Advanced Educational Technologies - Promise and Puzzlement

Enormous sums of money and human effort have gone into educational technologies over the past decade. Yet nagging questions surface as to whether this tremendous investment produces advantageous results. While we intuitively feel that the influence of technology should be substantial, little sound guidance exists as to what is effective and why or how to use it. We seem to have cleared several of the hurdles for building a computer-aided instruction infrastructure; now we must turn our attention to richer understandings of research into the impact of technologies in the classroom. This special issue of the Journal of Universal Computer Science focuses on assessment and evaluation practices. The six articles in this collection have been clustered around three major issues: (1) pragmatics -cost estimations and product reviews, (2) measuring the effectiveness of theory-driven design, (3) extending paradigms for capturing more profound understanding of variables and outcomes. Category: K.3 Computers and Education 1 A Critical Period for Educational Technology Increasingly, educational technology has come to mean some form of computermediated product. More affordable hardware, growing awareness of new media (information technology in general), and the combined push from education reform mandates and the pull of marketing for new media all contribute to an environment of rapid change. Yet, reports both from the workplace and from higher education indicate that meaningful integration of advanced information technologies is not a matter of simply making the hardware/software available. On all levels, many multimedia products available today are conceived of as "super-books" or elaborate "page-turners." They present students with multi-modal representations of materials and explanations, but their "pedagogy" is primarily didactic and their assumptions about learning are fairly static. Increasingly, we are seeing a backlash in the popular press against advanced educational technologies [Oppenheimer 1997]. These claims center on charges that most software engages only at a superficial level and -over time -both "deskills" the student and "disenfranchises" the teacher. In general, educational software has not reached its potential for a variety of reasons. I suggest that the bulk of these inhibitors can be clustered under four categories: • Lack of meaningful formative evaluation -While change is in the offing, the current-traditional design methods for courseware/educational software do not include adequate feedback loops. Although this may be typical for an "immature" industry, it is to be hoped that developers of educational technologies will at some Journal of Universal Computer Science, vol. 4, no. 3 (1998), 210-215 submitted: 10/12/97, accepted: 28/12/97, appeared: 28/3/98  Springer Pub. Co.