Teaching Machines

Teaching Machines
Author: Audrey Watters
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 325
Release: 2023-02-07
Genre: Education
ISBN: 026254606X

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How ed tech was born: Twentieth-century teaching machines--from Sidney Pressey's mechanized test-giver to B. F. Skinner's behaviorist bell-ringing box. Contrary to popular belief, ed tech did not begin with videos on the internet. The idea of technology that would allow students to "go at their own pace" did not originate in Silicon Valley. In Teaching Machines, education writer Audrey Watters offers a lively history of predigital educational technology, from Sidney Pressey's mechanized positive-reinforcement provider to B. F. Skinner's behaviorist bell-ringing box. Watters shows that these machines and the pedagogy that accompanied them sprang from ideas--bite-sized content, individualized instruction--that had legs and were later picked up by textbook publishers and early advocates for computerized learning. Watters pays particular attention to the role of the media--newspapers, magazines, television, and film--in shaping people's perceptions of teaching machines as well as the psychological theories underpinning them. She considers these machines in the context of education reform, the political reverberations of Sputnik, and the rise of the testing and textbook industries. She chronicles Skinner's attempts to bring his teaching machines to market, culminating in the famous behaviorist's efforts to launch Didak 101, the "pre-verbal" machine that taught spelling. (Alternate names proposed by Skinner include "Autodidak," "Instructomat," and "Autostructor.") Telling these somewhat cautionary tales, Watters challenges what she calls "the teleology of ed tech"--the idea that not only is computerized education inevitable, but technological progress is the sole driver of events.

USAF Instructor's Journal

USAF Instructor's Journal
Author: United States. Air Force. Air Training Command
Publisher:
Total Pages: 632
Release: 1963
Genre:
ISBN:

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The Classroom Arsenal

The Classroom Arsenal
Author: Douglas D. Noble
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 216
Release: 2017-09-29
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1351397370

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A quarter of a century after its initial publication, The Classroom Arsenal remains pivotal in understanding and challenging the relentless promotion of technology to reform education. This seemingly benign education technology juggernaut carries forward the momentum of military agendas in man-machine systems detailed in the book. Promoters continue to flood schools with technology and its (still unfulfilled) promise of cutting edge, "personalized learning." Meanwhile, they continue as well their insatiable pursuit of federal funding, educational legitimacy, corporate profits, and access to student subjects and their accumulated learning data for product development.? Less understood, though, is a companion enterprise, there from the start, to replace teaching and learning in traditional classrooms by efficient automated systems that manage and monitor human cognition and learning for high-performance systems, from weapons systems to high tech corporations. As education is moved?imperceptibly away from its traditional humanistic aims and from the classroom itself, the goal of this human engineering project, the depersonalized accumulation of cognitive components for a 21st century militarized economy, best befits the book’s original title: "The Human Arsenal." This ongoing military/corporate-sponsored enterprise continues to impact education today, largely unnoticed. One example is the federally-funded Advanced Distributed Learning Initiative (ADL), which has been a major force behind the implementation of electronic learning systems, now used in all Defense Department and federal employee training. With the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (ARPA) ADL is developing structures to capture students’ soft skills, and the Army Research Laboratory is developing "intelligent tutoring systems" to enable "instructional management of affect, engagement, and grit (perseverance)." ADL through the Department of Defense has developed Experience API, a learning technology that can monitor all student online and offline interactions and archive these in date lockers or learning record stores. ADL has already impacted thousands of school districts through nonprofits such as IMS Global and Future Ready Schools, part of an industry massively subsidized by high tech corporations and valued at $255 billion annually. A $90 million Advanced Research Projects Agency for Education (ARPA-ED), modeled after the military’s ARPA,?has been proposed to fund "dramatic breakthroughs in learning and teaching." These include "digital tutors as effective as personal tutors" and, with the Navy’s Full Spectrum Learning project, "data collection tools for personalized education modeled after corporate data analysis that identifies consumer patterns and preferences." ADL is just one example of how the military/corporate ed tech enterprise is changing public education by hollowing?it out into something that can be digitized, data-driven, automated, and monitored. Its promoters envision education as children interacting with online learning systems where, based on past performance, algorithms will serve up what each student needs to know next. Through this digital curriculum, students create virtual educational identities at very young ages and learning devices are watching students as much as students are watching them. Such is the education landscape presaged by The Classroom Arsenal a quarter century ago, whose origins and trajectories need to be deeply understood now more than ever.

USAF Instructors Journal

USAF Instructors Journal
Author:
Publisher:
Total Pages: 1280
Release: 1963
Genre: Flight training
ISBN:

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Programmed Instruction & Teaching Machines

Programmed Instruction & Teaching Machines
Author: William Edward Dodd
Publisher:
Total Pages: 186
Release: 1965
Genre: Programmed instruction
ISBN:

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International annotated bibliography on the application of programmed instruction to vocational training and the learning of languages - includes USA research abstracts, teaching methods and training centres, periodicals on the psychological aspects of education, directories of information sources, and references.

Air Force Manual

Air Force Manual
Author: United States. Department of the Air Force
Publisher:
Total Pages: 58
Release: 1967
Genre:
ISBN:

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Motivation and the Automation of Training a Literature Review

Motivation and the Automation of Training a Literature Review
Author: Alvin Ugelow
Publisher:
Total Pages: 40
Release: 1962
Genre: Motivation (Psychology)
ISBN:

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Controlling the motivation of learner in their continuing use of the new auto-instructional devices could become a serious problem, since neither the devices themselves nor the performance knowledge they provide seems sufficient to maintain extended participation in the instruction. A selective review of the literature on knowledge of results, praise and reproof, competition, task interruption, and readability suggests techniques for better controlling such participation. Potentially useful applications are discussed, and limited try-out of variations, both within the program and instructional environment, is encouraged. (Author).