Technology – The application of science, especially to industrial or commercial objectives. The entire body of methods and materials used to achieve such objectives.

Question of the day: Given the defnition of technology, what is the definition of Educational Technology?

I’m on a few trains of thought today: More after the jump.

1. Arvind has written a great post that highlights the frustrating conversations educational technologists have concerning the “what the heck do we teach kids” question. Software, skills, concepts?
2. I’m starting to delve into the research literature concerning education, technology, and media and there are some startling findings that I’ve never come across as a practitioner (teacher and ed/tech adminstrator)… namely research has shown that educational media does not influence learning and strictly constructivist pedagogy has not been proven to improve student learning; in fact guided instruction has been shown to be more effective. These two assertions are controversial and need more explanation, so I will devote separate blog posts (probably multiple, separate posts) to explain what they mean.
3. Back to Arvind’s post, the main problem with that discussion is there is no explicit defining of the aim of the education. Aims will likely be different for different classrooms, especially since Arvind’s quotes come from a listserv that primarily caters to private school professionals. But nevertheless, before you make a broad statement about “what” to teach, or “how” to teach it, you need to define the problem you are trying to solve. Do you believe that students need to know how to use Word for future success in school; to be able to write papers and participate in the daily machinery of schooling? Then maybe teaching Word is the right way to go about that. Do you believe that students should be “making things, communicating, exploring, sharing”; then maybe your focus will not be on specific software… actually your focus may not be on technology or computers AT ALL. We can make, communicate, and share without computers. We need to critically analyze the problems that need solving before we proclaim a solution.
4. I want to start advocating educational technologists to seek out and use research to guide their decisions and statements. First, as always, start with a problem statement. For example, if I am interested in student achievement, lowering the test-score gap, getting kids to perform on standardized tests, given that specific problem domain, I would need to know certain things – do computers increase student learning and performance on high stakes tests? Do “making, communicating, and sharing” activities increase student learning and performance? etc. etc. etc. I hope we (the ed. tech community) will learn to seek out research to figure out what we know and don’t know before making proclamations… otherwise we’ll be stuck in never-ending mud slinging and frustrating conversations.