The 1990s revolution in instructional technology
By: Drivers.com staff
Date: 1992-03-09
This article originally appeared in Volume 2, Number 1 of Driver/Education, in March 1992.
As CEO of Jostens Learning Corporation, one of the largest players in the educational software field, John Kernane is in a commanding position to watch the future taking shape. This is the vivid description of the impending revolution in instructional technology he gave delegates to the Maryland Instructional Computer Coordinators Association conference in Baltimore.
While the 1980s was a decade of development for computer technology, Kernane told delegates, he sees the 1990s as a decade in which the developments will converge into powerful integrated instructional systems that will not only radically change the nature of instruction, but also drive the radical changes being proposed for U.S. schools.
He described 1990 as the pivotal year for instructional technology. The educational software industry went from being a cottage industry to an expensive undertaking. And, for the first time ever, the software industry picked an educational software product as its product of the year. As well, there were changes in business community attitudes, in teacher union policies, in textbook adoption policies, that placed educational software on the front burner for developers.
In 1990, for the first time ever, a state (Texas) adopted a video product (Optical Data's Windows on Science educational software program) as though it were a textbook. That means that for the next five years one third of Texas' elementary schools will be teaching science without a textbook. Other states, said Kernane, have also changed their laws to allow the adoption of "electronic textbooks."
Since driver educators are being urged to look towards the integration of their educational objectives with the rest of the school curriculum, Kernane's predictions for the instructional revolution of the 1990s should be of great interest. Almost certainly they are describing the topography of the educational landscape in which driver educators will have to find their niche.
The predictions
"Production values of technology-based instructional materials will approach the quality of entertainment materials."
"Production values" is a TV term relating to the sophistication or richness of the tools used in developing the materials. Colour film, for example, has higher production values than black and white. Two hundred years ago, Kernane told his audience, good teachers could compete with the world of entertainment. They had much the same technologies available to them in presenting their material.
By the 1950s, however, there was no contest. Entertainers had TV and movies. Teachers were working with "Ditto" machines. At the beginning of the 1980s, teachers had upgraded to overhead projectors, but entertainers had moved into special effects, music TV, and multimedia.
Kernane sees the gap between educational and entertainment production values closing by the year 2000. "In the 1990s," he said, "serious instructional materials will be available to teachers that will be as rich, as compelling, as exciting for kids as anything the entertainers can do."
"All disparate instructional technologies will converge into a single all-digital multi-media format."
A hundred television sets hooked up to a VCR will all show the same program. It's virtually impossible, Kernane pointed out, to provide individualized instruction with this technology. On the other hand, the computer can send digitized information of different kinds down the same line.
The computer can sort it out so that a number of terminals receive different information. The advent of digital TV means that students at different workstations can be working on quite different instructional materials, with text, graphics, speech, animation and full-motion video.
"Technology-based instructional materials will be fully integrated with print materials at the classroom level."
Textbooks of the future will be delivered electronically to users who customize them for their own needs. Printing machines that are half computer, half copier, will receive text, pictures, and graphics on compact discs. The user can play around with the final product, deleting or adding material if desired. Such machines are already in use.
Using digital TV, video material can be integrated with the technology of the computer and electronic, customized publishing to provide comprehensive learning systems in which students can draw on the most sophisticated learning materials at their individual or group workstations, even though the group next to them may be working on different materials entirely.
"Staff development will be the key to the successful implementation of technology-based learning systems."
"Teachers tend to be conservative and reluctant to try new ideas," says Kernane. "But the new ideas are coming. The electorate is excited about them, the business community is excited about them, and other educational communities that have tried them are excited about them. The big action in the 1990s is going to be in staff development."
The good news, he says, is that there is going to be lots of help in the form of workshops, on-line tutorials, help routines, distance learning, and home cable programs. Some software now in the pipeline has an automated tutorial built in: an instructor pops up on-screen and gives a short lesson if you seem confused or make a mistake.
"Technological learning systems will be a key catalyst in school reform."
Educators who wonder whether all the talk about remodelling and revamping schools systems is hot air or something that is imminent should pay special attention to Kernane's final prediction.
"As Americans," he says, "we fundamentally believe that technology is good. In the decade of the '90s, what we will see is leading educators using technology that everybody thinks is good and everybody likes, as a spark for a whole wave of other restructuring activities." New technology, Kernane believes, will be the thin edge of the wedge that levers fundamental changes in how education operates.
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