Teaching Machines: Learning from the Intersection of Education and Technology

The allure of educational technology is easy to understand. Classroom instruction is an expensive and time-consuming process fraught with contradictory theories and frustratingly uneven results. Educators, inspired by machines’ contributions to modern life, have been using technology to facilitate teaching for centuries.

In Teaching Machines, Bill Ferster examines past attempts to automate instruction from the earliest use of the postal service for distance education to the current maelstrom surrounding Massive Open Online Courses. He tells the stories of the entrepreneurs and visionaries who, beginning in the colonial era, developed and promoted various instructional technologies. Ferster touches on a wide range of attempts to enhance the classroom experience with machines, from hornbooks, the Chautauqua movement, and correspondence courses to B. F. Skinner’s teaching machine, intelligent tutoring systems, and eLearning.

The famed progressive teachers, researchers, and administrators that the book highlights often overcame substantial hurdles to implement their ideas, but not all of them succeeded in improving the quality of education. Teaching Machines provides invaluable new insight into our current debate over the efficacy of educational technology.

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Teaching Machines: Learning from the Intersection of Education and Technology

The allure of educational technology is easy to understand. Classroom instruction is an expensive and time-consuming process fraught with contradictory theories and frustratingly uneven results. Educators, inspired by machines’ contributions to modern life, have been using technology to facilitate teaching for centuries.

In Teaching Machines, Bill Ferster examines past attempts to automate instruction from the earliest use of the postal service for distance education to the current maelstrom surrounding Massive Open Online Courses. He tells the stories of the entrepreneurs and visionaries who, beginning in the colonial era, developed and promoted various instructional technologies. Ferster touches on a wide range of attempts to enhance the classroom experience with machines, from hornbooks, the Chautauqua movement, and correspondence courses to B. F. Skinner’s teaching machine, intelligent tutoring systems, and eLearning.

The famed progressive teachers, researchers, and administrators that the book highlights often overcame substantial hurdles to implement their ideas, but not all of them succeeded in improving the quality of education. Teaching Machines provides invaluable new insight into our current debate over the efficacy of educational technology.

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Teaching Machines: Learning from the Intersection of Education and Technology

Teaching Machines: Learning from the Intersection of Education and Technology

by Bill Ferster
Teaching Machines: Learning from the Intersection of Education and Technology

Teaching Machines: Learning from the Intersection of Education and Technology

by Bill Ferster

eBook

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Overview

The allure of educational technology is easy to understand. Classroom instruction is an expensive and time-consuming process fraught with contradictory theories and frustratingly uneven results. Educators, inspired by machines’ contributions to modern life, have been using technology to facilitate teaching for centuries.

In Teaching Machines, Bill Ferster examines past attempts to automate instruction from the earliest use of the postal service for distance education to the current maelstrom surrounding Massive Open Online Courses. He tells the stories of the entrepreneurs and visionaries who, beginning in the colonial era, developed and promoted various instructional technologies. Ferster touches on a wide range of attempts to enhance the classroom experience with machines, from hornbooks, the Chautauqua movement, and correspondence courses to B. F. Skinner’s teaching machine, intelligent tutoring systems, and eLearning.

The famed progressive teachers, researchers, and administrators that the book highlights often overcame substantial hurdles to implement their ideas, but not all of them succeeded in improving the quality of education. Teaching Machines provides invaluable new insight into our current debate over the efficacy of educational technology.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781421415413
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Publication date: 11/17/2014
Series: An H&W Investigations Novel
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 216
File size: 5 MB
Age Range: 18 Years

About the Author

Bill Ferster is a research professor at the University of Virginia’s Curry School of Education and the director of visualization for the Sciences, Humanities & Arts Technology Initiative (SHANTI). He is the author of Interactive Visualization: Insight through Inquiry.

Table of Contents

Preface
1. Introduction
2. Sage on the Stage
3. Step by Step
4. Byte by Byte
5. From the Cloud
6. Making Sense of Teaching Machines
Notes
Index

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

Never have there been so many people grabbing at what they perceive as opportunities to use technology in education, and yet most have little understanding of the consequences of such applications, especially the changes in teaching methods and institutional structures that are necessary if technology is to have more than a marginal effect on learning. Ferster’s engaging, original argument—that knowing what happened when older technologies were used should be of great practical and academic value today—is one of the most exciting ideas I have encountered for a very long time. Teaching Machines adds a historical and conceptual perspective to the hoopla surrounding contemporary technology-driven innovation. I would love to see every teacher in training read this book.
—Michael G. Moore, editor of The American Journal of Distance Education

With wit and lucidity, Bill Ferster shows how technology has always been deployed in service to education, though not always with successful results. He demonstrates how early mechanical devices—books, telephones, radio, television, and computers—have been used to make education more effective, efficient, and profitable. His lessons speak volumes about our latest attempts to use machines to educate and enlighten.
—Donald L. Bitzer, North Carolina State University

This interesting book explores the history of teaching machines and the reasons they have not lived up to their promise of revolutionizing education. The book draws the reader in by providing a story of the people who were prominent in developing each technology and their hopes for improving education. The final chapter discusses lessons learned from these past failures and provides suggestions for developing more effective technologies. This should be required reading for all instructional designers and computer engineers interested in teaching machines and/or education.
—Debra R. Sprague, George Mason University

A valuable history of educational technology, Bill Ferster takes us from PLATO to MOOCs, B. F. Skinner to Sebastian Thrun with elegance and healthy skepticism.
—Bryan Alexander, Senior Fellow, National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education

This sweeping overview of teaching tools from the hornbooks of the seventeenth century to the cloud-based apps of the twenty-first provides rare and necessary perspective on a topic of perpetual debate.
—Ed Ayers, President, University of Richmond

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