The Educational Technology, is a field of study and research of science education and has roots that can be searched in the techniques and methodologies of the first schools of the Egyptians and Romans. Through instructional materials, you can look at the history of the school, once the tools were used to support learning objects such as clay tablet, then came the papyrus, parchment, paper, and finally, the computer.
The pedagogical tradition highlights the illustrious teaching materials for educators; the cube and sphere, symbols of peace and motorcycles; Typography and schools working with their repertoire of self-healing materials. Over the past forty years buy to emphasize a particular category of tools that directly concern the transmission and information processing: the media.
The 50s and 60s come to the fore the so-called mass media, i.e. media to spread a many-such as radio, television and print media and the self as the recorder, camera and video recorder. In the 70s, the media are a bit in the shadows and then experience a significant spike since the 80s, with the development of new interactive digital media such as personal media and tele-media, capable of triggering an unprecedented process based on the restructuring of the whole area of communication. This restructuring, the 90s until today, has also led to a communication based on multimedia.
Technology education as a discipline of study, came only from the middle of last century and more precisely in 1954, year of publication of a famous article by Frederic BF Skinner The Science of Learning and the Art of Teaching, which gives the work on a series of applications to education based upon scientific knowledge that are derived from experimental psychology. In that same period, which has just ended World War II and the U.S. political climate has changed since the Soviet ally was now transformed into a formidable rival, the design took shape early theories on curriculum and educational project, which will form the basis of what will become the Instructional Design. The effort culminated in the atomic bomb sets off a great advancement of scientific research, physics and mathematics leading to new and promising fields such as information science and cybernetics, which are offered as a model of what is meant by science and at the same time able to identify effective methods to improve over the years, the U.S. education system and equate it to the Soviet one. At the end of the 50s comes to light the notion that the mind can be studied and for this comes a cultural component that will affect greatly the history of the Educational Technology: the cognitive revolution.
In 1956, two American scholars the cognitives Allen Newell and Herbert Simon, in a conference at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) offer the first complete proof of a theorem executed by a computer giving way to AI (Artificial Intelligence): a strand study that aims to create machines capable of intelligent behavior, able to simulate human behavior through the eyes of outside observers. Since the late 50s until the behind time 70s, there is little room for the emergence of random phenomena, because the education system has dominated the approach that is based on a cognitive structuring orderly, linear and rational path and operationally defined learning objectives, or translated into measurable behaviors. During the 80s, however, become increasingly strong signs of dissatisfaction with the hierarchical-sequential models who have had weight in previous decades and, more generally, to the theoretical paradigm of cutting objectives and rationalistic based upon the premise that education can be transferred the results from scientific research. Precisely, for this reason we also diminish expectations for Artificial Intelligence, comparing it with the computer understanding of natural language, we note that the software is unable to master the complexity of a text, making a synthesis through a paraphrase.
