Educational technology includes all educational resources --- men and materials, methods and techniques, means and media in an integrated and systematic manner to optimize learning. Learning not teaching is the crucial task of the educational process. Technology is one component in this process and can help make learning easy and interesting.
A large number of schools have gone headlong into computer education --- not really computer-based education --- and usually what this means is learning how to use a computer for different tasks, including mathematical operations (statistics, spreadsheets, geometric modeling) and desktop publishing (bringing out a class magazine or making posters).
Computer-based education, on the other hand, implies the use of computers as a means to educate. Lessons are designed using the capacities of the computer to stimulate, organize information, and present materials that are visual, auditory and text-based, all within the same frame. Such computer-based education ‘packages’ replace or augment the textbook-and-lecture, and offer the students a different sort of learning experience.
Discussions and debates on computer-based education, to be meaningful, need to be based on systematic research and methodologically sound evaluations. However, current evaluations are inadequate for several reasons.
Consumers of technological innovations often assume that because these innovations are well advertised, they are good. Secondly, evaluations are often reduced to numbers where the amount of money spent, the ratio of students to computers, the amount of time the students have access to computers, etc., represent the value of computer-based education. Perhaps most importantly, evaluations have compared instructional innovation with an existing approach. They do not examine the nature of the innovation, assuming that it is inherently different from another entity simply because it is called by a different name.
Final comment: Do we need to be computer experts to teach, or, do we need to be educationists?
A large number of schools have gone headlong into computer education --- not really computer-based education --- and usually what this means is learning how to use a computer for different tasks, including mathematical operations (statistics, spreadsheets, geometric modeling) and desktop publishing (bringing out a class magazine or making posters).
Computer-based education, on the other hand, implies the use of computers as a means to educate. Lessons are designed using the capacities of the computer to stimulate, organize information, and present materials that are visual, auditory and text-based, all within the same frame. Such computer-based education ‘packages’ replace or augment the textbook-and-lecture, and offer the students a different sort of learning experience.
Discussions and debates on computer-based education, to be meaningful, need to be based on systematic research and methodologically sound evaluations. However, current evaluations are inadequate for several reasons.
Consumers of technological innovations often assume that because these innovations are well advertised, they are good. Secondly, evaluations are often reduced to numbers where the amount of money spent, the ratio of students to computers, the amount of time the students have access to computers, etc., represent the value of computer-based education. Perhaps most importantly, evaluations have compared instructional innovation with an existing approach. They do not examine the nature of the innovation, assuming that it is inherently different from another entity simply because it is called by a different name.
Final comment: Do we need to be computer experts to teach, or, do we need to be educationists?
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