Last week, during some online excursioning, I found myself reading a blog post about an out-of-print book called 1975: The Changes to Come. From what I could gather, it’s a sort of extended experiment in speculative thinking, a bid to imagine how technology might affect American lives in what was then, “the future,” and what is now, now. The post included a number of the book’s photos — some funny, some fascinating — but what really got my attention were several images of students using “teaching machines,” including the “Film based” example below:
According to the caption, “Teaching machines, expected to boom in the next decade, usually operate on the principal of repetition until the pupil understands. They aim to speed up the learning process and relieve teachers of much paper work in the classroom.”
A contemporary viewer might laugh at this image, and the cringingly retrograde notions about learning it seems to represent. And yet…adjusting for the rate of sartorial change, this student doesn’t look so much different from today’s budding scholar, hunched over a desktop computer. In fact, one could argue that “teaching machines” are just one of the more dubious experiments in a long history of educational-technological-tool-using. From blackboards to Blackboard, pencils to wireless mice, we have always made use of “machines,” however simple, both to teach and to learn. Just as silent films were never truly silent, classrooms – long before laptops, smartboards, and Web 2.0 – were never really free of technology.
My goal in starting this blog is to begin thinking and writing more regularly about the ways teachers and students make use of the unprecedented and startling number of technologies now available — in many instances, for free. I am thinking of this site as a sort of cognitive sandbox, a place where I — and hopefully others — can play around with ideas and pose questions. How might educators use this era’s “machines” in their teaching? How could students use them in their learning? What are the possibilities we know about, and the use-cases we haven’t even begun to imagine?
Wow, your post about technology and how much it’s changed our lives since 2011 is really deep! It is true, most of us were born with electricity to cook our food and keep us warm and cool and we take it for granted. If more people around the world continued to advance by innovation in technology to make new inventions, the world would change forever.
I’m a makeup artist toronto and even in my field with makeup, someone invented the airbrush compressor and gun to spray on makeup – machine to make art. Back then was just fingers, organic paint like beetle juice, coal etc. but now women have so much choice with factory made products with unlimited choices in beauty.
I even had a discussion with a friend that read statics about the world and that technology jobs and businesses holds the top 10% of money and also in changing the world and helping hundreds of thousands.
Your posts are really thought provoking and is quite interesting. I hope you do continue to remember to post things about technology here. Maybe in the future you could perhaps invent something!
– Olivia.