June 1997 — Features

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Computers in Education: A Brief History

Herbert Simon, Nobel Laureate, observed that the developments in science and information processing technologies have changed the meaning of the verb, "to know." It used to mean "having information stored in oneís memory." It now means the process of having access to information and knowing how to use it.[3] 

3. The Emergence of Cognitive Science

There has been a major paradigm shift in education from theories of "learning" to theories of "cognition." Cognitive science approaches teaching and learning in a different way. It addresses how the human, as an information processor, functions and uses information. Rather than focusing on teaching facts through expository lectures or demonstrations, the emphasis is, instead, on developing higher-order, thinking and problem-solving skills.

The cognitive approach is important because it recognizes human information processing strengths and weaknesses, and the limits of human perception and memory in coping with the information explosion. It focuses, instead, on organizing information to fit human capacity, and has changed the emphasis in education from learning to thinking.[4,5]

4. New Educational Demands

The launching of Sputnik, an unmanned Soviet satellite, in 1957 stirred national interest in educational reform. Thus began what has been called the "golden age" of education. Major national efforts were made to reform education.

While many of the problems in education were not new, other new and different demands were changing the basic structure of education. First, there was a change in national philosophy from a position of making mass education available to many to a challenge to provide education for all. Second, we were preparing children for a new type of society that did not yet exist.

Third, since people were now living significantly longer, formal education could not end with a high school or even a college degree. Itís estimated that workers would have to prepare for two to three career changes in their lifetime. Fourth, modern communications such as radio, film, television and computers had created an information-rich society. Schools were no longer the only center of information, but had to compete for student attention. Finally, the new emerging educational technologies were to become an important catalyst for rethinking education.

THE FIRST COMPUTERS

The history of the modern computer age is a brief one. It has been about 50 years since the first operational computer was put into use: the MARK 1 in 1944 at Harvard and ENIAC in 1946 at the University of Pennsylvania. Early use of computers in education was primarily found in mathematics, science and engineering as a mathematical problem-solving tool, replacing the slide rule and thus permitting students to deal more directly with problems of a type and size most likely to be encountered in the real world.[6]