Bullet points summary
Introduction
The landscape of educational technology is in the midst of a transformative shift, as the recent widespread adoption of public access large language models has catalyzed a renewed reflection on the historical patterns of technological integration within the education sector. As an economic historian, specialized in technological innovation and large technological systems, I believe that a deeper understanding of these historical trends is crucial in shaping our approach to the emerging technological advancements (Schram, 1997). As I wrote elsewhere, this is particularly relevant for educational institutions in low-income countries in order to tackle the global education crisis and make progress towards achieving the UN's Sustainable Development Goal four (SDG -4"access to quality education").
The article by Molenda, Subramony, Clark and Stallkamp (MSCS - 2023) provides an insightful overview of the state of the question, organizing the complex subject into broad "paradigms" - guiding principles that have inspired both research and practice in educational technology. Today, the "models vs. media" paradigm is particularly relevant, since we tend to forget that all technology are tools, or means to an end. If the pedagogical model is deeply flawed, and does not promote students' engagement and active learning, adopting new technology is like the proverbial "putting lipstick on a pig".
In the 1990s, Professor Carl Wieman, a Nobel Prize winner in physics and innovator in university science education, asked himself why PhD candidates at Stanford University were still unable to do physics. He concluded that they had been taught in the wrong manner and demonstrated that by putting the problem first, and giving learners more agency in an improved pedagogical approach, learning outcomes would improve dramatically.
The origins of giving learners more agency and autonomy can be traced back to the movement started in primary and secondary schools by Maria Montessori in Italy at the beginning of the 20th century. However, due to pressure from the fascist regime, the movement's headquarters moved to the Netherlands. The emergence of more decentralized and challenge oriented pedagogical models would have been impossible without Maria Montessori's work. Much later in the 1970s, at McMaster University in Canada, Problem-Based Learning a similar approach was developed for adults in tertiary education, initially only in the medical field.
However, in MSCS I find their conclusions regarding the recent developments during the introduction of mobile and internet technologies to be somewhat unsatisfactory, particularly in the context of what they describe as the "emerging technologies paradigm" from around 1998 to the present.