Page 24 - Educational Technology A Primer for the 21st Century

1.1 Introducing Educational Technology 11

Fig. 1.1 A typical abacus calculating device

From very early times, records were kept and histories were recorded on scrolls
and in pictographs that were used to teach each new generation things that had
transpired and that might affect their futures. People learned trades on-the-job using
actual tools for many years; apprenticeship and on-the-job training remain in use in
many fields.
The invention of the Gutenberg printing press in the fifteenth century made it
possible to share information and knowledge with a much wider group of indi-
viduals than had previously been the case. Its use had become widespread in Europe
by the sixteenth century, and books became a primary resource used in many
educational settings. It is worth noting that it took a hundred years or so for the
printing press technology to be widely adopted. How long did it take smartphones
to become widely adopted? The printing press transformed learning and instruction
as well as social, political, and economic arrangements, although it took a couple of
hundred of years for those transformations to occur. Are similar transformative
effects likely to occur on account of new and emerging technologies?
For the instructor: Conduct an in-class or group discussion of the rate of
adopting a new technology in terms of planning for a new technology and then its
introduction into a context to the time it takes to make an effective use of that
technology.
In the nineteenth century, non-text media arrived with the invention of the
daguerreotype (early camera) in 1839 and wireless transmission of electromagnetic