarius meaning

‘book’) and began to provide ‘information services’ and ‘knowledge

management’, while advocating the development of ‘information literacy’.

In some cases, ‘research centres’ or ‘resource centres’ replaced libraries.

In the 2000s, with the societal shift to all manner of digital technology,

and the pathfinding schools’ use of an extensive suite of digital tech-

nologies, one sensed the term ‘ICT’ was struggling and that another term

associated with the digital element was needed.

The more the authors analysed the various nomenclature, and in

particular looked at the range of digital technologies that could be used

to assist student instruction, the more we became concerned about the

term ‘ICT’. We found it limiting and increasingly dated. The term was

used synonymously with the term ‘personal computers’ even in ‘official’

publications like the OECD’s Are Students Ready for a Technology-rich World?

(OECD, 2005). An even greater problem is that the term covered all manner

of analogue information and communications technology, be it television,

radio, phone or video. Most importantly, the term did not emphasise the

vital element—the digital—and the associated facility for ready digital

convergence.

Others have mirrored the authors’ concerns. Marc Prensky uses the term

‘digital technology’ throughout his writings on digital natives and digital

immigrants (Prensky, 2006, 2007). The Illinois Institute of Design think-

tank on digital schooling (referred to earlier), which involved thinkers of

the calibre of Charles Handy and Gary Hamel, opted to use the term ‘digital

media’ (Illinois Institute of Design, 2007, p. 5). The Australian Communi-

cations and Media Authority in its report, Media and Communications in

INSTRUCTIONAL TECHNOLOGY—THE NOMENCLATURE

23

Australian Families 2007, chose to use the expressions ‘technology’ and

‘electronic media’ to refer to the range of digital technologies used by

young people in their homes (ACMA, 2007, p. 2).

The important points to note with all the above terms is the emphasis

on the digital nature, the facility to readily converge digital functions and

the ever-expanding range of digital developments that teachers and

students can use in the teaching and learning at home and in the classroom.

A tool like Apple’s iPhone exemplifies that kind of digital convergence

and near impossibility of categorising it under any of the existing categories.

While labelled a phone, it can handle not only the normal telephony but

also work as a web browser, handle email and operate as a digital camera,

an iPod, a computer games console or a digital storage facility, to name but

a few of its functions.

The authors have thus chosen the more inclusive term digital technology

in preference to the expression ‘ICT’.

The 2000s also saw a very significant shift in focus from the technology

to the teaching and the adoption of the term ‘e-learning’. Indeed, for

probably the first time in the history of the use of instructional technology

the nomenclature focused on the teaching and not the technology. The

following definitions of e-learning reflect that shift.

… learning that is facilitated by the use of digital tools and content. Typically,

it involves some form of interactivity, which may include online interaction

between the learner and their teacher or peers.

(New Zealand Digital Strategy, 2008)

Learning facilitated and supported through the use of information and

communications technology, e-learning can cover a spectrum of activities,

from supported learning, to blended learning (the combination of traditional

and e-learning practices), to learning that is entirely online. Whatever the

technology, however, learning is the vital element.

(University of Bath, 2008)

EDUCATIONAL TECHNOLOGY

Particular mention needs to be made of the term educational technology,

as it has become associated with an international group of educators and

with particular tertiary educators seeking to make the best educational use

of technology.

THE USE OF INSTRUCTIONAL TECHNOLOGY IN SCHOOLS

24

This school of thinking emerged out of the behaviourist movement of

the 1950s and was extensively involved in the promotion of the various

types of computer-based or computer-assisted learning (CAL). One of the

major advocates was Paul Saettler. In The Evolution of American Educational

Technology (1990), Saettler notes:

Ely (Donald) makes a clear distinction between devices and equipment or

the physical science of educational technology and the behavioral science

of educational technology and considers process as the how to knowledge

and skills (the art and craft of the Greek concept of techne) and product as

the equipment and materials used in the process …

Heinrich et al. adapted John Kenneth Galbraith’s definition of technology and,

applying it to instruction, defined instructional technology ‘as the application

of our scientific knowledge about human learning to the practical tasks

of teaching and learning’. Thus, technology of instruction is ‘a particular,

systematic arrangement of teaching/learning events designed to put our

knowledge of learning into practice in a predictable, effective manner to

attain specific learning objectives. (pp. 5–6)

The focus of the movement has been on the process and on the mode

of learning one uses with the technology, rather than the technology itself.

Saettler and his colleagues have little time for the highly practical Cuban

definition of instructional technology and indeed the like-minded terms

used by various education enquiries that have been constituted over the

years to promote the widespread use of the technology.

Interestingly, an analysis of Saettler’s writings provides little insight

into why teachers have been so reluctant to embrace either the scientific

view of teaching or the technology, only that the uptake of all the tech-

nologies had been very small.

Of note is that while the ‘educational technology’ movement con-

tinues to write papers and hold major conferences, it was difficult to

identify in the interviews school settings where its thinking has had any

real impact on the classroom use of the technology. One senses the

educational technologists, with their desire to control the teaching and

learning process, will have very real problems accounting for the ‘chaotic

learning’ young people use with the digital technology in their homes.

25

CHAPTER 3

THE IMPACT OF

THE TECHNOLOGY

CORPORATIONS AND

VESTED INTERESTS

THE DRIVING FORCE

The desire by the major technology corporations to make a significant profit

has been the driving force behind the development, marketing, sale and,

most importantly for this study, in the availability and use of appropriate

instructional technology—from its inception until today.

None of the major technology has been developed by the public sector.

All has been provided by private industry. The intensity of the drive for

profits has been fuelled by the size, financial strength and standing of the

major technology corporations behind each of the technologies. All the

electric and electronic technologies have been marketed by companies that

were, at the time, some of the most powerful in the world. All brought

to the product launch immense financial backing, and the marketing and

sales skills to take the technology through its inevitable capital-exhaustive

start-up phase and into market acceptance and significant profits. They

also inevitably brought a view on how the technology could best be used.

In reviewing the literature on the introduction of the instructional

technologies and the reasons for the invariably limited use of each, there

has been little mention of the role played by the companies or indeed the

extent to which their marketing strategies shaped the adoption of the

particular technology, the implementation of those technologies and the

support given to teachers. It should come as no surprise that behind the

introduction of each of the ‘revolutionary’ technologies were substantial

corporations—often from the Fortune 500 list—with the research capability,

THE USE OF INSTRUCTIONAL TECHNOLOGY IN SCHOOLS

26

finance, standing and international marketing, sales and lobbying expertise

to persuade clients globally to use the new technology. Note the brands

associated with each of the technologies.

Film—Edison Lighthouse Company, Eastman Kodak, Victor Motorola,

•฀

Pathe, and Bell + Howell, and the major film studios like Warner

Brothers, 20th Century Fox

Radio—Marconi, Radiola, AWA, Philips, Telefunken, Grundig, and the

•฀

many commercial broadcasters

Television—Admiral, Mitsubishi, Panasonic, Hitachi, Philips, NBC,

•฀

CBC

Photographic slides—Kodak Eastman, Fuji, Agfa, Ilford

•฀

VCRs—Sony, JVC, Panasonic, Philips, Mitsubishi, Sharp

•฀

Audio recorders—Sony, JVC, National Panasonic, Philips, Mitsubishi

•฀

Computers—IBM, Apple, Microsoft, Intel, ARM, HP, Compaq, Acer,

•฀

Fujitsu, Toshiba

Printers—HP, Canon, Epsom, Lexmark, Brother

•฀

Networks—Novell, IBM, Cisco, Microsoft

•฀

Interactive whiteboards—SMART Technologies, Promethean, Hitachi,

•฀

Panasonic, Steelcase/Polyvision, Rubbermaid/MIMIO

All of those corporations knew how to open the right doors, gain

access to the key decision makers, shape the media and generate the hype

invariably needed to bring a new product onto the market. The CEO of any

of these companies could soon secure access to the head of an education

authority or minister of education.

While not for a moment attributing Machiavellian motives to any of

those companies, nor suggesting that any key government or educational

leaders did not believe in the new technology, it is important nonetheless

to remember that these were businesses first and foremost seeking to make

a profit. They were powerful organisations that knew how to leverage the

widespread acceptance of their product. If a new technology displaced an

older technology, so be it.

While it is virtually impossible in a study like this to cite the strategies

employed and approaches adopted by each of the major technology

companies during the twentieth century, it is probably reasonable to

surmise that the strategies were similar to those adopted by the major

technology companies in the 2000s.

It might come as a surprise to some educators that the bottom line for

the technology companies in 1930, 1960, 1990 and 2000 was significant

profit and not so much whether the particular technology improved

27

THE IMPACT OF THE TECHNOLOGY CORPORATIONS AND VESTED INTERESTS

teaching or learning. Profit was the driving force. Without it, the companies

ceased to exist. To achieve that profit and to convince potential clients to

acquire their product, the corporations needed to play hard and to use all

of the openings and strategies available to them. What will soon become

apparent was how little support the vast majority of the aforementioned

companies provided teachers. The exceptions stand out.

It is important to recognise, with but one exception, that all the

major instructional technologies of the twentieth century projected to

‘revolutionise’ teaching were products designed from the outset for the

wider consumer market. Schools, like the other ‘training’ sectors, were

only secondary markets. (The one exception was the interactive white-

board, which—as will be noted in Chapter 15—was designed initially

for teachers.) It was a case of companies, perhaps even prompted by

educators, seeking to widen their market base and to increase sales and

profits. In addition to the major developers of the technology, there

was with each technology a group of related companies also seeking to

maximise their profits from the sale of the technology to schools, which

helped market the new technology. All the instructional technology, for

example, needed content or software, films to run on the projectors,

programs for the radio and television broadcasts or software for the

computers. It was in those companies’ interest to help promote the new

technology. Invariably there was also a host of companies providing the

complementary products, the peripherals needed to get the most from

the core technology. Whether it was trolleys to move projectors, blackout

blinds, projector screens, PA systems, the makers of computer printers

or indeed the technical support companies needed to maintain the

technology, a large number of businesses were all working to increase the

uptake of the new technology.

Collectively these companies, plus other vested interests mentioned

below, worked to sell the new technology to schools. Their power was

considerable and this needs to be borne in mind when considering:

the choice of the new technology by education

•฀

why significant sums of public money were spent on technology that

•฀

was ultimately seldom used or wasted

why there was such little use made of the particular technology by

•฀

teachers, and

how a particular technology was used, and why it did little to help

•฀

achieve the desired educational outcomes.

THE USE OF INSTRUCTIONAL TECHNOLOGY IN SCHOOLS

28

THE VESTED INTERESTS

The technology corporations’ aspirations have always been aided by

interest groups within the schools sector keen to acquire the technology.

Be it teachers, school leaders, tertiary educators, central office bureaucrats

or governments, there have always been those who have foreseen—rightly

or wrongly—the facility for all the new technology to be used in teaching

and who have worked with industry on its introduction.

The reasons for the interest in the technology have varied but the reality

is that no company, no matter how big or how many doors it can open, can

sell its wares to schools unless there are decision makers prepared to buy

the technology and teachers who are prepared to use the technology.

Early adopters

Throughout the history of instructional technology there has always been

a group of early adopter teachers who have been prepared to trial the use

of the new and overcome significant hurdles to use the tool to enrich their

teaching. They have been a group that has been able to see past the various

impediments and recognise how the use of the technology would benefit

their students. Why they were prepared to do so is a moot point, but in

most instances one would have to surmise it was mainly to improve the

learning of their students. Often unwittingly, this preparedness to use the

new has helped to advance the careers of the early adopters. Interestingly,

virtually all the existing and former school leaders and tertiary educators

interviewed had been early adopters of the technology able to recount the

challenges they had to overcome to use the technology.

Within the early adopter group there has always been a subgroup

imbued with the latest technology, a group we have called ‘impetuous

technophilia’. These teachers and school leaders have over the years been

swept along by the hype of ‘the latest and greatest’ technology and who

have been disinclined to question the educational appropriateness of the

technology for use by all other teachers. For many years they have been a

godsend to the technology companies and for the students they taught.

Invariably, upon the release of a new technology, they are to the fore

explaining how it could be used in teaching. In more recent times, with

the advent of common-interest mailing lists, blogs and online newsletters,

it has been that much easier for them to flourish. No sooner had Apple

released its iPhone in 2007 with much hype than one noted on the lists

29

THE IMPACT OF THE TECHNOLOGY CORPORATIONS AND VESTED INTERESTS

the call to use them in teaching. eSchool News typified that approach when

on 22 August 2007 it proclaimed:

Educators assess iPhones for instruction

As education-specific applications emerge, schools mull

whether to invest in the devices

(eSchool News, 2007)

This example also succinctly demonstrates how the hype generated

by the major provider is amplified by the providers of the complementary

technology to make it near impossible for the early adopters to resist

acquiring the technology.

Tertiary education

In many countries key tertiary educators have had a significant impact over

the years on the choice of the instructional technology adopted by schools.

It transpired with radio, film, educational television and significantly with

the various forms of computing education. Many with high profiles have

used their standing—invariably on high-level advisory committees or

through the media—to promote the use of a particular technology and

indeed how it might best be implemented.

Granted, a few of those people might have vested interests; however,

most, like the early adopting teachers, believed strongly in the potential of

the technology to enrich teaching.

Bureaucrats

In the same way, so too have there been early adopters in the education

authorities. They have foreseen the benefits in acquiring the technology,

for both the students and their political masters, and have in turn approved

the spending of considerable monies.

One should hasten to add that there have also always been bureaucrats

who have used the latest technological bandwagon to advance their own

careers. (The authors can well remember the internecine warfare between

competing senior bureaucrats on which video format to adopt.)

Government

One of the realities of living in a democracy is that most in schools are

reluctant to accept that the elected official—be it a minister of education

THE USE OF INSTRUCTIONAL TECHNOLOGY IN SCHOOLS

30

or chair of an education board—needs to be able to demonstrate to their

electorate that a good job is being done. The other reality is that one of

the major tasks of senior bureaucrats is to ensure that the elected officials

are provided with the required kudos. Anyone who has spent time in an

education authority soon appreciates this need.

Over the years, the latest and most appealing of the new technology

has invariably been a major part of that ammunition. Television sets, VCRs,

computers and more recently interactive whiteboards provide compelling

media coverage and photo shoots. Promising computers to schools was

often seen as a way of winning voter support, and even revolutionising

education.

One of the challenges for all bureaucrats is to package into the

media releases the vital (but to many, the very mundane) infrastructure

expenditure. The Clinton administration did it well in the US in the 1990s

with its promise to connect every school to the information superhighway,

but theirs was a skill not many governments have been able to replicate.

Rather, one notes that most of the political releases simply focus on the

core technology and provide none of the training, support, infrastructure

or implementation that will facilitate its appropriate use.

While it is easy to criticise the political decision makers, one of the

lessons schools need to learn is that in a democracy—and indeed we

suspect any form of government—the importance of government support

must be fully appreciated with all its implications. Schools should more

openly acknowledge the contribution by the relevant government body.

The irony is that schools globally are very up-front about acknowledging

the contributions by sponsors as well as their own parent bodies,

but invariably do not acknowledge their main source of funding—their

government.

THE ECONOMICS OF THE SCHOOLS MARKET

The proportion of the total education budget available for spending

on instructional technology has (as mentioned in Chapter 1) traditionally

been very small. While reference has been made to the significant sums

spent (and wasted) on instructional technology, that money represented

but a small percentage of the annual education budget. As indicated,

Anderson and Becker (1999, p. 5) have calculated that in 1998 the US spent

2.7 per cent of the education budget on instructional technology.

31

THE IMPACT OF THE TECHNOLOGY CORPORATIONS AND VESTED INTERESTS

While one can debate the exact proportions at the different periods of

history in the various developed nations, the reality is that the figure has

always been very small. What is clear is that schools in comparison with the

other information-rich industries have only ever had minuscule monies to

spend on instructional technology.

Many technology companies in the last 50-plus years have learned that

reality the hard way. They have lost considerable money chasing the elusive

schools dollar. Increasingly, the technology companies took the approach

that if the schools wanted to buy their technology, so be it, but few were

prepared to invest in technology specifically for use in schools. (It is of

note that Apple Computers and Microsoft are probably the only two major

technology corporations that have maintained a strong involvement in the

schools market for a reasonably lengthy period.)

If the pool of money available to the technology corporations increases

significantly, history is already suggesting that their interest will grow and

the investment in instructional technology will be made. This became

apparent in the UK in the 2000s. The total investment in technology across

education has risen from £102 million in 1998 to more than £860 million

in 2007–08. Schools and local authorities (LAs) received funding for ICT

through five major grants:

Devolved Formula Capital

•฀

School Development Grant

•฀

Grant 121: National Digital Infrastructure for Schools

•฀

Grant 122: Electronic Learning Credits (eLCs)

•฀

Grants 125 and 210: Computers for Pupils.

•฀

The Electronic Learning Credits initiative, which provided funds for

teachers to acquire both educational software, alone received an additional

£50 million to add to the £200 million allocated in 2005 (Secretary for

Education and Manpower, 2005).

With the Labour Government’s decision to fund the placement of

an interactive whiteboard in every classroom in the UK and to also fund

the complementary hardware and software, the government stimulated

the growth of an interactive multimedia educational software industry, not

only in the UK but also across the world. Within a very short time one

saw not only the emergence of a range of dynamic start-up companies like

2 Simple and Big Bus, but also sizeable investment in the technology by

the book companies like Cambridge University Press and Heinemann, the

television companies like Granada, Sky and the BBC, and the technology

companies like RM and Hitachi. While UK-focused, these digital resources

THE USE OF INSTRUCTIONAL TECHNOLOGY IN SCHOOLS

32

could readily be used by English-speaking schools across the world and,

as RM found with its Easiteach in Mexico, the material could soon be

converted to other major languages.

RECOGNISING THE IMPACT OF THE TECHNOLOGY

CORPORATIONS AND THE VESTED INTERESTS

On reflection, throughout the biggest part of the twentieth century one

sees schools and education authorities adopting the ‘in’ technology of the

time, with little consideration being given to the appropriateness of that

technology for everyday teaching. It happened with film and radio, and

in particular with television, video, personal computers and interactive

multimedia CD-ROMs. This is despite the fact that by the 1970s there was

ample evidence in the scant use of 16-mm film, radio and television that

something was fundamentally awry.

By the 1970s, and most assuredly by the 1980s, it should have been

apparent to policy makers researching the scene that the emerging

instructional technologies had experienced a common, unsuccessful life

cycle. Cuban (1986) clearly identifies the common pattern of use with each

of the main technologies. In interviews with two of the key policy makers

associated with Australia’s ‘Computers in Schools’ initiative of the early

1980s they full well understood the key human and technical variables

requiring consideration.

However, it is not until the latter part of the 1990s and the UK’s moves

that one finds a concerted effort towards specifying what was required

of the technology corporations. In brief, DfES (the national education

department) or Becta (its communications and teaching authority) specified

the standards expected of providers, and unless they satisfied those

requirements they were denied access to government funding. This was

amply demonstrated in the UK’s approach to the choice of IWB providers.

Since then, other national educational authorities, such as those

in Singapore, Mexico, France and New Zealand, have taken a similar

responsibility for identifying the way forward, rather than simply relying

on the market forces. That said, those pathfinders are still very much in a

minority in 2008.

In addition to influencing the choice of a particular technology, the

larger multinational technology corporations have, often unwittingly,

strongly impacted on the use made of the technology. While the full extent

33

THE IMPACT OF THE TECHNOLOGY CORPORATIONS AND VESTED INTERESTS

and nature of that impact are a study in their own right, it is important

to recognise the influence of the technology—particularly that technology

not designed specifically for classroom use—on the teaching/learning

process. As the school-wide use of digital technology grows, the likelihood

of schools adopting practices alien to the desired educational outcomes

will intensify. For example, schools and education authorities globally

have adopted network security practices, with the associated constant

changing of user passwords that were designed for office settings, often

without asking if the arrangement was consonant with the desired

educational outcomes. It is only when one encounters (as we did in our

research) schools that question that approach that one begins to appreciate

how much schools ‘go with the flow’ and fail to ask the hard questions.

The same situation is being evidenced in the design and choice of what

are known as learning platforms or VLEs (see Chapter 14). Virtually all in

use were heavily content-focused and placed considerable controls on

the nature of student use. If their aim was to develop creative and lateral

thinking and to have the students develop attributes like their networking

and information literacy, few of the VLEs would assist.

While today the influence of the major technology corporations

remains immense, the signs are that at last the more astute schools and

education authorities are beginning to exercise the desired control over an

ever-burgeoning suite of possible instructional technologies.

DISCRETE INSTRUCTIONAL

TECHNOLOGIES

PART I

37

CHAPTER 4

TEACHING BOARDS

The teaching board—be it black, green or white—is synonymous with the

classroom. It occupies a central position in virtually every classroom in the

developed world and has been used integrally in everyday teaching since

the 1800s.

Ironically, the boards have been so successful and so readily accepted

that they barely rate a mention in the educational research literature. A

Google search on blackboards will reveal only the barest details, while the

same search will unearth a plethora of references to Blackboard, the online

teaching software.

The teaching board has long been normalised in teaching. It has been

completely de-mythologised as a piece of technology. That normalisation

should have attracted far more consideration in that the long-term success

and universal acceptance of this particular instructional technology

provides valuable lessons for the total teacher acceptance and use of all

other instructional technologies.

TEACHING BOARDS—A HISTORY

The first of the teaching boards—the blackboard, or as some like to call it,

the chalkboard—emerged as a breakthrough instructional technology in

the early 1800s. The year 1801 is mentioned as the date of sale of the first

US blackboard, although mention is made of slate-based blackboards in

Scotland in the late 1700s.

Andrew Coulson made the interesting observation that the last major

development in instructional technology occurred in 1801.

Though computers have been introduced to many classrooms, their addition

has been at best facilitative rather than transformative. In other words,

the enormous potential of modern technology to revolutionize education

THE USE OF INSTRUCTIONAL TECHNOLOGY IN SCHOOLS

38

remains largely untapped. A typical private school classroom today would

be immediately recognizable by and intimately familiar to a student from the

1850s. The last dramatic instructional innovation occurred while Thomas

Jefferson was president: the introduction of the chalkboard, around 1801.

(Coulson, 2006, p. 5)

While the exact origins are obscure, by the mid 1800s blackboards were

commonplace in the classrooms of the developed nations. The substance

used in the manufacture of the boards differed, with some being timber

and others slate-based, but all teachers had a large, dark, smooth surface

on which to write and draw, usually with chalk (Wikipedia, 2008a, 2008b).

The uptake of the boards was helped in the mid 1800s with the develop-

ment of the modern compressed chalk sticks, which were in fact usually

made from gypsum.

The initial board surfaces continued in use until the 1900s when first

steel and then rolled plastic tended to replace the wood and slate. The

twentieth century also saw the emergence of the facility to use multiple

blackboards via a pulley system, roll-ups or wings. The basic board tech-

nology remains today, although in the late 1950s and early 1960s there

emerged a trend to use green rather than black paint on the surface. By

the 2000s, the sale of blackboards had declined markedly but they were

still on sale and being installed in new schools.

The next of the teaching boards to emerge was the display board,

which often took the form of flannel or cork boards that complemented

the blackboard and provided the facility to display student work. Both

appeared initially in the later 1800s, particularly in the primary but also in

specialist secondary classrooms. Although the technology used to create

the display boards changed over time, in the 2000s the display boards were

still serving the same purpose as when first introduced. An interview with

one of Australia’s major board providers revealed that in 2007 virtually

every primary classroom in Australia included a display board or two, and

indeed the design brief for each new state and territory primary classroom

included the requirement to provide display boards. (Of note, the authors

could not find any reference in the research to the use or effectiveness of

class display boards.)

The chalk used with the blackboard was a problem for many teachers

and students. Thus there was an ongoing quest to find a surface that would

not cause allergies. The whiteboard technology—also known as the dry

erase board—began appearing in schools in the 1960s and gradually over

TEACHING BOARDS

39

the next 40 years came to replace the blackboard as the main teaching board.

Far cleaner and clearer than the blackboard, the porcelain surface of the

whiteboard will work for decades without any significant maintenance.

TEACHER USAGE

As indicated at the outset, teaching boards are still being used in everyday

teaching by teachers at all levels and within all areas of the curriculum

across the developed world. In 2008, the teaching board—whatever its

colour—remains the most used of all the instructional technologies.

So accepted is the teachers’ use of this instructional technology that

virtually no one has stopped to ask why, or indeed to contrast its universal

acceptance with the minuscule teacher use made of much more vaunted

electronic instructional technology.

In hindsight, the reasons for the success of the teaching board can be

found in the following considerations:

its ready facility to enhance the teaching of all, with no need for the

•฀

teachers to vary their teaching style to use the technology

ease of use by all teachers and students

•฀

the facility for all teachers to readily create their own lessons in class

•฀

using the board

its facility to be used as an integral part of everyday teaching without

•฀

any loss of teaching time

the ready ability to use text and graphics to complement the teacher’s

•฀

voice

the capacity to use the board with all manner of teaching styles, with all

•฀

areas of the curriculum from K–12, and with any number of students,

be it for instruction, communication, interaction or indeed classroom

management

its reliability, working every time regardless of electricity, batteries,

•฀

networks or software

ease of use with other teaching tools like the pen and paper

•฀

its low cost and length of life; the boards have always been relatively

•฀

inexpensive to acquire and maintain, and with a spare tin of paint will

easily last for 50-plus years

ease and safety of locating and making it available in every teaching

•฀

room

its use in helping to manage classes and handle the classroom

•฀

administration.

THE USE OF INSTRUCTIONAL TECHNOLOGY IN SCHOOLS

40

The CEO of one of Australia’s major teaching board manufacturers

made the telling comment in his interview that one of the main reasons

why teaching boards have not been surrounded with the hype apparent

with the electronic instructional technology is that the boards are made

by a cottage industry when compared with the punch of the multinational

technology corporations. They simply do not have the marketing dollars

to court the media. Moreover, teaching board manufacturers are selling

a proven product used not only by all schools but also most government

agencies and businesses, large and small. There are few board or seminar

rooms without a whiteboard or two.

Figure 4.1 Chalkboard of today (Courtesy Greg Walker)

THE TRADITIONAL AND THE MODERN

Even with its many strengths the traditional teaching board had

very significant shortcomings when compared with the new form of

teaching board that began to emerge in the later 1990s—the interactive

whiteboard.

Obviously, traditional teaching boards could not take advantage of the

digital world. More importantly, they were highly inefficient. Considerable

teacher time was required to prepare, remove and refresh the work on the

board. Basically, teachers had to redo the work every time they wished

TEACHING BOARDS

41

to use the board. In contrast, interactive whiteboards (IWBs) could not

only harness the opportunities of the digital world, but also replicate the

workings of the traditional board. In brief, IWBs married the best of the

teaching board heritage with that of the computer.

Despite this, the schools in the 2000s that had introduced IWBs

throughout the campus invariably chose to also retain at least their

traditional whiteboard. There were two very good reasons for this.

The first was that the traditional teaching board, and in particular the

display board, provided teachers and students with the ready opportunity

to ‘permanently’ display material—something not easily done with any

electronic or digital technology. Whether for a brief notice, spelling lists,

policy statements, classroom management, the display of student work,

or simply to help create vital ambience and classroom distinctiveness, it

was very handy to have a board or two with which to work. One only had

to walk into a primary school classroom or an inspired science laboratory

to appreciate the importance of the display facility in a classroom. The

second and very basic reason was that most classrooms already had the

boards, with years of life left in them, and that in many respects it was

more expensive to remove them and remodel the room. One found schools

either moved the existing central board to the side or dividing the existing

board in two, affixing a new border and placing the two sections on each

side of the IWB.

By 2008, however, it was clear that blackboards had passed their use-by

date. In a classroom with extensive digital technology one most assuredly

did not want teachers using blackboards with all the associated chalk dust—

data projector maintenance was enough of a challenge without adding

chalk dust. Schools were opting either to remove the boards or install an

IWB over the top. (However, in so saying, we encountered a primary school

where IWBs had been installed in the 32 new rooms of a new building with

the principal intriguingly insisting on a blackboard being positioned beside

each IWB!)

In hindsight one has to agree with Coulson’s earlier assertion that the

blackboard was the first dramatic innovation in instructional technology.

One could, however, argue that at the start of the twentieth century the

introduction of the interactive whiteboard was the second great innovation

in instructional technology, 200 years after the introduction of the first.

The early experience would also suggest that these two genuinely

revolutionary instructional technologies will continue to coexist for many

years to come.

42

CHAPTER 5

FILM—THE ‘FIRST

REVOLUTION’

The motion picture, and the vast industry behind it, was the first of the

electric-driven instructional technologies that was projected to revolutionise

teaching. In 1922, Thomas Edison observed:

I believe that the motion picture is destined to revolutionize our education

system and that in a few years it will supplant largely, if not entirely, the use

of textbooks.

… The education of the future, as I see it, will be conducted through the

medium of the motion picture … where it should be possible to obtain one

hundred percent efficiency.

(Cuban, 1986, p. 9)

Undoubtedly, the motion picture offered teachers a new and exciting

teaching aid. At last teaching had the opportunity to use the magic of the

moving picture to add to the written word and the teacher’s voice.

Throughout the period 1910–29, particularly in the US but also in

Europe there emerged a vigorous, albeit silent educational film industry.

In the US, companies that were to become synonymous with the motion

picture industry produced an extensive range of silent educational films—

companies like Bell and Howell, Victor Animatograph, Edison Film Library,

the Pathescope Company, Kodak Eastman and Fox Films (Saettler, 1990).

Ironically, that output declined markedly in the late 1920s with the

introduction of sound movies and the advent of the Great Depression. The

silent film productions suddenly were not wanted, even if in the depressed

economic conditions the schools had the money. Overnight, the clients

expected films with sound (ibid.). However, while the strong educational

film industry declined, the sound motion picture industry thrived and soon

became an integral part of life and entertainment in the developed world.

FILM—THE ‘FIRST REVOLUTION’

43

The 1920s and 1930s saw the flowering of the documentary film industry

and the production of films, which while not tied to the curriculum like the

earlier offerings were of considerable educational worth. Robert Flaherty’s

Nanook of the North (1922) and Man of Aran (1934) were excellent examples

of those offerings. This period also witnessed the emergence of national

and large corporate film production units that were to add to the range of

documentary film available to schools for the next 30 to 40 years.

In the 1930s, many education authorities in the developed world created

audiovisual units to assist their schools’ use of film. Some of the larger units

produced films but most simply maintained film libraries, distribution

networks and film consultants to serve their schools.

With the advent of World War II, ‘educational’ film making grew

significantly even though most of the productions could be more

appropriately described as propaganda. By the later 1950s and 1960s, most

schools had ready access to a wide variety of films, many of which were

excellent.

MOTION PICTURE TECHNOLOGY

The projectors with which teachers had to work were a challenge. The vast

majority were designed to handle 16-mm films, the lower-cost version of

the 35-mm film used by the theatres. While the manufacturers of those

Figure 5.1 Early 16-mm projector

(Courtesy Peter Dalwood)

THE USE OF INSTRUCTIONAL TECHNOLOGY IN SCHOOLS

44

projectors—companies like Bell and Howell, RCA Victor, Singer and Eiki—

would have teachers believe otherwise, classroom use of the film was not

easy. First off, one needed a darkened room in which to show the films.

The 16-mm projectors were heavy and cumbersome; usually too heavy

for many female teachers. They were relatively expensive and thus most

schools had only one or two, even in the 1980s. The projectors were either

set up in a special viewing room or transported from a secure storeroom to

a room with blackout blinds.

The early versions of the 16-mm projectors, from the 1930s into the

1970s, were invariably manually threaded. As an electro-mechanical

device, the operator had to thread the film by opening and closing a series

of gates, ensuring the socket holes on the film were in the right place,

and then attaching the film leader to a take-up reel. The facility to make

a mistake was considerable, and thus it was no surprise in our interviews

with education authority A/V unit directors to learn of the considerable

damage to film stock. The challenge was often made more interesting by

having the film arrive at the school not rewound, with a damaged film

leader or a break in the film.

From the 1970s, self-loading projectors generally superseded the earlier

manual loading models, but many of the aforementioned ‘challenges’

remained. Furthermore, teachers had to use the films provided, rely on

the description in the catalogue and hope the selected resource would be

appropriate. One could not pause a 16-mm film without burning a hole in

the film itself—it was extremely difficult to show a part of the film.

Figure 5.2 Hanimex 16-mm projector

(Courtesy Peter Dalwood)

FILM—THE ‘FIRST REVOLUTION’

45

In general terms, teachers could not use the movie film to create

their own lessons. Movie films were expensive to produce and required

considerable expertise in the making. While the tools to create 16-mm and

8-mm sound films have existed since the 1930s, the reality is that only the

most enthusiastic of teachers travelled the film-making path. Teachers had

to make do with the package provided.

As quality films were expensive to buy they were usually borrowed,

and it therefore took considerable forward planning to obtain them at

the desired time. With the inevitable short turnaround on the loans

teachers simply had to use the film, even if it was not at an appropriate

point in the topic development. (Memories still remain of filling

triplicate carbon paper order forms six to nine months ahead and waiting

anxiously for the courier or the train to arrive! A principal interviewed

recalled standing on the station waiting for an overdue train as 200

students sat ‘patiently’ in the school hall of an outback town awaiting the

film show.)

Furthermore, teachers generally had to use the film within the existing

teaching periods and organisational constraints. If a teacher had a 40-minute

period and a 137-minute Henry V film featuring Laurence Olivier to show,

he or she hoped to fit it into the available lesson times before the film was

due to be returned.

Another significant challenge for teachers using film—particularly up

until the 1980s—was the perception held by many teachers, and in particular

those with a strong academic bent, that films were entertainment. Serious

teaching entailed bookwork.

Interestingly, it would appear that in the 1950s and 1960s many of

the education authority A/V units made a concerted effort to not only get

the appropriate films to teachers but also help them to use the films. For

example, the units in New Zealand and Victoria, Australia provided the

opportunity for teachers and pre-service trainees to acquire a licence to

work a 16-mm projector, which could in turn be used when helping other

staff. (All these challenges pale when compared with that facing one of

the former principals interviewed who recounted the delights of using a

battery-powered 16-mm projector in a rural school with no electricity and

contending with the fumes emanating from the open car batteries used to

power the projector!)

THE USE OF INSTRUCTIONAL TECHNOLOGY IN SCHOOLS

46

TEACHER USAGE

Not surprisingly, teacher use of film was usually limited to the early adopting

teachers who were prepared to overcome all the aforementioned challenges.

However, even the early adopters tended to use film as a supplementary

aid, rarely as an integral part of the teaching. In contrast to the pen, paper

and board, film obliged the teachers to markedly vary their style of teaching

and use specialist rooms if they were to use the technology other than as an

occasional supplementary aid.

In the interviews with a cross-section of experienced school leaders it

became apparent film was used in many schools as an entertainment tool.

Many rainy lunchtimes or a late Friday afternoon lesson were given over

to watching a film. There was little doubt that the students in the 1960s

loved watching a good film as much as they did in 2008. (The story was

told by one of those interviewed of how the films destined for the school

were also used by the local rural community and shown at the Mechanics

Institute Hall.)

But despite the entertainment value of the medium, the actual class-

room use was minuscule. Cuban noted of the use made of film in the

US that:

after almost forty years of experience with motion pictures in schools the

evidence, flawed as it is, suggests most teachers used films infrequently in

classrooms.

(Cuban, 1986, p. 17)

The 16-mm projector with an anamorphic lens was the only way of

showing cinemascope films inexpensively, until the late 1990s and the

emergence of quality and relatively inexpensive data projectors. So while

the general use of film was low, in time film found a niche market in

the school and (as indicated in Chapter 18) was used extensively into the

1990s. That niche was within what became known as media studies or

film studies.

The media studies niche also allowed a group of teachers and students

to make excellent use of the Super 8-mm film creation facility, again until

at least the late 1990s. While intended originally for the home market in

the 1960s, the Super 8-mm format and the associated cameras, sound

projectors and editing equipment allowed generations of students to learn

inexpensively the basic principles of multimedia production well before the

computer software opened the world to all.

FILM—THE ‘FIRST REVOLUTION’

47

In analysing the use of film in the classroom, the efforts made by

the moving picture industry to ‘provide’ film for schools and the very

considerable efforts made to assist all teachers, primary and secondary,

it is very difficult to find any evidence of the educational leadership

asking the hard questions about the motion picture as an instructional

technology. Rather, what is apparent is a wholehearted embracing of

the technology, a going with the market, concerted moves to support its

widespread use by all those interested, and little consideration by the

school or education leadership of the appropriateness and role to be

played by film as the tool.

48

CHAPTER 6

RADIO—THE ‘SECOND

REVOLUTION’

By the second half of the 1930s, radio had become an integral part of life in

all developed countries, and together with the movie film provided much

of the entertainment for those societies.

In the US, visionaries who had in fact seen the potential use of radio in

teaching in the 1920s had made concerted moves to develop educational

radio networks, but in the end lost in their efforts to secure the desired

radio frequency, effectively being shut out by the commercial radio industry.

Saettler makes the telling observation:

By the late 1930s, the growth period of radio education had already begun

to decline. With the advent of World War II, professional activity in educational

radio came to a standstill and has failed to appreciably revive.

(Saettler, 1990, p. 197)

One thus finds the US efforts to use radio in schooling limited in nature,

particularly when compared with those nations that provided extensive

daytime school radio broadcasts. Where the US literature compliments

commercial radio stations for providing five magnanimous hours of school-

related radio programming a week in countries like the UK, Australia and

New Zealand, Sweden, Finland and Denmark, it was not uncommon,

particularly from the 1930s, for schools to have access to five or six hours of

school broadcasts each day during the working week. Governments soon

recognised the power of public radio to inform the populace, and it was not

only the fascist leaders like Hitler and Mussolini who recognised the part

it could play as an ‘educational’ tool. Radio, like film earlier, was considered

to have the power to revolutionise teaching, and soon many European and

British Commonwealth governments were spending considerable monies

RADIO—THE ‘SECOND REVOLUTION’

49

on the creation of education units within their public broadcasters and in

equipping schools with radio receivers (Wikipedia, 2008c).

William Levenson wrote in 1945:

The time may come when a portable radio receiver will be as common in the

classroom as the blackboard. Radio instruction will be integrated into school

life as an accepted educational medium.

(Cuban, 1986, p. 19)

Radio had immense appeal with both the young and the old in the

middle years of the twentieth century. It is important to remember that one

is talking about a period when radio was king, and where all age groups

within society tuned in for their regular programs, be they serials, plays,

quizzes, sport or the news. It was therefore seen as logical to use the new

medium to enrich teaching.

In Australia, for example, the new nationally funded broadcaster, the

Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC), was handed the brief of

providing school broadcasts soon after its creation in 1932. A shortage of

funding in the 1930s and World War II hindered the initial developments.

Soon after the war, the ABC was able to work closely with each of the states

to produce approximately six hours of programming, Monday to Friday.

Preference was given to covering those areas that best suited the medium

and where there were teacher shortfalls. Areas like reading, early childhood

education, science and music received particular attention, with special

texts and music books being provided to complement the radio program.

Programs like ‘Kindergarten of the Air’ become part of Australian folklore.

Many of the former primary teachers interviewed fondly remembered the

book readings, the nature studies broadcasts and the quality of the music

and singing programs (ABC, 1979).

The use of the school radio broadcasts grew in the 1950s and reached its

peak in the 1960s before being superseded, at least budget-wise, by school

television broadcasts. The ABC reported that during 1956–57, 88 per cent of

schools regularly used educational programs, with ‘most of the remaining

20 per cent outside the coverage area of transmitting stations’ (ABC, 1979,

p. 14). It reported further:

During the period 1965–75 regular usage of radio programs by schools

became almost universal. By 1965, 94 per cent of schools used radio

programs regularly, and by 1969 this figure had reached 97 per cent.

(p. 19)

THE USE OF INSTRUCTIONAL TECHNOLOGY IN SCHOOLS

50

It is important to note that the ABC provided these figures and, as indicated

in an interview with a former member of the ABC’s national education

advisory panel, at a time when the school radio broadcast unit was fighting

for its continued existence against the threat of educational television.

What was meant in the figures by ‘used radio programs regularly’ was that

a teacher at the school had used the radio broadcasts regularly.

While an immense amount of thought, effort and expense went into

producing quality radio programs and every effort was made to limit the

broadcasts to the available lesson time, the uptake and use made of those

programs were in general terms limited, like film beforehand.

USAGE AND CONSTRAINTS

There were different factors at play with the use of radio in comparison

with film.

The use of school radio broadcasts in secondary schools and the

larger primary schools was minimal. Use was primarily constrained by

the organisational arrangements and the ready access to and control

over the technology. But other factors did impact as well. While school

radio broadcasts were invariably repeated, the chance of the lesson time

coinciding with the program broadcast time was small. Initially there

was no way of time shifting, but even with the advent of reel-to-reel

tape recorders the challenge of lugging the likes of the early Byer or Rola

recorders into class was only for the dedicated.

The other major constraint in the larger schools was what one of

our interviewees aptly described as ‘the bloody PA system’. In the larger

primary and secondary schools the radio broadcasts were distributed

across the school via the public address (PA) system. With that system

the teacher had control of only the volume switch on the speaker in the

classroom, and was dependent on the front office staff remembering to

switch on both the PA and the radio—and the deputy principal not opting

to use the override facility to make a ‘serious announcement’. (Memories

of having a class ready for a broadcast and having to sprint up to the front

office still linger.)

The other reality was that teachers had little or no control over the

lesson offered. They had to use the package in full.

It also needs to be remembered that even in the developed world

many rural schools did not have electricity until as late as the 1960s, and a

significant number had little or poor radio reception.

RADIO—THE ‘SECOND REVOLUTION’

51

An interesting exception to the use of radio broadcasts was within

the smaller rural primary schools where they were used extensively and

integrally in the teaching for a significant period. One is talking about

one- and two-teacher primary schools, where the teacher/s taught a cross-

section of age and ability groups within one or two rooms. The teaching

in those schools was of necessity far more individualised than the larger

primary schools where the classes were invariably of a common age. In

those small schools the teachers could schedule their teaching around the

broadcasts. Most importantly, both the teacher and the students had direct

control of the radio receiver. (One of the interviewees spoke of the senior

students using the radio out on the school verandah or porch while the

teacher taught the younger ones in the classroom.)

All the indicators point to significant use being made in the small

primary schools of the music, nature and reading programs, particularly in

the 1950s, 1960s and even early 1970s. Teachers had, for example, copies of

the songs being broadcast and, conscious that many primary teachers were

not strong on music, the radio supplemented their shortcomings well.

An important factor influencing the use of the radio in the rural schools

in Australia was that the teachers could record in their lesson books for the

inspector that they ‘had done music’ at 2.30 pm on Thursday afternoon.

Figure 6.1 Three-in-one

hi-fi system with radio

(Courtesy Peter Dalwood)

The contrast between the small and large school use of radio was well

explained in an interview with a former principal who had responsibility for

fourteen one-teacher schools. He made mention of the very extensive use

made by the teachers in those schools of the radio broadcasts, particularly

those covering music, nature studies and reading. He noted that each

of the schools had its own radio receiver under the control of the teacher.

THE USE OF INSTRUCTIONAL TECHNOLOGY IN SCHOOLS

52

In time, the local education authority closed the fourteen schools and

brought all the students together in one central K–10 school, with a new PA

system that carried the radio broadcasts. Use of radio in the new situation

declined markedly.

By the early 1970s, radio as the entertainment in the home had been

supplanted by television. As with film, the same pattern was evidenced

with the use of radio broadcasts in that the public monies were shifted to

this new medium. As will become apparent in Chapter 8, the advent of

television brought school broadcasts to an end, although television did not

in general terms fill the void left behind.

NICHE USAGE

Ironically, as the provision of broadcast radio came to an end there emerged

in many secondary schools—particularly within media studies—student-

produced and distributed radio programs. It was not uncommon from

the 1970s onwards for secondary schools to have their own student radio

station, and indeed for a significant number of the newer schools to have

purpose-built radio studios.

Where the general teaching population had been reluctant to use

radio in their lessons, a selection of media and English teachers have used

radio production as part of the student communications program from the

1970s onwards. Those moves were helped by the emergence of the ready

availability of inexpensive, quality audio recording, editing and playback

technology. By the mid 1970s (as noted in Chapter 9), schools could

readily afford the audio recorders, mixing desks, amplifiers, turntables and

microphones needed for student radio production.

The 1970s also saw the emergence of community-based radio stations,

and with them the facility for the schools to merge their work with that of

the community radio stations.

While one is talking only of a niche group, the interviews made regular

mention of the use of student-produced radio well into the 2000s. The

only real difference in 2008 was the use being made of digital rather than

analogue technologies.

53

CHAPTER 7

VISUAL TOOLS—

THE EXCEPTIONS

Two visual instructional technologies were used integrally in classes by

a small but significant number of teachers and, in so doing, provided an

insight into why radio and film failed to revolutionise teaching. The two

exceptions were the photographic slide and the overhead projector. Both

were used by a group of teachers in everyday teaching for many years.

PHOTOGRAPHIC SLIDES

The use of the photographic slide as an instructional technology dates from

almost the inception of photography in the mid 1800s and the use of magic

lanterns, but it was not until the early 1950s that the technology became

cheap and easy enough for the average classroom teacher to use on an

everyday basis.

Figure 7.1 Magic lantern

(Courtesy Peter Dalwood)

Throughout the 1920s and 1930s a small group of expert users made

very effective use of glass photographic slides, but the projectors were

expensive for schools and the art of creating glass slides was tricky and

something only the dedicated could readily master.

THE USE OF INSTRUCTIONAL TECHNOLOGY IN SCHOOLS

54

The photographic slide became a reality for all interested teachers after

World War II with the release of Kodachrome colour film stock in 1954, and

the advent of a brace of photographic creation and presentation technolo-

gies designed for the home market (Wikipedia, 2008d; Kodak, 2008). The

facility to shoot slides on virtually all 35-mm cameras and, most importantly,

the opportunity to have film readily and inexpensively processed allowed

the interested teachers to finally use this powerful visual aid.

Figure 7.2 Slide projector with 35-mm

filmstrip facility (Courtesy Peter Dalwood)

The usability of photographic slides was in turn aided by the availability

in the 1950s and 1960s of relatively inexpensive projectors that were

able to handle pre-assembled sets of slides. While different brand-based

technologies sought to capture the market, Eastman Kodak’s Carousel

projector was the one that, in time, came to win the major market share.

The first of the Carousel projectors was released in 1961. The Carousels were

gradually refined over the years and the facility to use multiple projectors

and synchronised sound was added. The last of Kodak’s Carousels was

produced in 2004, 50 years after introducing Kodachrome (Wikipedia,

2008d; Kodak, 2008).

A small but significant group of teachers soon began to use photo-

graphic slides integrally in their everyday teaching, while many other

teachers made incidental use of the technology. In the sciences and

subjects like geography and art, photographic slides were used extensively

from the 1950s until well into the 1990s. It was not until data projectors

reached a price point in the early 2000s when they could readily be acquired

for classroom use that the life cycle of the photographic slide ended. Indeed

one can argue that the ubiquitous PowerPoint and its use of ‘slides’ is in

fact an extension of the photographic slide tradition.

The relative success of the photographic slide is to be found, at least in

part, in the reasons for the failure of all the other electronic instructional

technologies. First and foremost—in contrast to film, radio and television

—teachers had control of the technology in the preparation, delivery

VISUAL TOOLS—THE EXCEPTIONS

55

and ongoing refinement of their lessons. Teachers could use the slide

projector like the teaching board to assist their existing teaching—they did

not need to significantly change their ways.

With the advent of daylight projection screens, teachers could use their

normal teaching room. Any interested classroom teacher could readily use

the slide technology to create their own lessons and share them with the

class group. It was simple to shoot the slides, organise them and present

them as and when desired. In contrast to the broadcast instructional

technologies, the teachers had control of the pace and structure of the

lesson. They could readily pause the presentation at any stage, enter into a

discussion of the issue at hand and, if they wished, could easily add another

slide during the presentation. Most importantly, teachers determined when

they wanted to use the slides and for how long. They could thus readily use

the instructional technology within the existing organisational structures

and at appropriate points in a topic of study.

Teachers soon developed a pride in the slides and lessons they

had prepared. The teachers interviewed spoke of the many slide sets

they had prepared over the years and how they had been able to

reorganise and use the slides over that time. (One can remember art

and geography teachers coming to morning tea clutching their prized

Carousel collections.)

Figure 7.3 Kodak Carousel projector

(Courtesy Peter Dalwood)

In some countries teachers were able to claim the photographic

technology they acquired—and indeed the international field trips they

undertook shooting their slides—on their tax.

The advent of photographic slide cassettes and in particular the Kodak

Carousel enabled teachers to assemble collections of slides on major

topics and readily store them for future use. While the later model Kodak

projectors allowed for high-impact, highly professional multi-projector

presentations with synchronised sound, only the most proficient of

teachers took regular advantage of the facility.

THE USE OF INSTRUCTIONAL TECHNOLOGY IN SCHOOLS

56

The facility to package slide sets inexpensively and to place them

on Carousels came increasingly to be used by educational authorities,

educational foundations and commercial houses selling content into

schools. By the latter 1960s, the availability of quality A/V kits, invariably

containing a selection of slides with accompanying teacher notes, had

become commonplace. The local education authorities, national agencies

and increasingly the educational publishing houses produced the kits. The

quality of the slide kits produced by the likes of National Geographic and

Encyclopaedia Britannica was well known. Increasingly teachers were able

to complement their slide collections with the commercial and education

authority offerings. Indeed it was of interest to learn in our interviews of

the number of teachers who created slides out of the 35-mm filmstrips.

A number of education authorities around the world used photo-

graphic slide collections as part of the student assessment moderation

process. In New Zealand, for example, the interviews revealed that a cross-

section of the previous year’s student artwork was provided to all secondary

art teachers across the country as a guide to the marking of student work.

By the 1970s the cost of the Carousel projectors had reached the price

point where schools could acquire one for each of the specialists using them.

When combined with the new daylight projection screens, the art, science

and geography rooms could be set up permanently, enabling teachers to

use the technology whenever appropriate.

Figure 7.4 A 35-mm camera kit, with

single reflex camera, alternative lenses

and filters, tripod and flash lighting

(Courtesy Peter Dalwood)

VISUAL TOOLS—THE EXCEPTIONS

57

Slides in the hands of a quality teacher could have an immense impact:

with quality photographs and a well-shaped presentation, they could be a

very powerful teaching aid.

In retrospect, the success of the photographic slide was also helped

by the financial interest of the photographic industry keen to see its

photographic stock and creative and presentation technology being

used by teachers. Where the other electronic instructional technology

industries were committed to marketing packaged content, the

photographic industry focused on the creative process. Undoubtedly also

driven by the wider home consumer market, all the major photographic

companies like Kodak, Agfa, Ilford and Fuji provided extensive support

for teachers wanting to produce quality slides. The authors can remember

well how all—but in particular Kodak—provided extensive free advice

for teachers. All, moreover, sought to improve the quality and impact of

the slide projectors, moving from the early single slides to carousels, and

synchronised multimedia technology.

However, even with all these positives, regular classroom use was

restricted to a relatively small group of specialist secondary teachers and

the occasional primary school teacher. The photographic slide was not a

common tool of mainstream teachers.

THE OVERHEAD PROJECTOR

The second of the visual instructional technologies to be used by a significant

number of teachers in their everyday teaching was the overhead projector,

or what became commonly known as OHPs.

Overhead projectors, with their facility to project writing or an image

onto a screen, emerged as an instructional technology during World War

II. Designed primarily to assist in the training of the defence forces, the

technology slowly became available for schools (Wikipedia, 2008e). In the

early years—the 1950s and 1960s—the images were generated by the user,

writing with a felt-tipped pen, directly onto an opaque transparency. Other

image-creation facilities emerged such as the 3M overhead transparency

maker (Figure 7.6—see page 59), but in time transparencies could be

created with all photocopiers.

As with most new instructional technology, the initial versions were

expensive and use was limited to the armed services and the corporate

sector. By the 1960s, OHPs had reached a price point where most schools

THE USE OF INSTRUCTIONAL TECHNOLOGY IN SCHOOLS

58

could afford one or two, and thus one notes their use being advocated by

teacher training colleges and the education authority A/V units (Wikipedia,

2008e).

OHPs were simple to operate. All teachers could readily write on the

transparencies, and most importantly—and in contrast to the traditional

teaching boards—teachers could retain their notes and images for future

use. That facility was aided by the emergence of acetate rolls that teachers

could readily affix to the side of the OHP. The interviews consistently

referred to maths teachers’ use of OHP rolls.

OHPs did, however, need a reasonably darkened room as the average

projection lamps were not powerful. While most OHPs came with a spare

projection bulb, the invariably constant movement of the OHPs between

rooms did not help with the life of the bulbs, and many a teacher suffered

the indignity of the blown bulb.

In essence, the OHP was another teaching board in that teachers

prepared a visual image for the class to see on a large screen, be it text for

the students to copy or an image or graphic to help reinforce the explanation

of a concept.

Interestingly, in the latter 1980s, one saw the introduction of transpar-

ent computer monitors—or what were known as liquid crystal screens

Figure 7.5 Overhead projector

(Courtesy of Peter Dalwood)

VISUAL TOOLS—THE EXCEPTIONS

59

that were placed over an OHP and projected. The screens were in essence

an early, albeit somewhat lacking, form of the interactive whiteboard.

Classroom use of OHPs was initially slow and spasmodic, gradually

rising in time to a point in the latter 1980s and 1990s where they were used

integrally in everyday teaching by a small but significant group of teachers.

Maths teachers would appear to have been the main users, although

extensive use was (and still is) being made by primary school teachers if

they had/have an OHP in their room.

The slowness of the uptake can in part be attributed to the availability

of the technology and the infamous propensity of schools to lock the

instructional technology away in case it should be stolen. Those interested

in using the technology invariably had to endure not only securing the

key, but also trolleying or lugging the OHP to the classroom, darkening

the room and returning the technology. In those situations one had to be

keen. (One of the interviewees, who was the deputy director general of

an education authority at the time, used an OHP at a school to extol the

virtues of the technology. A year later he visited the same school to give a

presentation and asked for the OHP to be made available. In turning to use

the OHP he found on the transparency his writing from the year before. No

one had used the technology in the past year.)

In the latter 1970s and the 1980s, OHPs reached a price point where,

if there was the demand, schools could afford to position one in most

classrooms, increasingly without fear of them being stolen. They were not

the kind of item a thief could readily resell.

By the 1980s, the OHP had became the ‘in’ presentation technology.

Anyone presenting at a conference or seminar was expected to use OHPs

and, in fairness, some presenters could use OHPs to great effect.

Figure 7.6 A 3M overhead

transparency maker

(Courtesy Peter Dalwood)

THE USE OF INSTRUCTIONAL TECHNOLOGY IN SCHOOLS

60

However, even with all the refinements and the reduction in costs, most

school principals were not deluged by requests from teachers to have their

own OHP. The everyday use of OHPs was limited in the main to teachers

who relied on an expository style of teaching, in subjects like secondary

maths and science. Indeed, a wander around the average primary or

secondary school in the 1990s would reveal a few still in use, but with many

sitting at the back of the room, covered in dust.

By the 2000s, OHP use, even by the dedicated, had markedly declined.

61

CHAPTER 8

TELEVISION—

THE ‘NEW SAVIOUR’

By the 1950s, television had reached the stage of technological development

where it could be seen as having the capacity to revolutionise teaching. Here

at last was a technology that embraced the best features of film and radio

but could inexpensively be beamed into every living room and classroom.

The television industry and behaviourist educators promoted television

—and in particular educational television—as the technology to bring

teaching into the modern age. All that was needed was the production

of a suite of programs to cover the school curriculum. Not only would

those programs have more impact than any teacher, television would

help overcome the teacher shortage created by the ‘baby boomers’ of the

war years.

While it is easy in retrospect to dismiss the folly of that thinking, it

is important to appreciate the immense impact the advent of television

had on society as a whole. Look at the pictures of the crowds that sat

outside the TV stores in the 1950s—invariably watching the wrestling—to

appreciate the profound impact television had on people’s lives and why

both educators and governments should have been so taken with the

potential of the medium.

In the US, in particular, there were many plans to use educational

television to revolutionise teaching and to markedly enhance the

productivity of schools. Television was seen in industry, government and

tertiary education as being able to provide the desired expert instruction.

Television was hurled at teachers. The technology and its original applications

were conceived, planned and adopted by non teachers, just as radio and film

captured the imaginations of the earlier generation of reformers interested

in improving instructional productivity.

(Cuban, 1986, p. 36)

THE USE OF INSTRUCTIONAL TECHNOLOGY IN SCHOOLS

62

The belief in the immense potential of educational television was

fuelled by the USSR’s launch of Sputnik in 1957 and the US perception that

its school system was holding the country back. Sputnik opened the US

coffers for education and released very considerable money for the vested

interests. The US made its most notable use of educational television in

American Samoa in the 1960s. When H. Rex Lee was appointed governor

in 1961, he approached the US Congress for funds to provide most of

Samoa’s elementary school teaching via television.

Twenty-six new elementary schools were constructed and four new high

schools were built. A complete modern television facility was built with four

production studios and ultimately ten broadcast-quality videotape recorders.

The instructional television program was inaugurated in October 1964 and

television lessons began to be transmitted over six VHF channels.

Approximately thirty television teachers were brought from the U.S.

mainland—along with producer-directors and complete production and

engineering crews.

(Saettler, 1990, pp. 369–70)

At its peak in the mid 1970s, 60 lessons a day were broadcast in Western

Samoa. But by 1980 the experiment had all but come to end. Schramm,

Nelson and Betham’s classic in-depth study of the Samoan experiment,

published as Bold Experiment in 1981, makes for a fascinating read and

provides a valuable insight into why the immense investment and faith

in this instructional technology failed.

While no other educational television initiative was of the same scale,

there were nonetheless across the US in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s a range

of significant education-authority funded projects that made extensive use

of educational television as a major medium of instruction. The likes of the

St. Louis public schools, Pittsburgh, Chicago, and most notably Hagerstown,

Maryland, made concerted use of educational television (Saettler, 1990;

Cuban, 1986). The typical US educational television project was well funded

and backed by a major industry group or foundation. Invariably the project

engaged a group of ‘experts’ to design and produce the desired educational

program and to measure how educational television improved student

learning. The project usually also embraced a didactic, one-way broadcast

model of instruction designed, often consciously, to minimise teacher input.

It is estimated that the Ford Foundation alone invested over $US300 million

in educational television projects (Saettler, 1990, pp. 372–74).

TELEVISION—THE ‘NEW SAVIOUR’

63

In the US the focus was very much on purpose-specific, invariably

‘in-house’ educational television, with the commercial networks—like

radio beforehand—providing little educational content. While there were

notable exceptions like Sesame Street, the US saw few educational programs

on its commercial networks.

The path taken in the other developed nations was significantly

different, and again more akin to the public radio model with national

broadcasters being charged with producing educational television

programs for showing during the school day. It was usually the same public

broadcasters that had provided the radio broadcasts who now delivered the

educational television broadcasts—the BBC in the UK, ABC in Australia,

NZBC in New Zealand, ARD in Germany and YLE in Finland (Wikipedia,

2008c). All these public broadcasters were charged by government with

producing television programs for the school curriculum, particularly in

the 1970s and 1980s.

By the 1990s, the limited use made by schools of those programs was

apparent and the number of programs produced was dropped.

Interestingly (as will be seen in Chapter 15), the same public

broadcasters—and indeed the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) in

the US—used their media understanding to play a significant role in the

production and provision of interactive multimedia teaching materials.

THE TECHNOLOGY

The early television sets were all black and white, and expensive, but the

novelty and attractiveness of the medium dismissed those shortcomings.

The cost, however, meant most schools could only afford one or two. Those

precious items were in turn either locked away or placed in a special,

darkened television room. Television reception was sometimes problematic,

particularly outside the major urban centres. Invariably schools had only

the one aerial and only a few outlets at the most.

However, a major problem particularly in the secondary schools was

that in the early years of television there was not the ready facility to record

broadcasts—to time shift—and thus teachers had to hope their lessons

coincided with the broadcast schedule. Even when broadcast standard

video recorders appeared in the 1960s they were well out of the price range

of schools, and it was not until the release of the home VCRs that schools

could consider video recorders.

THE USE OF INSTRUCTIONAL TECHNOLOGY IN SCHOOLS

64

THE CONTENT

While considerable effort was made to broadcast programs that were

tied specifically to the curriculum, the reality is that in the early years of

television like schools made greater use of mainstream broadcasts. In this

regard, little has changed with the passing of the years.

Interestingly, the one program all those interviewed could remember

was the 1969 lunar landing.

TEACHING MATERIALS

Like others within society, quality teachers saw the potential of TV to

enrich teaching, but in the main they were shut out of the creative use

of the medium and, as with film and radio beforehand, had to make do

with what was provided at the scheduled times. There was little chance of

securing any ownership of the resource. Teachers once again had to work

with the broadcast in its entity. Until the advent of video recorders, there

was no ready way of teachers cutting and pasting the material broadcast

and integrating it in their lessons.

The cost of producing quality television—even just to insert into a

lesson—particularly in the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s, was prohibitive

for teachers, even if the teachers had the rare expertise needed to use the

requisite tools.

Teacher training on the use of the medium in teaching was virtually

non-existent, and was consistent with the attitude that those in control of

the medium knew what was best for the students.

Figure 8.1 TV in use

with a class in the 1970s

(Courtesy Peter Dalwood)

TELEVISION—THE ‘NEW SAVIOUR’

65

It ought to have been no surprise that this all-powerful medium should

have been so little used by teachers when one reflects on the mindsets of

those shaping the use of the medium and the logistical barriers that had to

be overcome.

USAGE

All those interviewed reported on the non use—or, at best, scant use—of

television before the advent of inexpensive video recorders. Larry Cuban,

commenting on his own experience as a superintendent of schools in the

US, noted:

[about] … 2% of teachers were using television when I entered the room.

Instructional television occupies a tiny niche of the school day for teachers

who use it.

(Cuban, 1986, pp. 41 & 49)

The use was, at best, supplementary except in the aforementioned special

projects.

The concerted class use of educational television obliged teachers

to adopt a fundamentally different model of teaching—a model that

most believed was inappropriate. In retrospect, school radio broadcasts

were probably more widely used by teachers in most countries than

television.

Niche use

Interestingly, like film, the use and study of television found a particular

niche in the mass media and indeed English communications programs

from the 1970s onwards where the major focus was on an analysis of its

use and form.

While a sizeable number of secondary schools made use of small

television studios for video production, few produced teaching materials. It

should also not be a surprise when the research undertaken in conjunction

with the aforementioned type of educational TV projects was unable to

show that teaching with the new medium improved student performance.

Within a decade, virtually all the high-profile educational television

projects had come to an end.

66

CHAPTER 9

VIDEO AND AUDIO

RECORDING—REMOVING

THE BARRIERS

The advent of relatively inexpensive audio and video cassette recorders in

the 1970s once again opened the doors for what some at least envisaged

would be a dramatic change in the nature of teaching. Here was the

panacea that would overcome the logistical problems of broadcasts and

enable all teachers to provide their students with quality audio and video

materials when needed. Teachers finally had the facility not only to record

and time shift, but also to readily edit, create and store their ‘own’ audio

and video teaching materials. The impediments that had confronted

teachers with the pre-packaged broadcast materials for the past 50 years

were now overcome.

The release of the video cassette recorder (VCR) in particular seemingly

represented a significant breakthrough. While the broadcasters and a few

schools had had reel-to-reel video recorders for some time, they were

expensive and cumbersome and required a degree of expertise to operate.

The cassettes were a tool that all teachers could use. Teachers could at last

store large quantities of quality sound and motion picture material, and

then insert that material into their lessons when and where they wished.

The new, portable technology could be used anywhere, in any classroom,

and the teacher could readily pause both the audio and video presentations

for class discussion.

The uptake of both the audio and video cassettes in schools in the

1970s was swift, but in both instances class use was limited and invariably

supplementary in nature. Neither technology changed—let alone

‘revolutionised’—the nature of teaching. However, while the video and

VIDEO AND AUDIO RECORDING—REMOVING THE BARRIERS

67

audio playback and recording facilities only ever supplemented traditional

teaching, they did become part of most teachers’ toolkits for the next 25 to

30 years.

AUDIO CASSETTES

As previously mentioned, schools had had audio recorders prior to the

1970s but their cumbersome nature precluded their ready general use.

Those drawbacks disappeared with the release of the Philips compact

audio cassette and the associated availability of light, inexpensive cassette

players. Every class could have one. Most importantly, teachers could secure

copies of the school radio broadcasts and use them when convenient

(Wikipedia, 2008f). Inexpensive pre-recorded audio cassettes created with

the new Dolby sound facility were made available, particularly for use in

English, with the teaching of foreign languages and the growing array of

A/V kits being acquired by the school libraries. Students even in the early

childhood classes could begin recording their own audiotapes.

With all these positives, the vast majority of teachers made little use of

the technology, and even then they used mainly the playback facility.

With the advent of listening posts—a facility that allowed a group of

five or six students to listen to the one cassette player—the hope was that

more teachers would use the facility. It was generally not to be, although

it is interesting to note that even in 2008 one still sees on the teacher

mailing lists requests by teacher librarians for information on where to buy

listening posts.

The one area where the facility is still well used is in the teaching of

foreign languages and the teaching of students of non-English-speaking

background. The digital audio playback had in 2008 still not reached a

point where it could displace the audio cassette player.

On reflection, the cassette recorders used by most schools were cheap,

with very average sound quality, and amplification was ill suited to a robust

clientele. (An interesting observation by a very experienced primary school

teacher was that with the listening post in operation one could not tell

if the students were actually listening.) So while the audio cassette—and

in particular the ubiquitous Walkman audio cassette player—was used

extensively by all outside school, its use in the classroom was limited.

The same situation prevailed even when the high-quality audio cassette

recorder, and in time the digital variety, became available.

THE USE OF INSTRUCTIONAL TECHNOLOGY IN SCHOOLS

68

As with film, television and radio, the quality audio recording and

playback technology found a niche in media studies, and to a lesser extent

in language courses.

EARLY VIDEO

The use of video in teaching, like that with the audio, ramped up with the

introduction of video cassette recorders (VCR). While again a few schools

had dabbled with reel-to-reel video recorders, it was not until the release

of VCRs that schools gave serious consideration to using this instructional

technology widely.

Figure 9.2 Shibaden reel-to-reel

black-and-white video recorder

(Courtesy Peter Dalwood)

Figure 9.1 Sony Sports

Walkman audio cassette player/

recorder (Courtesy Greg Walker)

The solution lay initially in the ¾-inch U-matic video cassette recorder.

Developed by Sony in the late 1960s–early 1970s as its initial home-market

video recorder, these very robust and reliable recorders came with their

own tuner, the facility to record and play back in stereo and to edit—in

a fashion—existing material. These machines were bulky and the early

tapes were regularly limited to a maximum length of one hour (Wikipedia,

2008g). The promotional literature referred to them as ‘luggable’.

VIDEO AND AUDIO RECORDING—REMOVING THE BARRIERS

69

Despite the drawbacks, video recording offered so many advantages

that most schools secured them. They suited classrooms and their

operations. Teachers did not need to move desks, darken windows or alter

timetables. Videos could be run when it suited and stopped at any time

when discussion or other timetable constraints necessitated it.

The cost of the new equipment was initially relatively high, in keeping

with all new technology. A U-matic VCR cost around $A1100 in 1975,

even when on a government contract. Televisions to display the media

were equally pricey, with a 26-inch Philips TV costing around $A740 at

the same time. Despite this, there were plenty of schools willing to try the

new media.

Figure 9.3 JVC U-matic video recorder

(Courtesy Peter Dalwood)

CAMERAS MAKE THE SCENE

Following the release of the U-matic recorder came the early video

camera. Companies like Sony, Panasonic, JVC and Hitachi began making

relatively inexpensive, quality colour video cameras. In some cases these

were offered as part of the recorder package (for example, the Panasonic

Porta-Pak) and promoted on the basis of producing one’s own videos

rather than breaching copyright.

Those who are sufficiently advanced in years to remember those times

will recall the considerable misnomer of Panasonic’s or Sony’s ‘porta-pak’

nomenclature. Intended to be a portable camera station and recorder in

one unit, the ‘paks’ were large and extremely heavy. Battery life was short

THE USE OF INSTRUCTIONAL TECHNOLOGY IN SCHOOLS

70

and a couple of kilograms in weight. Spare batteries were a necessity and

so the whole kit was a very substantial one, and not one that was readily

carried on the school bushwalk.

However, the price was attainable, even for smaller schools, and the

potential uses of the equipment were exciting. The immediacy of the play-

back was a major factor in its use. Mistakes could be analysed and then

removed, successes could be recalled again and again, especially at parent

evenings.

The average school in the developed world could, if it wished, now

acquire the technology to allow the students to produce their own media,

and the teachers to compile their own video resources. Teachers now had a

tool that they could readily use to create new material or record broadcasts.

If they wished they could record their own television programs, either in

totality or by ‘cutting and pasting’ broadcast and original material.

Pathfinding education authorities and schools across the western world

recognised the educational potential of the ¾-inch VCR. As the decade

progressed, bulk sales brought prices down and both the equipment and

the ‘software’ became more affordable. Further, the success of the medium

brought new development and video-on-demand became less of a dream

and more of a reality.

By the later 1970s, there were a sizeable number of schools that built

on the U-matic development, wired every classroom and provided the

monitors that would enable every teacher to call up a program when

Figure 9.4 Panasonic black-and-white

studio camera of the 1970s

(Courtesy Peter Dalwood)

VIDEO AND AUDIO RECORDING—REMOVING THE BARRIERS

71

they wished. Control equipment was still primitive, so many early systems

employed a variation on the telephone technology so that classroom

teachers could directly contact the A/V technician. In the Australian Capital

Territory, for example, the new Year 11–12 secondary colleges opened in

1976 with a central video control room, a bank of U-matics and reticulated

video throughout. One of the authors was fortunate enough to head up

the media faculty in one of those schools. There was undoubted initial

excitement shown by many of the staff, and from the outset the resource

was well used in science, geography, humanities and media faculties. A

highly supportive library staff and an enthusiastic A/V officer aided the

use. In retrospect, however, a number of the subject faculties made little

or no use of the facility, and the vast majority of the teachers simply used

the programs provided in toto, with little teacher use being made of the

college’s then expensive video editing suite.

Figure 9.5 Common

school U-matic recording

set-up of the 1970s

(Courtesy Peter Dalwood)

Some schools—such as Waverley College in Sydney and Wesley

College in Melbourne, Australia—not only wired the school for video,

but also created a significant production facility for the development of

educational television lessons. Much hype and undoubted initial excitement

accompanied these developments, but in time the enormous effort and

expense entailed in producing quality lessons impacted and the use of the

facilities waned.

These systems were limited to only the largest or wealthiest schools.

For most, it remained a dream and if they were lucky their allotment might

be a couple of VCRs, their attendant monitors and perhaps one camera and

porta-pak for roving projects. While the sales hype was considerable, the

bulk of the machinery, its cost and the relatively high skill levels that were

associated with it made the technology a ‘specialist’ one. Most classrooms

missed out.

THE USE OF INSTRUCTIONAL TECHNOLOGY IN SCHOOLS

72

THE ½-INCH VCR

In the later 1970s, Sony and JVC released the ½-inch VCR to capture the

world home market. Sony launched the now legendary Beta format, and

JVC and linked companies produced the VHS format. All came equipped

with their own in-built timer so teachers or school libraries could record

programs any time (Wikipedia, 2008h).

While seemingly inordinately expensive when compared with the price

of a VHS/VCR today, these inexpensive, small and readily transportable

video recorders ended the need to spend considerable monies wiring a

school and maintaining a central control room. For a fraction of the cost

schools could be provided with multiple portable VCRs and monitors that

all teachers could control. Soon schools had the option of securing even

cheaper VCRs that only had a playback function.

Early VHS tapes were of one hour duration (or shorter) and generally

cost around $A30 each, but within two to three years mass market pressure

saw three-hour tapes available for less than $10. For schools, the difference

was significant. The lower cost of the machinery, its smaller size and

the cheaper consumables brought video resources into more and more

classrooms. School libraries could afford a bank of recorders to amass

extensive VHS tape libraries.

The largest users were primary teachers and the humanities teachers in

the secondary sector.

TEACHING PATTERNS

The pattern of video recording established in the early 1980s largely

continued in use worldwide until the latter 2000s. One had only to note

the daily requests on the teacher-librarians’ mailing lists to appreciate how

widespread the practice still was in 2008. While the digital video recorder

(DVD) and hard-drive technology was slowly replacing the VCR in the

home, most schools—with their very sizeable videotape collection, and

the copyright ‘challenge’ of transferring programs from one medium to

another—were slow to move to the new medium. (The memories of those

we interviewed are that the vast majority of teachers and school leaders were,

particularly in the early days, somewhat ‘flexible’ in their interpretation of

the copyright laws if the material was being used simply for teaching. Any

offering of the local video store was deemed a useful resource.) In time, the

VIDEO AND AUDIO RECORDING—REMOVING THE BARRIERS

73

ethics of recording and the adoption of copyright laws that caught up with

the technological reality undoubtedly changed the schools’ approaches and

respect for copyright.

In most schools the teacher-librarians—or what have been variously

termed the library, media, resources and information services—have

overseen the recording, storage and lending of videotapes, like so much

of the ‘software’ used with the other instructional technology. They were

ideally positioned to comment on the extent and nature of the teacher

borrowing of videotapes. The comment made by all the experienced existing

and former teacher-librarians interviewed was that:

the video tapes were requested and used by only a small proportion of

•฀

teachers

a small proportion of teachers did make extensive use of the material

•฀

the tapes were used as broadcast; there was little or no effort made to

•฀

edit or use the ‘cut and paste’ facility to create new lessons

the tapes were used as supplementary teaching materials; none had

•฀

seen the tapes being used (as envisaged by the advocates of educational

television) as central to everyday teaching.

The reality is that by the 1980s, VCRs, TVs and home entertainment

centres were a normal part of most teachers’ homes. While some teachers

might have some reservations about programming their home VCR, the

everyday use of the technology did not worry them. Why then should the

VCR be used only as a supplementary teaching aid?

Those interviewed believed the answer lay in the broadcast

communication nature of the medium. While teachers could control the

time of use and the playing of the video, in many respects the video suffered

the shortcomings of film, radio and television. It is a one-way, packaged

communication, which the vast majority of teachers were unable or did not

have the time to vary.

On reflection, the VCR has been a significant instructional technology

for near on 30 years. While its use in teaching has been limited, and while

the technology is nearing the end of its life cycle, it was a tool all teachers

could readily use.

74

CHAPTER 10

COMPUTERS AS

DISCRETE TEACHING

TOOLS—THE ‘GREAT

REVOLUTION’

From the time of their first appearance in the 1970s a significant proportion

of business, political leaders, educational administrators, tertiary educators,

school leaders and teachers saw computers as the tool that would finally

revolutionise teaching. While the earlier instructional technology had not

had the desired impact, computers were perceived as having the power

and potential to overcome the earlier shortcomings.

The considerable faith placed in the technology, from all its advocates

from the outset was in the use of computers as discrete or stand-alone tools.

Here finally was an instructional technology with the in-built capacity to

replicate human thinking and shape the students’ learning.

However, after 20-plus years of use, the considerable development

of computers and the associated software, and a vast investment made

by schools and education authorities worldwide, computers as discrete

teaching tools experienced the same inauspicious life cycle as the previous

technology and had minuscule impact on the nature of teaching and the

development of the traditional academic skills. By the 1990s, and with the

emergence of the World Wide Web (WWW), the reliance on computers as

discrete teaching tools began to wane and over the next decade in the more

astute educational settings they became increasingly an integral part of a

suite of digital technologies.

In so saying, one could in 2008 still find many school situations

where teaching revolved around the personal computer and relied on

computer labs rather than the wider digital toolkit of the type described in

Chapter 14.

COMPUTERS AS DISCRETE TEACHING TOOLS—THE ‘GREAT REVOLUTION’

75

It is thus important to examine the use of the personal computer as

a discrete instructional technology and consider why, like the earlier

technologies, it was not embraced by the vast majority of teachers for use

in their classrooms.

THE TOOL OF THE REVOLUTION

By the 1960s, the educational potential of computers was being spoken

of in awe. One of the authors well remembers his first school principal,

Gil Hughson, commenting at a school speech night in 1968 on the role

that computers were about to play in schooling.

The greatest change you will have to accept is the technology revolution

which is leading us into the age of the computer.

(Lyneham High Year Book, 1998)

While that comment was prescient and by no means common of school

leaders at the time, it nonetheless reflects the potential envisaged.

The following observation by Seymour Papert in 1980 reflects the

potential he had long seen and advocated:

The computer is the Proteus of machines. Its essence is its universality, its

power to simulate. Because it can take on a thousand forms and can serve

a thousand functions, it can appeal to a thousand tastes.

(Papert, 1980)

Here at last was a technology that to many mirrored the thinking of

the young and which, even in its early rudimentary form, could be used

to help ‘teach’ the basic skills. Moreover, here was a tool that allowed the

older students to develop their higher-order logical thinking and acquire

the understanding that was needed in the future workplace. Most

importantly, personal computers could be used every day by the students.

Until this point only the teachers could use the instructional technology.

At last the teachers and the students had the technology to create or

present their work.

This fervent belief continued for many years, and even in the 1990s this

kind of observation was common.

THE USE OF INSTRUCTIONAL TECHNOLOGY IN SCHOOLS

76

Recent developments in media and communication technologies are set to

revolutionise the provision of education and training. With modern technology

it will soon be possible to deliver lectures, assignments, tutorials, simulations,

even the contents of the world’s best libraries to anyone in possession of

a modem and computer. Furthermore, amongst all these concrete benefits

... there is the shift towards a more student-centered approach. Learners

are now freed from the barriers of time and space imposed by conventional

classroom teaching, and encouraged to interact with the material in ways

that could never be supported adequately by traditional teaching methods.

(Rose, 1996, p. 65)

BRIEF HISTORY OF USE

The initial general use of computers in teaching in schools began in the

mid to later 1970s, invariably at the senior school level. Use was generally

made of mainframe computers, owned by an outside institution, to teach

programming in a new subject called computing studies. While at the time

access to mainframes generated immense interest among the devotees,

the reality was that those computers were primitive. Both the teachers and

students had to work via mark sense cards and allow time for the cards to

be processed, and thus ultimately use was limited to a very small group of

early adopting teachers and keen students who were prepared to overcome

the many hurdles confronting them. (Memories of teachers traipsing out to

the local university well into the night remain with the authors.)

In the latter 1970s, the situation changed significantly with the

introduction of personal computers, but in so saying it is important to

remember the rudimentary nature of that early technology, its considerable

cost and the lack of expertise in the use of computers with most teachers.

Apple released its groundbreaking Apple II in 1977, and in the same

year Tandy released its TRS 80 and Commodore released its PET. Here at

last were computers that could be bought by schools, even though initially

at a very considerable price. (Bear in mind a TRS 80 retailed in 1977 for

$US599, nearly as much as a colour TV.) While basic, these machines

enabled the enthusiasts to finally undertake their work in the classroom

(White, 2005).

White (ibid.) reminds us that the situation was further improved with

the following releases in the early 1980s:

COMPUTERS AS DISCRETE TEACHING TOOLS—THE ‘GREAT REVOLUTION’

77

1981:

IBM’s personal computer 5150

•฀

BBC’s Acorn in the UK

•฀

1982:

Commodore 64

•฀

MS DOS

•฀

Apple’s Dot Matrix Printer, for US$700

•฀

Compaq’s Portable PC, which was compatible with the IBM PC

•฀

1983:

the Apple IIe that was to remain in production as an educational

•฀

mainstay until 1993

Of note, also in 1983, Atari signed an agreement with Nintendo for the

worldwide licence of Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Junior video games

for Atari home computers.

Figure 10.1 Commodore 64 keyboard (Courtesy Greg Walker)

All of these early personal computers were aimed at the general

consumer market, but the Apple and BBC Acorn were also pitched

successfully at the school market. While all were limited and expensive,

they were well received by a fascinated public. White (ibid.) notes that in

1982, for example:

sales of home computers in the United States were 2 million.

•฀

shipments of personal computers worldwide during the year were

•฀

2.8 million, worth US$5 billion

unit sales of home computers during the year: 2.2 million.

•฀

A major shortcoming of all the early machines was the software. It

was all text-based. While revered by the enthusiasts, it lacked the user-

friendliness to be used more widely. That deficiency began to be addressed

THE USE OF INSTRUCTIONAL TECHNOLOGY IN SCHOOLS

78

with Apple’s release of its first Macintosh in 1984, and most importantly

its graphical user interface (GUI) that, in time, was to become the norm

with personal computers. While Microsoft introduced a PC with GUI in

1985 with its Windows 1.0, it was not until its Windows 3.0 release in 1990

that PC users began to enjoy the same ease of use as the Macs (Wikipedia,

2008i, 2008j).

By the mid 1980s, those of us leading schools were able to secure

relatively cheap IBM PC compatibles, or what were commonly referred

to as clones. ‘Cheap’ is probably the key term in that the majority of the

clones were what is known in the IT industry as tier-three machines. In

most developed nations there are usually three levels of computing:

tier one, which are the quality machines produced by the major

•฀

providers

tier two, which are quality machines that invariably utilise the

•฀

technology of the major providers

tier three, which are inexpensive copies of the major providers.

•฀

The tier-three clones were significantly cheaper than a tier-one Apple unit,

but at the same time were invariably of poorer build and unreliable, and

came with limited warranty.

Schools keen to secure computers but lacking in cash tended to opt for

the IBM clones. Indeed, mention was consistently made in the interviews

that a significant number of education authorities that went out to tender

also opted for both PC clones and the cheaper monitors. On the other

hand, there were education authorities that insisted on the higher-quality

machines, and thus one found a significant number of schools in the 1980s

with Apple, BBC and IBM, HP or Compaq personal computers.

Figure 10.2 Apple II computer laboratory of the 1980s (Courtesy Peter Dalwood)

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While the level of unreliability with the tier-three technology was very

high, none of the tier-one machines of this era was particularly known for

its reliability.

The latter part of the 1980s saw significant increases in the power and

in particular the memory of all the personal computers, and in the use of

the 1.2 MB floppy disks.

What soon became apparent to schools and education authorities was

that the life of personal computers was limited by the rate of technological

development, and that if schools wanted to stay approximately ‘state-of-

the-art’ they needed to replace their personal computers every three or four

years. As a consequence some schools opted to begin using some kind of

rental or leasing model from the later 1980s onwards.

A significant impediment to the widespread teacher use of personal

computers was the availability of a set of easy-to-use applications software

that allowed the ready transfer of work between computers. Microsoft

began redressing that shortcoming in 1989 with its release of Microsoft

Office for Mac. It released its Windows version of Office in 1990, the same

year it released its breakthrough Windows 3.0 (Wikipedia, 2008j). Finally

most teachers were able to work with quality GUI interfaces, and most

importantly teachers working with Macs or PCs could readily exchange

files across computing platforms.

The advent and widespread industry acceptance of Microsoft Office

led ultimately (as revealed in the interviews) to the demise of those

computers like BBC’s Acorn that Microsoft chose not to support. While the

Figure 10.3 Apple PowerPC of the 1990s (Courtesy Greg Walker)

THE USE OF INSTRUCTIONAL TECHNOLOGY IN SCHOOLS

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Acorn with its RISC architecture and extensive educational multimedia

software was in many respects well ahead of the opposition, it ultimately

suffered because it was perceived as being unable to prepare young people

for the workplace.

So rapid was the acceptance of Office, one could safely say that by

the mid 1990s it had become the ‘de facto’ international standard for

teachers. At the same time as the teachers were using Office and its

associated operational conventions in preparing their teaching materials,

so too were the young people using it in their homes. Office had become

in essence the application tool of the young throughout the developed

world, both in the home and at school.

In the early 1990s in Australia the move began to give all students in

the school—or at least a significant proportion—their own laptop, or what

in some circles were called notebook computers. The laptops chosen were

usually Toshiba, Compaq, IBM or in some situations Apple.

As usual, the initiative was launched with much hype, and significant

marketing support was provided from the laptop providers, Microsoft, and

the major resellers of the technology. Throughout the Australian media

and the school conference circuit, school laptop programs were proclaimed

as the way forward for all schools. In reality, the initiative was largely

restricted by cost to the country’s more affluent schools, even though in

most instances the students actually paid for the machines (Shears, 1995).

An interesting point to note—particularly in light of the comments

made in Chapter 11 on the technology of the home—is that when the

Figure 10.4 Toshiba

notebook of the 1990s

(Courtesy Greg Walker)

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81

Australian Council for Educational Administration (ACEA) undertook its

study of the Australian school laptop initiative in 1995, it found ‘46% of

students have access to a personal computer at home’ (Shears, 1995, p.

21). In keeping with other instructional technology initiatives the research

was commissioned to ‘prove’ the advantages to students of laptops over

traditional learning, and in this instance laptops over the use of desktops.

What became evident was (again like earlier technology initiatives) that

there was a group of very capable and committed early adopting teachers

who impacted positively on the teaching of their students, but there was

also a sizeable proportion of the teachers who either made little or no use of

the technology or who used it mundanely. (One of the authors remembers

vividly watching a history teacher working a class where all had laptops.

The students were sitting at their desks, in perfect rows, copying the notes

being handwritten in chalk on the board onto their laptops.)

In time, the number of schools using the model in Australia stabilised,

with some schools dropping the approach and a few others coming on

board. In the latter 1990s, the approach was ‘discovered’ by the US,

particularly with the support of Microsoft, and once again became the

way forward. Several of the leading figures associated with the Australian

program were taken to the US by Microsoft to foster the program there.

The next major development in the use of personal computers as the

instructional technology was the creation of the World Wide Web and the

launch of the ‘information superhighway’.

As becomes apparent in Chapter 13, virtually overnight the computer

ceased being simply a discrete instructional tool and became a facility to

access and work the online world. Quickly teachers, students and the more

astute educational leaders started viewing computers as the portal for

entry to the greatest teaching resource humanity had ever provided—the

Internet.

The release of the Mosaic web browser in 1993, and in turn its

transformation to Netscape in November 1994 (Friedman, 2006), opened

a new world for teachers, students and prescient governments. With the

ready, free availability of Netscape and the release of Microsoft’s Internet

Explorer in 1995, the use of personal computers as discrete instructional

technologies began to wane.

In so saying, it took many schools another five to ten years or more to

acquire the network access to allow that to happen, but in real terms by the

start of the twenty-first century personal computers in most schools had

become but one of a suite of digital instructional technologies.

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IMPLEMENTATION

By the mid 1970s it was apparent to the wiser heads that if schools and

education authorities were to get teachers using instructional technology

wisely and extensively, the schools and the education authorities needed

to adopt appropriate holistic implementation strategies. Plans were needed

that ensured the teachers were provided with the requisite direction and

ongoing support.

In retrospect, the strategies invariably used with computers left much

to be desired and it should come as no surprise that computers as discrete

instructional tools, with all their potential, should have been used so little

in the classroom. There were undoubtedly initiatives around the world that

did use well-reasoned implementation strategies, but in the main most of

the rollouts left much to be desired.

Computer use in virtually all schools and education systems was

initiated by a small group of enthusiastic teachers imbued with the potential

of the computers. Many in that early group had a mathematics/science

teaching background. While undoubtedly influenced by the pathfinding

computer companies, there is also little doubt that those early adopting

teachers believed in the educational potential of the technology and were

thus prepared to move heaven and earth to get underway. The feedback

from those interviewed points to this group of pioneering teachers putting

in an effort unparalleled in the use of instructional technology. (Sadly, the

same interviewees commented on the number of quality and committed

teachers who became disenchanted with the lack of support from the

school and education authority leadership, and who took their expertise

outside teaching.)

In the 1970s one thus saw computing in schools being initiated by

these devotees, often with the bemused blessing of their principals, but

also usually lacking any coherent whole-school implementation strategy.

In the first instance, most of the developments were in the secondary

schools with the senior students and were focused on getting computing

studies programs off the ground. The desire was to have the students learn

the languages of computing—Fortran, COBOL and BASIC—and how to

program.

By the early 1980s there was the chance to reflect on the efforts of

the enthusiasts and begin integrating the use of computers across the

curriculum in both the primary and secondary sectors, but with limited

success. Computing remained largely a separate subject.

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83

In the US, the advent of the personal computers opened the way

to introduce into the classrooms what has been variously described as

computer-assisted instruction (CAI), computer-aided learning (CAL)

or mastery learning. While the devotees might argue about the subtle

differences between each of the approaches, all built on the stimulus-

response theories of the likes of Skinner and Watson to teach the basic

literacies with highly structured, linear programs. Saettler made the

observation that in the US:

by the mid 1980s a national pattern of computer use in the schools could

be clearly discerned. The drill and practice mode had become dominant as

well as teaching about computers.

(Saettler, 1990, p. 458)

In Australia, the then federally funded Schools Commission took a very

different approach and in 1982 launched a national Computers in Schools

project, which—as those interviewed reinforced—built extensively on the

constructivist school of learning and sought to provide Australia’s young

people with a general appreciation of the role computers could play in all

areas of learning.

In hindsight, the team assembled to develop and steer the Schools

Commission project was very capable and very reasoned in its expectations

of the computer’s use, and appreciated from the outset the importance in

using a holistic implementation strategy that placed considerable store

on providing appropriate ongoing teacher training and using teaching

software that would engage the students. Unfortunately, as one of the

team members observed, their thinking was years ahead of the technology

available and needed in order to realise their vision.

This type of high-level, carefully reasoned and well-resourced holistic

approach was the exception rather than the norm.

The approach followed by most schools and education authorities

was to focus on buying the ‘latest and greatest computers’ and to assume

that the mere provision of the technology would not only address all

the implementation issues but also encourage teacher use and improve

student learning. One has only to look at the school, education authority or

computer company media releases of the period to appreciate the emphasis

given to the technology and the scant attention given to teacher training,

the provision of appropriate software or indeed the required technical

support.

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84

What became apparent in the interviews with former senior

administrators was the importance placed on how many computers were

being provided and how much was being spent. The lowering of the

computer-to-student ratio was perceived as the all-important performance

indicator.

Computer purchases for schools generated very good political capital.

Many a government made great mileage out of announcing it was going to

give all schools a computer. (It was revealed that one education authority

took what it thought was a more reasoned approach and based its allocation

of computers on the population of the school, and thus obliged three small

rural schools to share the one computer!)

However, it was not only governments that sought to gain ‘political’

capital out of the acquisition of computers. Very early in the piece, schools

and education authorities began using the availability of computers

in their marketing. John Goodlad, in his famous study of US schooling in

the early 1980s entitled A Place Called School, commented that ‘purchasing

microcomputers is becoming the “in” thing for school districts to do’

(Goodlad, 1984, p. 340). (An interview with one of Australia’s pathfinding

computer educators brought back memories of the then major educational

system integrator who was given an order for $10 000 worth of computers.

When he inquired what was desired the school simply indicated that the

principal had included in the marketing brochure that the school had

computers worth that amount!)

A related development that was seen in various guises across the

developed world was the creation, funding, branding, and often staffing

of special lighthouse technology schools. Terms like ‘schools of the future’,

‘technology schools’ or ‘computing schools’ were used to describe them.

Some—like Apple’s ACOT schools—were subsidised by technology

companies, while the local education authorities funded others. Schools

like River Oaks Primary in Canada received international attention. In

retrospect, those schools—like the ‘television’ schools that preceded

them—had little impact on the use of instructional technology in teaching

in general. Their ‘special’ nature set them apart from normal schools and

the facility to transfer their work to the everyday teaching in other schools.

While the schools generated great copy for the technology corporations

and education authorities, their existence had little other than ‘political’

impact.

The laptop program launched in Australia in the early 1990s had

a strong marketing imperative. While not suggesting the educational

COMPUTERS AS DISCRETE TEACHING TOOLS—THE ‘GREAT REVOLUTION’

85

rationale was not strong, most of the schools involved were private

schools needing to succeed in a highly competitive market place. For a

time in Australia it was very much the ‘in’ thing to use laptops school-wide

(Shears, 1995). While the pathfinding teachers were prepared to take and

make wise use of anything given, this kind of political rollout invariably led

to great waste and boxes of computers were left literally unopened.

Implementation at the school and indeed education authority level was

invariably determined and carried out by the computer coordinators, or

what became in time the IT (information technology) or ICT (information

and communications technology) coordinators. The focus was thus on the

technical aspects of the implementation and ensuring that the equipment

worked, and not how it might be used by all teachers.

Within the schools the computers were usually located in a computer

laboratory or two, with a teacher or two given control of the operation.

In time, in some situations technical staff were employed to assist in

maintaining the labs, but the technical agenda prevailed. Issues like theft

and ease of maintaining unreliable equipment held far greater sway than

any educational rationale.

By locating the computers in labs, schools introduced organisational

constraints that were to play a major part in limiting the use of not only

computers, but in time all manner of digital instructional technology. While

the issue is examined more fully below, in brief the lab placement left the

general teaching rooms with only the old tools—the pen, paper and the

board—and the majority of teachers to build most of their lessons around

Figure 10.5 Apple ‘clamshell’ laptops of the early 2000s (Courtesy Greg Walker)

THE USE OF INSTRUCTIONAL TECHNOLOGY IN SCHOOLS

86

their use. The rest of the teaching staff, each with their own speciality, soon

assumed ‘computing’ would be taught by the computing teachers. It is of

note that as late as 2007 in the UK around half of the desktop computers in

the primary schools were still located in computer labs (Becta, 2007, p. 7).

In 1995, Gerstner et al. in Reinventing Education commented:

When schools do employ technology they treat it more often as an add-on

or an extra. Computers are typically in separate labs, to which students are

periodically sent. (p. 12)

By the mid 1980s one began to see an increasing number of education

authorities mandating the development and submittal of school computing

plans, and then in time IT and ICT plans. They were ‘stand-alone’ plans

that sat beside the many other discrete plans, like those on occupational

health and safety (OHS), social inclusiveness, indigenous education, equal

employment opportunities, and literacy, which schools were increasingly

obliged to submit. Most were ‘bolt on’ plans that sat adrift from the

school’s main development plan. Invariably committees with a strong

representation by the computing or ICT staff developed the plans.

Principals were rarely involved. The work was left to the ‘experts’. The focus

was usually on the mechanics, although in time the question of computer

integration in the curriculum became an issue.

Particularly in the 1980s and 1990s, the plans built on the notion of

constancy that characterised much school strategic planning, and thus

schools were obliged by their local authorities to submit three- and

sometimes five-year ICT plans, even when it was becoming increasingly

apparent that the ICT scene was changing at a pace and becoming

increasingly uncertain. Of note is that many, and possibly most, education

authorities were still obliging schools to submit their largely ineffectual

‘stand-alone’ ICT plans at the time of writing in 2008.

What separate ICT plans succeeded in doing was to reinforce the

separation of the ICT from the everyday teaching. All of the schools featured

in the case studies below did not use a separate ICT plan, but rather

integrated the use of the technology into their overall school development

planning.

It was unusual for the school or education authority leadership to

play any major role in the introduction of personal computers, other than

to promote the investment being made. Most school leaders had little

understanding of computers and were happy to delegate their use to

the experts. In a pattern akin to the initial use of computers in industry,

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87

responsibility was delegated—some might say abrogated—to middle

managers, and as such the technical agenda assumed primacy over the

educational.

Almost all the principals and educational administrators interviewed

indicated that they left the deployment of and the best ways to use the

computers—particularly in the 1980s—to the ‘experts’. In the 1990s, the

continuing lack of widespread use of the computers prompted the more

astute school leaders to take a greater leadership role, but in retrospect

there was little or no training provided to existing or prospective school

leaders on how best to use the technology. The research and interviews

unearthed very little literature or programs specifically designed to provide

school and education authority leaders with the skills and understanding

needed to make the best use of the computers.

By the early 1990s and with the drop in the relative price of computers,

a growing number of primary schools opted to place the computers in

the classroom, often in clusters in what became known as pods, but many

well-intentioned deployments were frustrated by the dearth of teachers

able to make use of the facilities.

The efforts to employ appropriate implementation strategies were

made more challenging in many situations by the moves to school-based

management (SBM) in the 1980s and the devolving of responsibility for

computer deployment wholly to the school. In the larger schools there

might be the requisite expertise on the staff, but not so in the medium-sized

to smaller schools, where well-intentioned teachers or teacher-librarians

were simply ‘lumbered’ with the task of making best use of the computers.

In speaking with the cross-section of school leaders and pathfinding

computer educators it became apparent that this devolution, without the

requisite high-level direction setting and support, contributed to the use of

ineffectual implementation strategies, and in turn to considerable waste of

money and effort.

As the number of computers in schools grew and became more

sophisticated, the facility to network those computers improved. And as

the desire to use the computers across the curriculum intensified, so grew

the importance of schools adopting wise, holistic implementation strategies

and of central agencies providing the requisite advice and support.

In hindsight it is apparent there were a number of decisions relating to

the use of computers, and in particular their networking, which would have

been better handled at a regional or national level, rather than by teachers

in the school.

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In the latter 1990s, a significant number of national and regional

governments such as those in the UK and New Zealand that appreciated

this problem, while retaining significant school-based decision making, took

responsibility for setting direction, determining procurement standards,

establishing the networks, providing the requisite teacher and leadership

training and commissioning the research.

However, in the mid 2000s there were still many situations in the

developed world where this has not happened and schools were left to

fend for themselves.

COMPUTER-TO-STUDENT RATIO

Special mention needs to be made of the computer-to-student ratio referred

to above. It was a measure used with much abandon in the 1980s and

1990s, and indeed in government analyses and media releases, particularly

in the US, in the 2000s. It communicates the desire for all students to have

their own personal computer at school.

In the US, a survey undertaken by The Greaves Group and published

as America’s Digital Schools 2006 Report documents the continuing quest

across the US to achieve what it terms ‘ubiquitous computing’; that is, a

1:1 student–computer ratio. It is reported that in 2006, 24 per cent of US

school districts ‘were in the position of transitioning’ to that point (The

Greaves Group, 2006, p. 7). The same organisation was also lauding the use

of student laptop programs, with the aforementioned survey reporting that

19 per cent ‘of all student devices are mobile’ (ibid.).

In 2007, the new national Labor Government in Australia announced a

‘digital education revolution’ by promising to provide a personal computer

for every student in Australia in Years 9 to 12.

The student–computer ratio is a measure that should be viewed

with considerable care. The mere existence of a technology matters little

educationally if it is not being used, or used inappropriately.

While the quest to achieve a 1:1 ratio will enhance the profits of

the computing companies and provide some political capital for the

governments concerned, one needs to question the educational value of

such a vast outlay of monies, ask why replicate technology already in the

home and identify whether even the most affluent of nations can afford to

sustain such a ratio, even if it was educationally desirable.

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89

Chris Dede from Harvard University made the telling observation

in 1998:

I feel additional concern about attempts to supply every student with

continuous access to high performance computing and communications

because of the likely cost of this massive investment. Depending on the

assumptions made about the technological capabilities involved, estimates

of the financial resources needed for such an information infrastructure vary

(Coley, Cradler, & Engel, 1997). Extrapolating the most detailed cost model

(McKinsey & Company, 1995) to one multimedia-capable, Internet-connected

computer for every two to three students yields a price tag of about ninety-

four billion dollars of initial investment and twenty-eight billion dollars per

year in ongoing costs, a financial commitment that would drain schools of

all discretionary funding for at least a decade. For several reasons, this is

an impractical approach for improving education.

(Dede, 1998, p. 2)

The more astute educational authorities in different parts of the world

also began at a similar time to seriously question the educational worth of

the ongoing improvement in the student–computer ratio. No significant

studies were revealing any marked improvement in student learning

resulting from the vast outlay on personal computers. These authorities

believed schools needed some computers for teaching but that there

were complementary digital instructional technologies that would be

better used by teachers. They were increasingly conscious of the very

short life of PCs, the cost of replacing them and the associated software

every three or four years, and hence the questionable value-for-money

they represented.

USAGE

The use made of computers as discrete instructional technologies by

teachers and students in the classroom did grow in the 1980s and 1990s,

but ultimately remained small. While in time most teachers came to use

computers in their lesson preparation (Cuban, 2001; Balanskat, Blamire &

Kefala, 2006), the vast majority did not use them in their teaching, nor in

turn did they enable the students to use them in school, particularly in the

period when computers were used discretely.

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Despite very extensive and expensive national and education authority

efforts, by the mid 1990s it was still rare to have more than 25 per cent of

teachers using personal computers integrally in their everyday teaching.

The level of teacher use in most schools and education authorities would

have been far less.

Meredyth et al. in 1998 note:

While many reports extol the potential benefits of computer use in classrooms

international surveys suggest that around the world, the use of information

technology in classrooms is the exception rather than the rule. (p. 13)

Larry Cuban in his aptly titled 2001 publication Oversold and Underused

observed:

Teachers at all levels have used the technology basically to continue what

they have always done: communicate with parents and administrators,

prepare syllabi and lectures, record grades and assign research papers.

These unintended effects must have been disappointing to those who

advocate more computers for schools. (p. 178)

Becker, in his analysis of Cuban’s assertions, concludes:

In response to Cuban’s projection that computers are likely to continue to

play a minor role in student learning of academic subjects in elementary

and secondary schools, this article has presented an examination of related

evidence. On the issue of whether computers are generally a central vehicle

of instructional activities in classrooms, the data suggest that Cuban

remains correct up to the present time. Although a substantial fraction of

teachers are having students do word processing during class time, most

in-class use of computers occurs as part of separate skills-based instruction

about computers, in occupationally-oriented courses such as business and

vocational education.

(Becker, 2000)

In their interviews the authors seldom encountered schools where

more than 25 per cent of teachers were using computers integrally in their

teaching even in the 2000s, let alone in the 1990s when computers were

basically stand-alone tools. A study of government school teachers in

the state of South Australia in October 2003 noted that only 26 per cent

of teachers believed they used ICT regularly in their classroom teaching

(Measday, 2004).

Cuban makes the telling point:

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91

Teachers tend to overestimate frequency of computer use. The discrepancy

between self report and practice is common not only of teachers but also

among other professionals.

(Cuban, 2001, p. 201)

It is appreciated that the use made of PCs varied across the curriculum,

but the reality is that despite very considerable expense and effort to

integrate computers into the curriculum teachers did not embrace the

classroom use of personal computers. That was the case as much in the

schools with laptops as with desktops.

In making this observation it is important to bear in mind that even by

the mid 1990s in the more developed nations the computer–student ratio

was in the region of 1:10–1:15, or in general terms two per class group

(Coley, Cradler & Engel, 1997; Meredyth et al., 1998, p. 13).

With no ready facility to display the work done on the PC with others

in the class, there was only so much that even the best of teachers could do.

When one compares the school situation with that in the home (as we do

in Chapter 11), it will be appreciated that schools were struggling.

One of the very real challenges in examining the use of any of the

instructional technologies in schools—and personal computer use in

particular—is that most of the data is compiled by government agencies,

where the bureaucrats would appear inclined to paint the best possible

picture for the governments concerned. Cuban noted this propensity

throughout his 1986 study, Teachers and Machines. This inclination is

particularly apparent in the recent OECD work. Scant mention, for

example, is ever made of the age of the computers in use, even if half were

so old as to be next to useless. Moreover, there is a marked inclination

to use nomenclature and base observations on that data that portray a

positive image, but which on closer inspection have little real meaning. For

example, in its 2005 study Are Students Ready for a Technology-rich World?,

the OECD makes the observation:

Access to a computer at home remains comparatively less common than

access at school in most countries. (p. 21)

While that is true, a deeper analysis of the term ‘access’ reveals that all

that is being said is if a school had only one computer and the students had

access to it at some time in the year, they could be said to have had access.

In reality, it is a largely meaningless observation that flies in the face of the

data provided in Chapter 11.

THE