Reflections

Learning technologies are not new. Purveyors of learning from the time of Socrates up through today continue to invent and apply methodologies to strengthen and enhance the teacher-student relationship and the efficacious conveyance of information. Technology is the appropriate use of specific knowledge, most generally scientific. Every age had a method, constantly morphing as newer and better technologies were developed to convey knowledge to the student. Despite the technology of the time, the purpose has always remained the same; to educate!

The rise of the computer age of the 1980s and the digital age of the late 1990s has propagated a paradigm shift in education creating a focused study of the use of new technology in today's educational environments. Digital learning technologies are mainstream in education today and found in the corporate training room and schools K-12. Online courses and eLearning have become an industry unto itself.

Before the rise of digital appliances, an educator was the do-all, end-all, in the classroom. Although university educated and mostly state certified, few had any understanding of the pedagogy of design principles beyond a subject matter textbook, blackboard, and chalk. Today Instructional designers, digital age professionals, engage in the creation of educational curriculum utilizing cutting-edge technology. These highly skilled and creative individuals are transcribing subject matter using new and exciting digital formats and platforms for the 21st century. They work with a hope, a promise, and a dream that learning technologies will increase one's ability to learn, to create cost-effective delivery, and to provide accessibility in the classroom through distance learning venues. Today digital curriculum development is a crucial component for the practical application of learning in the digital classroom landscape.

Professor Joel Gardner of Franklin University explains three areas of Instructional Design (ID) in his video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0iQgStGND4 (Gardner, 2012). He discusses the importance of understanding learning theory, the culture of management and learners in the design process, and under which umbrella of development and implementation one might be asked to design, e.g., the military, K-12, or corporate.

Another exampled video featuring Onna, an instructional designer employed by Khan Academy, candidly explains her responsibilities, the requirements of ID and the financial aspects of ID in her YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5K5axz_8Ws&t=44s (Careers and Personal Finance, 2018).

In the scheme of things measured within the context of time, ten years is not notable. Prognosticating and projecting one's self into the future can conjure up any number of fantastical images. What would a German citizen answer in 1929 to predict the rise of the Socialist party in 1939? Who in 1919 was predicting the collapse of the stock market in 1929? In 2009, as the technology was becoming mainstay and learning technologies was developing potentiality in education, would one be able to predict the state of learning technologies as used and understood today?

A property of "the future" is that it is always built of a platform of optimistic promise. One can predict anything from the outrageous to the sublime. Where learning technologies are going, one can only speculate, but if guesses, albeit intelligent guesses based on the history of the development of other products and innovations, one's bet would be to see continued research and slow to modest growth in learning technologies. To fully see technology become the promise of the future, one foresees another century required. Virtual realities will play some role; artificial intelligence will not develop in the next ten years to have a significant impact, holographic imagery will continue to be developed but is also beyond the decade to become a mainstay.

One could predict that the newborn child with a 2019 birth date will know how to use some technology in 2029 and their parents, having been a generation raised in technology will think nothing of it, nor will educators. However, that 2019 baby will look back at age 80 and speak of the good old days like the dark ages. Learning technology will be fully integrated into the educational system in the next ten years if the economic and political structures of society do not collapse.

Just like the first flight a century ago at the turn of the 20th century, could you predict the stock market collapse, the next two world wars, or the rise of a Socialist party any better than one's great grandparents? Developing and answering the question based on research and observation of the past is a best predictor, but then still only an ignorant guess. Every morning a new decade begins. Look to make decisions today, make changes today, learn more today: Carpe diem.

The evidence to support one's view surrounds us all. It is written in the literature of all times. The wisdom of philosophers, prophets, poets, and pundits, all give testimony. The historian, physicist, the psychologist, and the economist all contribute to one's view with evidence that the future is unpredictable, that human life flickers in the breeze with the vagaries of suffering and a delusion of happiness. They speak of one's predestined fate, and of what is moral and what is normal. The greatest delusion and most presumptuous of all is that man can control or has influences on the future. It is quintessentially absurd.

The literature that one is reading or that one has read lends itself to many conjectures. As one writes and shares one's thoughts, so has Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Marcus Aurelius, Augustine, Dawkins, Schopenhauer, Thoreau, Becker, Sapolsky, Harari, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Rand, Tolle, Hesse, Kant, and Easwaran to list a few influential thinkers, have shared their thoughts with me. One must also toss in the Koran, the Bible, the Torah, the Mahabharata, Bhagavad Gita, the Upanishads, and the Tao Te Ching.

The literature concerning learning technologies is telling me that those who have invested decades of time and money to the subject will continue to invest time and money into the subject. Theorists have to theorize, writers have to write, and researchers have to research. Theories will rise, be discussed, modified, re-discussed, and re-theorized. Some will be abandoned, and some will be accepted as applicable for implementation, and some deemed impractical to implement but correct in theory. Study and research will continue, new ideas will be tried, some will be better than others, and progress will be slow to begin but explode as core practice at some future time. Implementation will be difficult, expensive, and have a high failure rate.

In short, the works contained within the course's readings make one's argument, for they are generally a decade old: Baylor's paper 1999, Leidner 1995, Clark 1983, Molenda 2002/2009, Kozma 1991, Dillon and Gabbard 1998, to example a few. What that research exemplifies is the continuation of thought, theory, and opinion of learning technologies. The literature demonstrates the search for an understanding and approach to the promise and prediction that technology in education will become manifest. As mentioned previously, the future is always built on the platform of optimistic promise. To predict the future, look to the past, for it does seem to repeat.

After digesting the readings of the last three weeks, one sees the role of technology for teaching and learning as presented in the literature as dated but progressively forward projecting. It can be said that the different articles do have a time stamp. The assessment of the research concerning the time-frame of past technologies versus the technological environment in use today is still the ongoing discussion de jour.

One tends to view the application of technology today within the same focus as Clark did in 1983. "As a general characteristic of hypermedia environments, the ability to control pace and delivery of information, even when coupled with selection advice, appears insufficient to affect learning outcomes significantly for all but high-ability learner" (Dillon & Gabbard, 1997). But to put both scholarly articles into perspective, one was using a new IBM PC-XT with a 20 MB hard drive in 1983 and was still teaching MS-DOS, albeit the Window for Workgroups was giving way to Windows 95 in 1997. Much of what is interpolated within the literature is a search for technology's value in education where it had not yet been found or yet matured.

The real question is: Has technology matured to the extent that it is of value today? Before one can begin to discuss the role of technology in teaching and learning, one would be best served to break down the terms used — i.e., "technology, role, teaching, and learning." It is easy to say, "Oh yeah. I know what that means," but if one assumes, makes generalizations of their understanding, extracts from it a simple base comprehension without a granular depth, then perhaps one does not have true comprehension, only a supposition.

As the articles pile up, and the eyes twitch with strain, one recognizes that the process by which one moves to a depth of knowledge is like standing at the edge of the lake. It is shallowest at the shore, but its deep will drown you. To put a spin on teaching and learning, one is the hand the other the glove; however, deciding which hand and what kind of glove is the conundrum.

The conveyance of knowledge, information, guidance, direction, and authority seems to cover the aspects of the term. To teach needs an object upon which to apply knowledge, information, guidance, direction, and authority, be it another person, one's self, or the family dog. That object's purpose is to learn. One takes note of the varieties of terms that describe the verb "teach": Educator, professor, trainer, instructor, facilitator, and of course, teacher. The process of being a learner also has a few defining terms: Student, learner, participant, and of course, "the Kids."

Teaching and learning are the most basic of activities in nature, simplistic in the whole, but beyond complexity in practice. When technology is viewed as the application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes, the role of technology should be accurately aligned with the implementation of said scientific knowledge with the skill of teaching and the processes of learning. From the readings, one gleans a "maybe is, maybe isn't" answer.

What seems to color the undercurrent of all the discussions is that hardware is not really the technology of learning — enter Clark (1983). Technology is a tool. A hammer to a carpenter is a tool, to drive a nail, but not the only tool and has nothing to do with the architect. The real technology of learning is an effective and efficient application of the scientific knowledge of cognition and how people learn applied via the design of the curriculum, the effective processes employed, and the applicable tools and material of technology applied for the conveyance of the instruction via the social, attitudinal and learning schema of the learner, as Kozma (1991) implies.

Not to wax political, nor to wane philosophical, but the assumed and intended role of technology in teaching and learning was to create equilibrium between the intellectually competent and the not so competent. To bring cost efficiency with maximum effect. New and modern methods of technological advances were sold like snake oil off the back of a wagon. In one's years of observation, the dumbing down of successive generation upon generation has progressed like lava slowly creeping and destroying all in its path. America ranks 27th in the world assessment of educational effectiveness as quoted in a 2016 study (Lim, et al., 2018).

The corporate, political, and societal need for a marginally educated population aligns well with the mind-numbing distractions of technology. Education is a business. Knowledge is a commodity. Technology is a commodity. Selling technology is profitable. The salesman says technology is good. Education is a purchaser of wholesale technology. Education produces a product. Consumers are dismayed when the product does not make them happy, wealthy, and wise. It must be the product, surely not the consumer.

On a personal note, the only thing that one can say about the role of technology in education and learning is that it has made one fat, lazy, and better at being pointless and opinionated. One can be happy with that. Perhaps the role of technology has been fulfilled.

References

• Clark, R. (1983). Reconsidering research on learning from media. Review of Educational Research, 53(4), 445–459.
• Dillon, A., & Gabbard, R. (1997). Hypermedia as an educational technology. Review of Educational Research, 68(3), 322–349.
• Kozma, R. (1991). Learning with media. Review of Educational Research, 61(2), 179–211.
• Lim, S., et al. (2018, September 24). Measuring human capital. The Lancet. doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(18)31941-X
• Sieczkowski, C. (2013, August 12). 1912 eighth-grade exam stumps 21st-century test-takers. HuffPost.