TEACHING MACHINES: THE HISTORY OF PERSONALIZED LEARNING
What is it?
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.
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.
Who is it for?
Everyone in education.
Everyone in education.
What can it do?
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. 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.
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. 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.