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Educational Technology: The Development of a Concept

Article  in  Ethics and Information Technology · April 2003

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68 B OOK REVIEWS
Alan Januszewski, Educational Technology: The
Development of a Concept. Libraries Unlimited, Inc.:
Englewood, CO., 2001, http://www.lu.com.
Education is the most human of processes. Through
it we seek to sustain our roots in the past of human
endeavor as we strive for future improvement.
Education is transmission of culture through time.
One of the defining features of a culture is how
education is practiced within it. The development of
public education systems, for example, are marked
departures from exclusionary hierarchies. In the later
20th century and early 21st century, the marked
influence on education comes from information and
computing technology. Through television, internet,
and instructional programming we get two major
transformative effects on education: the growth of
distance education and the conception of educating
as an engineering problem. The later is the subject
matter of Educational Technology: The Development
of a Concept, by Alan Januszewski. For anyone
interested in how the current ideas about the relations
of technology to education came to be, this book is a
valuable source.
Januszewski does not take up the distinction
between educational technology and distance educa-
tion. It is not necessary to his project to do so. Yet, as
the two are frequently conflated, I think it important to
explain the difference. The history of distance educa-
tion begins about 150 years ago. Industrial age trans-
portation and public postal systems made it possible to
exchange educational materials at a distance. Distance
education is a result of industrial technology (Keegan
1996, pp. 7–8). As technology develops, so do the
prospects for distance education. Consider the state
of affairs in 1995: at least ten distance education
systems around the world were serving up to 100,000
learners at a time for an annual total of about 3.5
million learners. Most of these were television and
correspondence systems. All of the ten had been long-
established (some for more than 50 years) and none of
the ten were based in the United States (Keegan 1996,
p. 4). Distance education is a firmly-grounded prac-
tice by which many of the world’s higher education
learners are educated. The defining features of distance
education is that it is formal education (i.e., mediated
by an educational institution) in which the teacher and
learner as well as the learner and the learner group
are separated in time and space. While the impact of
the internet on education remains open to assessment,
we may be on the path to seeing distance education
become the primary form of educating post-secondary
learners. Being that all distance education is mediated
by technology, the study of educational technology is
fundamental to distance education. Januszewski points
us in the right direction for the investigation into our
changing educational environment.
Educational Technology: The Development of a
Concept is a conceptual history of the official defi-
nition of educational technology. Unlike many philo-
sophical projects of definition and concept analysis,
Januszewski’s has the advantages of a fixed time
frame (since the 1920’s) and a progression of official
definitions produced by a professional organization.
With this concise range of conditions he produces a
conceptual map that draws out the social, political,
and theoretical territories that overlap with the idea
of educational technology. In tracing this map, the
reader comes to discover how the idea of educational
technology is driven by a theories of learning. Most
urgent is the need to understand the agenda that the
growth of educational technology sets for teaching and
learning, for that agenda is implicit in the design of
the tools that are now commonplace in our educational
environment.
Januszewski’s analysis covers the four official
definitions produced by the Association for Educa-
tional Communication and Technology (AECT) from
1963 to 1994. The AECT was formed in 1970 when the
Department of Audio Visual Instruction (DAVI), estab-
lished in1932, separated from the National Education
Association (NEA), taking with it 10,000 members.
In 1963 University of Southern California Education
professor James D. Finn chaired a commission with
the objective of defining the role of technology in
education. The resulting definition was published as
a monograph in 1963 and contains in it the major ideas
that have directed educational technology since. The
key statements in this definition are;
Audiovisual communications is that branch of
educational theory and practice primarily concerned
with the design and use of messages which control
the learning process . . . Its practical goal is the effi-
cient utilization of every method and medium of
communication which can contribute to the devel-
opment of the learner’s potential (Januszewski 2001,
p. 18).
The term audiovisual communications was explicitly
set as a transitional term pending future revision.
The term eventually settled upon was educational
technology Januszewski analyzes the major terms of
the definition (e.g., theory, process, communications,
message, learning, control) by reference to the educa-
tional theorists that influenced it. The history of twen-
tieth century education movements (at least in the
United States) that one gains from this short book
makes it a valuable read even for those not interested
in technology per se.
 B OOK REVIEWS
In the original definition there is an explicit effort
to distinguish the scope and aims of educational tech-
nology (qua audiovisual communications). Part of this
emphasis, as Januszewski documents, is due to the
political goals of James Finn to justify the forma-
tion of a professional feild dedicated to educational
technology. More important than the organizational
dynamics is the intentional conviction in the concept of
educational technology that educating is a process that
can be engineered. Present in the definition is the key
premise that learning is a process governed by infor-
mation inputs and outputs; “messages which control
the learning process.” This conception is completely
distinct from the traditional picture of education as
an information delivery system. The educational tech-
nology conception of learning is learning as an essen-
tially communicative process. This communication
may take place between people face-to-face, between
people at a distance, or between the learner and a
program. The key point is that the educating agent’s
actions are adjusted in designed ways to respond to the
learner feedback. This evokes the crucial (and contro-
versial) idea of control in the original definition of
educational technology.
Norbert Weiner introduced the idea of cybernetic
control in Cybernetics (1948), refined it in Wiener, N.,
The Extrapolation, Interpolation, and Smoothing of
Stationary Time Series with Engineering Applications
(1949), and advanced it in Cybernetics: Communi-
cation and Control in the Animal and the Machine
(1961). Weiner’s notion is formal and mathematical.
Control is the formal expression of a feedback mecha-
nism in which a channel of information works to
inform a communicating agent that a message has
been received and/or evaluated. In order for a feed-
back mechanism to function, both communicators
must be subject to change in relation to the relevant
messages. In the case of education, we may say that
both teacher and learner must respond dynamically to
changes in the learning state. Teaching and learning,
on this model, cannot occur within a simple hier-
archy of one-way information flow. The traditional
lecture course with large numbers of students, a fixed
lecture agenda, and final exam evaluation is a well-
established instance of hierarchical one-way informa-
tion flow. The Socratic Elenchus (intentionally set by
Plato in opposition to lecture and text information
delivery), in which the educator responds to imme-
diate feedback from the interlocutor, is one sort of
a feedback mechanism. James Finn and his cohort
were seeking to formalize the study of education
according to the model of information engineering by
investigating the messages which control the learning
process.
The thirty years following brought three revisions
69
of the 1963 definition. Januszewski traces the changes
in these definitions and the social/political forces
driving them. The struggle over these definitions is
a case-study in political dynamics in the education
profession. The 1972 revision reads;
Educational technology is a field involved in the
facilitation of human learning through the syste-
matic identification, development, organization and
utilization of a full range of learning resources
and through management of these processes.
(Januszewski 2001, p. 49).
In the 1972 definition of educational technology (and
the two subsequent revisions), control was replaced
with facilitate. The later concept continues to have
currency in contemporary education language to the
degree that facilitator commonly replaces teacher or
instructor in many forms of educational text. Donald
Ely, Chair of the AECT Definition and Terminology
Committee which produced the 1972 revised defini-
tion, reported a “metaphysical pathos” of many in
education to the term control. Thus, facilitate was
substituted “to make the definition more palatable.”
(Januszewski 2001, p. 50). Yet, the computing and
information technology that has become the primary
tool-set for contemporary educational technology does
depend upon the feedback and control components as
its underlying form. How the idea of educational tech-
nology as a process relates to the logic and design of its
tools is an area crucial to understanding the impacts of
information technology. In using the internet, course
management systems, and educational software we
may be conforming to implicit formal control mech-
anisms without being aware of them. This is far less
advantageous than a process that is explicitly studied
and evaluated.
One regard in which James Finn did succeed was
his effort to extend the concept of the technology of
education to the full-range of human organizational
processes, including the theoretical, social, and moral
aspects. He is largely responsible for refocusing the
emphasis in the audiovisual technology camp from the
management of equipment to a field of research with
its own learning theory. Finn dedicated much of his
career activity to opposing the notion that technology
is a category of objects: i.e., machines, tools, instru-
ments, and gadgets. Rather, he argued, technology is a
process and a way of thinking. The uses of technolo-
gical objects follows from this way of thinking, such
that machines are;
symbols . . . and must be thought of in terms of
in connection with systems, organizational patterns,
utilization practices, and so forth to present the true
technological picture (Januszewski 2001, p. 24).
 70 B OOK REVIEWS
Given Finn’s success in translating his vision into
organizational and political action, this picture of tech-
nology as a process is critical these days when faced
with promoters of technology mediated or automated
education who proclaim that technology is merely a
tool and is ultimately value neutral. The defining
figure of educational technology stands in stark oppo-
sition to technological instrumentalism. To deny that
educational technology is value-laden and agenda-
advancing is to deny the one of the major ideas that
contemporary educational technology is predicated
upon.
In 1977 the AETC produced yet another definition
in the form of a 169 page book with extended explana-
tions of the concepts involved. The definition begins
with;
Educational technology is a complex, integrated
process, involving people, procedures, ideas,
devices and organization, for analyzing prob-
lems and devising, implementing, evaluating and
managing solutions to those problems, involved in
all aspects of human learning (Januszewski 2001,
p. 78).
At this point, the definition has become so broad
that it is hard to tell what parts of education it does
not encompass. For instance, the idea that educa-
tional technology has to do with “. . . all aspects of
human learning” would encompass human activities
that are outside of education altogether. For instance,
the acquisition of one’s native language is surely an
aspect of human learning, but it is not a product of
education, much less educational technology. Having
begun with an explicit agenda focus in 1963, the prac-
titioners of educational technology found themselves
with an increasingly fuzzy definition.
The last definition of educational technology
produced by the AECT came in 1994. It is far more
concise than the 1977 version;
Instructional technology is the theory and prac-
tice of design, development, utilization, manage-
ment, and evaluation of processes and resources for
learning (Januszewski 2001, p. 103).
It lacks the formal direction indicated by Finn’s 1963
definition. I think that philosophers urgently need to
investigate how the formal structures of information
and computing technology impact the goals of educa-
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tion. One hand, information technology is a major
factor in the world of contemporary learners; the
virtual world is central among the phenomena for post-
industrial people. A thorough educational philosophy
must take into account the experiences and values
that arise in a digitally mediated environment. On
the other hand, information technologies designed for
educational purposes (e.g., programs, websites, course
management systems) are commonplace in the post-
industrial academy. The goals and values underlying
the design of these technologies may have deep impact
on how the educational process is shaped. Thus far, not
much philosophical attention is given to those issues
of design. Yet most educators have those technologies
ready-at-hand. The products of the educational tech-
nology agenda are with us. In summarizing the signifi-
cance of the history of the educational technology
definitions, Januszewski observes;
As a worldview of education, educational tech-
nology emphasizes applying scientific techniques
to solving educational problems in efficient and
effective ways. This emphasis results in an atti-
tude of action. This attitude values technique over
philosophy (Januszewski 2001, p. 118).
He identifies an area that calls for philosophical atten-
tion; an area that has practical significance for most
contemporary academic philosophers. This gives suffi-
cient reason for philosophers concerned with educa-
tion or technology to critically read Educational Tech-
nology: The Development of a Concept.
References
Januszewski, Alan. Educational Technology: The Development
of a Concept. Englewood, CO, Libraries Unlimited, Inc.,
2001.
Wiener, N. The Extrapolation, Interpolation, and Smoothing of
Stationary Time Series with Engineering Applications. Wiley,
New York, 1949.
Weiner, N. Cybernetics: Communication and Control in the
Animal and the Machine. The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA,
1961.
Oregon State University Jon Dorbolo
Jon.Dorbolo@orst.edu