Information Technology And Psychology Prospects For The Future

The past 30 years have witnessed enormous advances in information technologies. These advances have had a profound and irreversible effect on every institution of modern society. Implementing information-processing technology fell to professional experts and a relatively small cadre of managerial personnel. Responsibility for the utilization of computer technology has shifted away from these professionals, and promises to accelerate due to technological advances and reduced costs for information-processing devices. A symposium was convened in 1980 at the University of Houston to examine the recent antecedents and future consequences of these developments in information technology. Distinguished spokespersons were invited from academic science, government, and business. This book contains the papers delivered at the symposium and the concluding discussion.

This volume identifies promising learning, teaching, and assessment strategies for the use and assessment of technology in educational settings, specifically: *educational context (e.g., organizational and structural factors that contribute to the effective use of technology in school settings); *promising learning and teaching strategies; *promising technology-based assessment procedures and methods; *policy implementation issues; and *a summary of current research on the effective use of technology in education. Chapter authors represent a variety of perspectives and disciplines, from computer science, cognitive and educational psychology, and educational administration. Authors represent government, business, and university communities from within and outside the U.S. These multiple perspectives contribute to the overall understanding of current technology use in education and help in identifying future research needs. Technology Applications in Education: A Learning View explores the state of the art of technology in K-16 education from a learning perspective rather than a hardware/software view. It is designed for professionals and graduate students in the educational technology, training, assessment/evaluation, school administration, military psychology, and educational psychology communities. This book is characterized in the following montage of factors: *the primacy of learning as a focus for technology implementation; *a focus on technology uses in K-16 education; *a focus on the assessment of both individuals and teams; *a broad variety of methodological approaches from qualitative to instructional design to quantitative (e.g., structural equation modeling); *a need to support the development of technology-based curriculum and tools; and *a need for theory-driven and evaluation studies to increase our knowledge.

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.

The chapters and reports in this publication have been selected from presentations at a Symposium on "Aging and Technological Advances" held in August, 1983 at the Ethel Percy Andrus Gerontology Center of the University of Southern California. The Symposium was made possible by a grant from the NATO Special Programme Panel on Human Factors, and the support of this program is gratefully acknowledged. Members of the Symposium Advisory Board were James E. Birren, Judy Livingston, Erhard Olbrich, Victor Regnier, Pauline Robinson, Thomas Singleton, Arnold Small, Harvey Sterns, and Alvar Svanborg. Professor Lambros Houssiadas also provided invaluable encouragement. Appreciation is also extended to the Andrew Norman Institute for Advanced Study in Gerontology and Geriatrics for support of planning activities leading up to the Symposium and for support of events surrounding the Symposium itself. A generous gift from The UPS Foundation to the Ethel Percy Andrus Gerontology Center made possible the compilation, editing and preparation of this manuscript and helped to support Symposium ac ti vi ties. We thank David Bergstone and Mary Margaret Ragan who together carefully and skillfully organized and carried out the typing of the manuscript.

Highlighting and illustrating several important and interesting theoretical trends that have emerged in the continuing development of instructional technology, this book's organizational framework is based on the notion of two opposing camps. One evolves out of the intelligent tutoring movement, which employs artificial-intelligence technologies in the service of student modeling and precision diagnosis, and the other emerges from a constructivist/developmental perspective that promotes exploration and social interaction, but tends to reject the methods and goals of the student modelers. While the notion of opposing camps tends to create an artificial rift between groups of researchers, it represents a conceptual distinction that is inherently more interesting and informative than the relatively meaningless divide often drawn between "intelligent" and "unintelligent" instructional systems. An evident trend is that researchers in both "camps" view their computer learning environments as "cognitive tools" that can enhance learning, performance, and understanding. Cognitive tools are objects provided by the instructional environment that allow students to incorporate new auxiliary methods or symbols into their social problem solving which otherwise would be unavailable. A final section of the book represents researchers who are assimilating and accommodating the wisdom and creativity of their neighbors from both camps, perhaps forming the look of technology for the future. When the idea of model tracing in a computer-based environment is combined with appreciation for creative mind-extension cognitive tools and for how a community of learners can facilitate learning, a camp is created where AI technologists and social constructivist learning theorists can feel equally at home.

"This book provides information on different styles of instructional design methodologies, tips, and strategies on how to use technology to facilitate active learning and techniques to help faculty and researchers develop online instructional and teaching materials. It enables libraries to provide a foundational reference for researchers, educators, administrators, and others in the context of instructional systems and technology"--Provided by publisher.

This volume of the ARGG is devoted to the behavioral sciences, with particular attention given to topics in experimental and applied psychology. With the rapid rate of research in this field of aging, the contributors address a number of important basic and applied topics that are underrepresented in other literature.

Selected as one of the outstanding instructional development books in 1989 by the Association for Educational Communications and Technology, this volume presents research in instructional design theory as it applies to microcomputer courseware. It includes recommendations -- made by a distinguished group of instructional designers -- for creating courseware to suit the interactive nature of today's technology. Principles of instructional design are offered as a solid base from which to develop more effective programs for this new method of teaching -- and learning.