Educational Technology in the 1960s
Students were the intended end-point for much of the information traveling along these networks. A myriad of educational technologies were newly available to connect students to these inner- and inter-campus information systems. If the 1950s was the age of educational television, the 1960s was the era of advanced electronic educational technology, the decade when the electronics revolution reached campuses and classrooms. From the late 1950s forward, educational film and television were joined by a host of new, more cutting-edge information technologies: language laboratories, audio-listening centers, self-instructional "electronic" study carrels, computer-assisted instruction, teaching machines, talking typewriters, multi-media "electronic" classrooms and remote-access programmed instruction.
More and more, students were engaging information of an electronic variety. The vast majority of everything they did still required texts, but increasingly, they were interacting with information by way of screens, telewriters and headphones and connecting to it via remote-access. What’s more, the accelerated pace of innovation and expansion between and across campuses, in addition to the overstated forecasts of educational technology advocates made it appear to students and educators alike that a significant portion of educational communication—of teaching and learning--was moving inextricably towards the transmission and presentation of information via these multimedia venues. “What future place books will have, either in education or leisure time activities, cannot confidently be predicted,” asserted Edmund J. Farrell, professor of English Education at the University of California, Berkeley, “Certainly they will not dominate education as they presently do.” [1]
The use of established modes of educational technology--slides, film, television and audio—increased in classrooms throughout the 1960s, facilitated by a boom in the construction of new campus facilities throughout the decade. These were the years when standard projection equipment and multi-channel audio systems for in-class playback became a common feature of new lecture halls. Of course these modes were also continuously updated throughout the 1960s. On the far end of the spectrum, cutting-edge lecture halls, like that shown in Figure 7, were set up to employ split-screen technology, allowing instructors to juxtapose text, images and graphics. Lectures themselves could also be transmitted remotely by mid-decade, though only a few colleges employed the emerging technology. Generally referred to as tele-courses (tele in this case referring to telephone and not television) a few campuses began in 1965, transmitting lectures over two-way telephone connections to other colleges and universities or else to their own satellite campuses. What made these telecourses exciting to educators and administrators was a new technology called remote-blackboarding, electrowriters that transmitted what an instructor wrote or illustrated at his or her own location to remote sites. Made by Victor Electronics, the Victor Electrowriter Remote Blackboard (VERB) consisted of a writing pad and stylus. The stylus picked up electronic impulses which were transmitted by telephone connection to the receiver. The receiver consisted of a writing pad and an electronically controlled stylus; the impressions were instantaneously received and projected onto a screen by a specially designed overhead projector which was connected to the receiver.
Perhaps the most significant innovation in educational technology in these years was the introduction of computer assisted instruction (CAI). CAI was a process whereby instructional material was presented to students via a typewriter or cathode ray tube in a pre-programmed order. The software for such systems, called programmed instruction, was of two types: branching and operant conditioning. The first type, developed by psychologist Norman A. Crowder, constituted a kind of choose-your-own-your-adventure set of lessons. Each lesson ended with a test whereby incorrect answers would return students to prior points in the program to review material or else extrapolate on relevant material until a correct answer was achieved. The second type, developed by famed behaviorist B. F. Skinner, presented a sequence of “frames,” each frame containing only a small bit of information followed by a clear-cut question the student was unlikely to get wrong given the information presented (if more than 5% of questions were answered wrong, a programmed was revised). Each frame built on the small bit of understanding achieved in the prior frame so that the whole program “shaped” the students overall understanding of a subject or concept. Programmed instruction had been employed in other types of media, scrambled textbooks and teaching machines, primarily in the 1950s. But CAI enjoyed a tremendous vogue in the early to late 1960s, with millions of dollars flowing from the federal government for research, development and training in the new technology. At first CAI systems consisted of one or two terminals connected to a nearby mainframe. But by the early 1960s, systems had been constructed which could control dozens of terminal situated in one classroom or laboratory. The first such system, developed by the Systems Development Corporation in 1961, also included monitoring equipment enabling teachers to observe any students performance from a main console (Figure 8). Within a few years, time sharing computing made possible the distribution of CAI terminals across a given campus, like the systems at SUNY. It also made possible inter-campus CAI systems. For example, in 1966 the National Science Foundation funded the Triangle Computing Center, a complex which linked together, Duke University, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and North Carolina State University. Students at any of the three campuses could dial up to a central mainframe a choose CAI lessons from several subject areas.
The popularity of CAI was part of a concurrent trend in educational technology in the 1960s towards the kind of self-instructional learning environments on display at Library 21 and Library/USA—the multimedia study carrel. Perhaps the main advantage hailed by advocates of programmed instruction, whether in teaching machines or CAI systems, was its capacity for “individualized instruction,” its flexibility in allowing students to work at their own pace as well as the capacity of machines, by way of question-and-answer feedback mechanisms, to impart information suited to individual understanding. Indeed, many self-instructional study carrels, including those at Library 21 and Library/USA were equipped with teaching machines or CAI systems. In fact, the sheer variety of self-instructional multiple-media devices put on the market in these years attests to the scale of the attempted “electronification” of education (Figure 9).
Multimedia study carrels represented an end-point in the evolution of a related educational technology already in wide use in the late 1950s: language laboratories. Language laboratories became popular in the late 1950s as a way to combat teacher shortages in foreign language education. Laboratories typically included a few dozen study carrels each equipped with a tape player and headphones (Figure 10). They remained popular in the 1960s, though many were updated to include remote-access taped selections—students no longer needed to physically obtain tapes before sitting down to study, but instead selected lessons from a push-button console located in each carrel (Figure 11). By the early 1960s the use of audio-technology in language laboratories was extended beyond language education to include pre-recorded lessons and lectures in all areas of study (see figure 12). ‘Language laboratories’ became increasingly referred to as ‘listening laboratories.’ In 1957 about 240 language laboratories existed; in 1963 over 700 language and listening laboratories were in operation.[2] Just as with instructional television, within a few years of its emergence on the educational scene, the audio-technology used in these laboratories began to reveal opportunities unique to the medium. More and more, taped lectures were punctuated with recorded source material, interviews and news reports—they became, increasingly, assemblages of instruction and recorded media. Time Magazine described such “electronic teaching” this way:
A coed slides into a plastic chair in a soft green three—sided cubicle, consults a mimeographed list, flips a switch, sees a red light blink, dials 1-2-2, pulls on earphones. Into the headset flows the voice of her political science professor, then Adlai Stevenson on the meaning of democracy, finally a discussion of freedom by New York University's Sidney Hook—and thus ends Lecture 1, Second Semester, Political Science 113. An electronic approach to teaching at M.I.T.? A far-out experiment at Goddard? Not at all. This is 15-year-old Oklahoma Christian College, a theologically conservative, Churches of Christ-run school, which, though academically obscure, has just opened the nation's first wholly electronic learning center. Each of Oklahoma Christian's 652 students has his own study carrel, tied to a computer that connects him in seconds to one of 46 tape playback machines. The system can transmit as many as 136 programs at once.
At Oklahoma Christian College, a full two-thirds of freshman and one-third of sophomore lectures were on tape by 1966. Ohio State University had the most robust remote-access audio system. Students there could dial for 8,000 separate programs from 75 courses in 13 departments and hear everything from a reading of Chaucer to a lesson in Chinese. By 1966, student calls into the system had reached a reported 40,000 each week.[3]
Still, multimedia study carrels represented the fullest development in this area. In the early to mid-1960s, they began popping up around campuses across the nation. Some had isolated audiovisual equipment; others were networked into a centralized storage unit for audio, video and programmed instruction. Some were distributed throughout campuses; others were contained within a central laboratory or what were increasingly called, Learning Resources Centers. A full ten percent of colleges and universities surveyed by the National Association of Education’s Department of Audiovisual Instruction in January of 1967 reported using some form of multimedia, self-instructional study unit. New campuses especially began investing heavily in the new technology, imaging a future where remote-access, multimedia instruction was central to the circulation of information on campuses. Three years after its establishment in 1960, for instance, Grand Valley State College in Grand Rapids, Michigan decided to organize their new campus around multimedia carrels. In the words of their Vice President for Academic Affairs and Dean of Faculty, they decided early on to “provide students with individual study booths or carrels” and that these carrels “would become each student’s personal headquarters on campus … equipped to display audio and video materials distributed on the campus AV system.”[4] Having made such a decision early on, they were able to construct a completely wired-up campus, with a network of underground cables connecting nearly all facilities (Figure 10). Their campus contained 118 carrels, each capable of accessing 120 audio programs and eight closed-circuit television channels, all via coaxial cable. All auditoriums and lecture halls on campus could access the same material by the same means. Lectures could be recorded in any auditorium or lecture hall from a central control unit on campus (number 7 on Figure 10), stored centrally and then played back in any carrel or lecture hall in the future.
Advocates for educational technology often saw multimedia study carrels as the best way to plug students into the information explosion—the most effective and efficient way to get students to start processing the ever expanding record of human thought. Some focused again on the capacity of electronic technology to allow for individual differences in learning. Instead of keeping up with the rest of their class, slower learners could take the time to fully comprehend critical concepts. But of more interest to advocates of educational technology were advanced students, who correspondingly, could process the expanding body of information and recorded thought at an accelerated rate. With adjustable speeds, for instance, some argued that students could literally play information as fast as they could comprehend it. In this case, speeding up the learning process meant keeping up with the information explosion—a near obsession for advocates of educational technology in the 1960s. “The Knowledge Explosion is a very real problem for our new generation of students. And to help them cope with it, we must speed the learning process,” ran an ad in Time Magazine (April of 1966) for Sylvania Electronics, “Already, Sylvania is working with educators to project completely integrated systems of educational communications. Developing more sophisticated applications. Information "banks" that incorporate libraries on tape, capable of being comprehended at many times the speed of normal speech.” Others argued that multimedia learning environments were, by their nature critically interactive. In promoting the national expansion of electronic educational technology in 1966, the Subcommittee on Economic Progress summarized the testimony of eight experts in this way:
The student can control the speed of presentation in accordance with his own progress. The presentation can be in written form, through pictures, either moving or still, by voice, or by various combinations of these. Likewise, the student responses can be made by typewriter keyboard, by pressing buttons, or by simply pointing a wand at a tube.
Finally, others felt that multimedia self-instruction—and multimedia teaching in general—allowed students to process information communicated along multiple channels within the human sensorium. Film, television and audio-sequenced slides all combined sight and sound, but together with taped lectures, assigned texts and data-interactive teaching machines or CAI, multimedia study carrels were viewed by many educators, educational technologists, behavioral scientists and members of the electronics industry as cutting-edge human-machine information systems.
As we saw in chapter one, the popularity of cybernetics in the 1960s, both within and without academia, made the concept of information interface between humans and machines particularly intriguing. As one can imagine, educational technology was an arena where this new fascination played itself out. In fact, the sheer variety of new instructional media in the 1960s was only part of what set the arena of educational technology in these years apart from its analog in prior periods. Perhaps more critical was the newly dominant role of communications theory, behavioral science, and systems engineering in the research, development and theoretical rationale behind educational technology in these years. In the early 1960s, the professional field of audio-visual instruction, influenced by thinking in the novel fields of computer science, communications and cybernetics, experienced a reorientation away from a concern with visual aids in the classroom towards a more comprehensive theory of human-machine systems. This reorientation made the field considerably more amenable to the work of behavioral scientists, systems engineers and the electronics industry, all of whom became intimately involved in the construction of educational technology in the 1960s. In 1963 the field attempted to formalize this reorientation with the release of the definitional work, The Changing Role of the Audiovisual Process in Education: A Definition and Glossary of Related Terms, sponsored by the Division of Audio-Visual Instruction of the National Education Association and authored by three of the field’s architects, James Finn, Donald Bushnell and Donald Ely.[5] Their work was, in essence, an effort to put the field, for the first time, on a solid theoretical footing. Imbibing a healthy amount of cybernetic-inspired communications theory from works such as Claude Simon and Warren Weaver’s touchtone, Mathematical Theory of Communication (1949), the authors cast off the field’s prior focus on things—visual and instructional aids—and asserted a more sophisticated underpinning to their domain, the process of information transmission; messages and feedback within “educational-communicant systems” (Figure 11). “Audiovisual communications” was now:
that branch of educational theory and practice concerned primarily with the design and use of messages which control the learning process. It undertakes …the structuring and systematizing of messages by men and instruments in an educational environment. These undertakings include the planning, production, selection, management, and utilization of both components and entire instructional systems. Its practical goal is the efficient utilization of every method and medium of communication which can contribute to the development of the learner's full potential.
“The 1963 definition [characterized] educational technology as a process,” Alan Januszewski has written in his Educational Technology: The Development of a Concept, “The Process was the analysis, development, implementation and evaluation of man-machine systems to deliver instruction.”
This new orientation had two important features for our purposes here. First, it treated humans and machines, at least those capable of responding to input, as mutual communicants in an educational-communicant system. Both were senders and receivers of messages and thus “designated communicants.” Communicants were “complementary organisms which operate within an optimal linkage situation,” that is, the overall design of a learning environment was meant to make optimal communication linkages, between educators, instructional material, students and equipment: “Optimal linkage is designed to show the mutual roles of communicants in the transmission of messages.” Second, this new emphasis on the total process of communication included a “systems approach” to instructional design. Using the communications model outlined above, an effort was made to forecast the most effective way to transmit information to, and thus elicit the proper response from, the learner given the total set of interrelating elements in the educational-communicant system. “The task of the audiovisual specialist may be described as assistance in the appropriate design of a presentation which utilizes the elements of messages, media-instrumentation, men, methods, and environment,” the authors instructed, “The appropriate combination of these elements implies a systems approach.” The Changing Role of the Audiovisual Process in Education merely codified a transformation already taking place in the field. Audiovisual specialists, who ten years prior, had focused on acquiring visual aids for schools based mostly on their content (e.g. history, math or spelling), were more and more educated in information systems theory and applying a systems approach regarding the arrangement of multiple media equipment. Practitioners in the field, for instance, began to increasingly refer to themselves as “audiovisual engineers.”
The new social scientific and systems engineering approach to audiovisual instruction made the field of educational technology incredibly amenable to the method and manner of the electronics industry who, in the mid-1960s, moved full force into the world of education. From the early to late 1960s, with few exceptions, every major electronics manufacturer in the United States began to invest in the research, development and production of educational technologies. Xerox, R.C.A., Raytheon, Sylvania, Victor, General Electric, I.B.M., Honeywell, Remington Rand, Burroughs, Digital Equipment, Westinghouse and Philco-Ford—essentially, the nation’s entire electronics industry moved en mass into the schoolroom.
In one sense, they did it for the money. Education was a booming industry. Direct expenditures for formal education in elementary schools, high schools, and colleges increased from $18 billion a year in 1955 to $40 billion in 1966. By 1975, that number was an expected to increase another 50% to $60 billion. Increased enrollments were only part of the reason. Total enrollment in U.S. educational institutions did rise from 36 million in 1954 to 53 million in 1964 and was expected to reach 63 million by 1975. But at the same time, annual expenditures per pupil in public elementary and secondary schools increased from $321 per pupil in 1954-55 to $478 in 1964-65, and were expected to increase to $660 by 1974-75 while the annual cost per student in institutions of higher learning rose from $881 in 1954-55 to $1,220 in 1964-65, and was expected to climb to $1,537 in 1974-75. In 1966, experts estimated that the educational technology market in the United States was somewhere around $500 million a year, while predicting that it would rise markedly in the next decade to $5 or $10 billion. Indeed, the federal government alone was shelling out 1 billion a year by 1966 towards educational innovation, with 200 million of that going directly to hardware development.
But once inside the classroom, industry took the position that they were there to save education. The tone of industry leaders when addressing educators, often indicated that they felt they had been called on by the government and by detractors of modern schooling to apply the prowess of their technical know-how and “systems thinking” to the large-scale problems of the nation’s educational system. “It is characteristic of our economy to meet new challenges with more effective technology,” John Stark, deputy director of the Joint Economic Committee, framed it historically, “When our historical development required breakthroughs in transportation and communications, to name two important sectors, it was technical innovation that made them possible. It is not surprising to discover mounting enthusiasm among educators for the possibilities of applying our rapidly developing communications technology to education.”[6] Deficiencies in the nation’s educational system—whole uneducated sectors of society, poor national test scores, the inability of educators to keep up with the information explosion, even the inability to successfully transmit traditional values to the next generation at a time of social upheaval —were often blamed on the technological backwardness of education. Some even compared education to a third world country, whose folk culture has successfully resisted modernization. "The aircraft industry would go out of business in 2 years if it changed as slowly as education" one industry leader stated before the Joint Economic Committee.
To their credit, industry leaders did often attempt to allay educator’s fears by stressing the need for cooperation and collaboration. “The goal, of course, is to build a working relationship between schools and industry so that together we can plan, carry out, and evaluate efforts aimed at improving education,” assured Edward Katzenbach, vice president of Raytheon’s Education Division.[7] But they did so with some arrogance. After only a few years working in the area of education, industry leaders again and again felt comfortable telling lifelong educators that the progress of education in America now depended on their getting along with engineers and businessmen.
Industry is strongly committed to utilize its broad technological knowledge; its administrative, engineering, and systems analysis talent; its research and development and manufacturing resources; and its energy in helping to improve education. If these resources are to be skillfully applied … a close working relationship between industry and the academic community must be developed. The continuing and accelerated progress of education in America may well, in fact, depend upon this relationship.[8]
What recourses did industry have? More than just educational technology. For with educational technology came “systems analysis.” Systems analysis was, according to another exec in Raytheon’s Education Division, “the application of scientific methods and tools to the prediction and comparison of the values, effectiveness, and costs of a set of alternative courses of action involving man-machine systems.”[9] In other words, it was a way to forecast and thus properly design and implement the assembly of a multitude of resources geared towards a broad objective, in this case and educational objective. But in the end, the electronic industry’s brand of systems analysis, as they themselves articulated it to educators, essentially called for industrial solutions, specifically the design of “new and exciting” combinations and re-combinations of various educational media components. When the electronics industry talked of “systems analysis” in education, more often than not, they meant figuring out which media components should be used in what order or what configuration to effectively convey a subject or concept. When for instance, should CAI as opposed to multimedia instruction be employed in an overall system? In fact, members of industry often expressed their expectation that educators would one day become something like information councilors, primarily training students to properly employ, and discriminate between, various sources of ubiquitous informational media. “Educational technology may require profound changes in the teacher’s role,” assured Katzenbach, “from that of classroom instruction to that of including the much broader duties of ‘orchestrating’ an array of new teaching tools.”[10] Whether with apprehension or optimism, many educators had similar expectations. In a world where information was everywhere—in print, on your home television, on computers, at the other end of your telephone line, in the air, and who knows where else in the future—students may need, more than anything else, to know how to manage information sources. “I rather think the term 'classroom teacher' will soon be a misnomer, if it is not already so,” argued Lois Edinger, president of the National Education Association in in trying to reassure educators that educational technology was not meant to displace teachers so much as alter their overall function, “for the teacher will no longer be confined to a classroom ... No longer will we think of the classroom in its traditional box shape. Indeed, we may soon call the teacher a manager of learning resources in an instructional resources center.”[11]
Industry also moved into education because they regarded the campus and classroom as key arenas in which to work out the development and implementation of cutting-edge information transmission systems. In particular, the electronics industry believed that education was the first arena where information transmission would move, on a large scale, beyond the bound book and towards electronic systems. This particular vision was behind a sudden spate of large-scale mergers, acquisitions and joint ventures between the nation’s leading electronics firms and publishing houses specializing in educational material in the middle 1960s. In 1964, IBM acquired Science Research Associates, a company specializing in programmed instructional materials while R.C.A. made public negotiations to purchase Prentice Hall, a large publisher of textbooks. Talks between R.C.A. and Prentice Hall fell through in April of 1965, but meanwhile a number of other firms were negotiating similar arrangements. In the summer of 1965, Xerox purchased American Educational Publications and in 1966, Litton Industries acquired the American Book Company, a publisher of elementary, high school and college textbooks and educational records. In that same year, Raytheon Inc. purchased D.C. Heath, another textbook concern and in March, R.C.A. ended up acquiring Random House, the largest of these electronics and publishing arrangements. Joint research ventures between electronics and publishing interests were also popular. In the fall of 1965, General Electric and Time Inc. formed a joint company, the General Learning Company, to produce educational materials, systems and services. The next year, Sylvania Electronics and the Reader’s Digest Association announced a joint group to investigate the potential of electronic systems in education. Alongside these more conspicuous, large-scale transactions, other partnerships were being formed. By 1968, this “rash of mergers of ‘hardware’ and ‘software’ companies” included over one hundred new partnerships.[12]
At the center of these deals, at least explicitly, was a kind of core formula, a formula that, according to Alan Stein, partner at Goldman, Sachs & Co., even investment houses were counting on: in the future, at least in education, publishers would be responsible for producing content and the electronics industry would be responsible for producing the equipment which transmitted that content. Even Bennet Cerf, president of Random House could get behind such synergy. “Publishing and electronics are natural partners,” he argued at the time of his and R.C.A’s merger, “With the revolution in education that is expected in the next ten years, R.C.A. has the equipment that will be used and we have the books.”[13] On the surface, at least, everyone appeared to be in agreement. George Haller, president of General Electric, characterized publishers as “the people who can collect and present learning materials,” while arguing that systems engineers can “do a better job of transmitting the material.”[14] Both groups had reason to be happy about these ventures. The electronics industry needed educational content—well written, edited content—for their instructional systems. Members of the publishing industry who specialized in educational material—the most profitable field of publishing—perhaps convinced that educational material was destined to be transmitted electronically, felt they needed a partner in the electronics industry to stay competitive.
Others were not so sure. In May of 1966, the American Book Publishing Council held a panel discussion with members of the electronics industry to ask them point blank why they were “interested in the book business.” Some feared that educational publishing was only the beginning, that the electronics industry would move inextricably into all areas of traditional text production. Representatives of General Electric and IBM did little to allay such fears at the Council meeting. When asked by the audience of publishers what kind of hardware would transmit the contents of printed material in the future, both representatives talked of a futuristic world where the codex would be nearly irrelevant. D.V. Newton of IBM talked about artificial intelligence programs that would soon determine a student’s learning deficiencies before teaching them, simply by conversing with the student, something a book could never do; George Haller talked about a point in time when a device could be used to pass information directly from one brain to another.
Such fears were not unwarranted. On the one hand, the electronics industry undoubtedly had the expansion of educational communications systems in mind when they acquired these publishing houses. They had, for instance, designs on the American home. When Alfred C. Edwards, president of Holt, Rinehart and Winston, was approached by a “leading electronics executive,” he was told that the firm wanted to “take information out of a book, put it on audio-visual tapes and then … bring the information into homes and schools.” Edwards, who turned down their offer, reportedly asked the executive, “Doesn’t a book do that already?” At the time of its merger with Random House, R.C.A. was in the process of developing a machine that transmitted printed material—text and images—by way of television sets (Figure 12). In yet another example that the television, as a networked electronic device, was initially offered as a viable alternative to the computer for managing the information explosion, six prototypes existed in 1966 and each could successfully transmit a paperback sized page of material in 10 seconds. Customers would ultimately choose between 14 options “scheduled” each day. They would turn a switch to one of 14 points and the corresponding material would be transmitted over the FCC controlled airwaves to their printer. Among the material listed by James Hillier, vice president of R.C.A Laboratories, for possible transmission was news briefs, sports scores, stock market reports, TV program schedules, syndicated columns, news magazines and presidential addresses. Also included was printed material to accompany educational television programs. In the middle-1960s, Sarnoff envisioned this device, or something like it, at the heart of future information transmission. “A true communications revolution,” was coming, he said in 1966, “[where] the telephone, record and tape player, radio, TV, and film projector [will be] merged into one unit that will also publish magazines, and newspapers in your home."
On the other hand, some members of the electronics industry clearly felt that the realm of education was only a first step, that one day soon, a good portion of content traditionally destined for print would be communicated electronically. George Haller, president of General Electric, rather arrogantly declared to the audience at the American Book Publishing Council meeting that the function of their profession would soon be narrowed to fit technological trends: “We are not interested in the book business, we are interested mainly in the information business. I predict that you people will be chiefly information publishers in the future.”[15] R.C.A. clearly envisioned a future where a good deal of published material would end up in electronic systems. Their newly formed “Graphic Systems” division, the division which absorbed Random House, was primarily responsible for designing electronic systems capable of converting printed material into information which could be displayed by a computer onto a cathode ray tube screen (Figure 13). In short, the “Graphic Systems” division was among the first in the nation to develop a method of turning computer memory of a text (inputted in the form of paper or magnetic tape) into a CRT display of that text on a computer screen. One could, for the first time, create a paper tape of a text—any text—by punching out spaces on the tape corresponding to given letters, numbers and punctuation; each punched space would tell the computer to render on a CRT screen, a specific graphic representation, stored in its memory, of a letter, number or punctuation mark. R.C.A. marketed this process to printers as the Videocomp phototypesetter, but they had larger futuristic designs on this breakthrough technology. The central project of the “Graphic Systems” division was the development of “electronic libraries in which all types of printed information could be stored electronically and retrieved immediately.” In short, RCA and other electronic firms, imagined that one day soon, whether with the computer at the center or not, the myriad of new electronic networks and devices would be configured in such a way as to transmit all information more effectively. The arena of education was just a start.
[1] Farrell, Edmund. English Education and the Electronic Revolution. Campaign, Illinois: National Council of Teachers of English, 1967. Pp. 53.
[2] Brown, James W. and James W. Thornton. New Media in Higher Education. Washington D.C.: Association for Higher Education and the Division of Audiovisual Instructional Service of the National Education Association. Pp. 86.
[3] Gilroy, harry. Electronics and Books: Merger Path. New York Times. Feb 6, 1966. Pp. 14.
[4] Potter, George. “Dial-Remote Access.” In Ed. Robert A. Weisgerber. Instructional Process and Media Innovation. Rand Mcnally & Company, Chicago, 1968. Pp. 390.
[5] For an explication of this reorientation see Educational Technology: The Development of a Concept.
[6] Educational Technology: a Communications Problem, 196
[7] Katzenbach, Edward L. “Industry Can Serve,” The Phi Delta Kappan, Vol. 48, No. 5 (Jan., 1967). Pp. 191.
[8] Ibid. pp. 193-94.
[9] Meals, Donald W. “Heuristic Models for Systems Planning,” The Phi Delta Kappan, Vol. 48, No. 5 (Jan., 1967). Pp. 202.
[10] “Industry can serve,” 191.
[11] Keppel, Francis. “The Business Interest in Education,” The Phi Delta Kappan, Vol. 48, No. 5 (Jan., 1967). Pp. 189.
[12] Sharpes, Donald K. “Computers in Education.” The Clearing House. Vol. 43, No. 3, Nov., 1968. Pp. 135. Behrens, Carl. “Publishing Goes Electronic.” Science News, Vol. 92, No. 2, Jul., 1967. Pp. 44.
[13] Gilroy, Harry. “Electronics and Books: Merger Path,” New York Times, Feb 6, 1966. Pp. F1.
[14] Gilroy, Harry. “Newest Bookman Program the Future,” The New York Times. May 27, 1966. Pp. 40.
[15] Gilroy, Harry. “Newest Bookman Program the Future,” The New York Times. May 27, 1966. Pp. 40.
More and more, students were engaging information of an electronic variety. The vast majority of everything they did still required texts, but increasingly, they were interacting with information by way of screens, telewriters and headphones and connecting to it via remote-access. What’s more, the accelerated pace of innovation and expansion between and across campuses, in addition to the overstated forecasts of educational technology advocates made it appear to students and educators alike that a significant portion of educational communication—of teaching and learning--was moving inextricably towards the transmission and presentation of information via these multimedia venues. “What future place books will have, either in education or leisure time activities, cannot confidently be predicted,” asserted Edmund J. Farrell, professor of English Education at the University of California, Berkeley, “Certainly they will not dominate education as they presently do.” [1]
The use of established modes of educational technology--slides, film, television and audio—increased in classrooms throughout the 1960s, facilitated by a boom in the construction of new campus facilities throughout the decade. These were the years when standard projection equipment and multi-channel audio systems for in-class playback became a common feature of new lecture halls. Of course these modes were also continuously updated throughout the 1960s. On the far end of the spectrum, cutting-edge lecture halls, like that shown in Figure 7, were set up to employ split-screen technology, allowing instructors to juxtapose text, images and graphics. Lectures themselves could also be transmitted remotely by mid-decade, though only a few colleges employed the emerging technology. Generally referred to as tele-courses (tele in this case referring to telephone and not television) a few campuses began in 1965, transmitting lectures over two-way telephone connections to other colleges and universities or else to their own satellite campuses. What made these telecourses exciting to educators and administrators was a new technology called remote-blackboarding, electrowriters that transmitted what an instructor wrote or illustrated at his or her own location to remote sites. Made by Victor Electronics, the Victor Electrowriter Remote Blackboard (VERB) consisted of a writing pad and stylus. The stylus picked up electronic impulses which were transmitted by telephone connection to the receiver. The receiver consisted of a writing pad and an electronically controlled stylus; the impressions were instantaneously received and projected onto a screen by a specially designed overhead projector which was connected to the receiver.
Perhaps the most significant innovation in educational technology in these years was the introduction of computer assisted instruction (CAI). CAI was a process whereby instructional material was presented to students via a typewriter or cathode ray tube in a pre-programmed order. The software for such systems, called programmed instruction, was of two types: branching and operant conditioning. The first type, developed by psychologist Norman A. Crowder, constituted a kind of choose-your-own-your-adventure set of lessons. Each lesson ended with a test whereby incorrect answers would return students to prior points in the program to review material or else extrapolate on relevant material until a correct answer was achieved. The second type, developed by famed behaviorist B. F. Skinner, presented a sequence of “frames,” each frame containing only a small bit of information followed by a clear-cut question the student was unlikely to get wrong given the information presented (if more than 5% of questions were answered wrong, a programmed was revised). Each frame built on the small bit of understanding achieved in the prior frame so that the whole program “shaped” the students overall understanding of a subject or concept. Programmed instruction had been employed in other types of media, scrambled textbooks and teaching machines, primarily in the 1950s. But CAI enjoyed a tremendous vogue in the early to late 1960s, with millions of dollars flowing from the federal government for research, development and training in the new technology. At first CAI systems consisted of one or two terminals connected to a nearby mainframe. But by the early 1960s, systems had been constructed which could control dozens of terminal situated in one classroom or laboratory. The first such system, developed by the Systems Development Corporation in 1961, also included monitoring equipment enabling teachers to observe any students performance from a main console (Figure 8). Within a few years, time sharing computing made possible the distribution of CAI terminals across a given campus, like the systems at SUNY. It also made possible inter-campus CAI systems. For example, in 1966 the National Science Foundation funded the Triangle Computing Center, a complex which linked together, Duke University, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and North Carolina State University. Students at any of the three campuses could dial up to a central mainframe a choose CAI lessons from several subject areas.
The popularity of CAI was part of a concurrent trend in educational technology in the 1960s towards the kind of self-instructional learning environments on display at Library 21 and Library/USA—the multimedia study carrel. Perhaps the main advantage hailed by advocates of programmed instruction, whether in teaching machines or CAI systems, was its capacity for “individualized instruction,” its flexibility in allowing students to work at their own pace as well as the capacity of machines, by way of question-and-answer feedback mechanisms, to impart information suited to individual understanding. Indeed, many self-instructional study carrels, including those at Library 21 and Library/USA were equipped with teaching machines or CAI systems. In fact, the sheer variety of self-instructional multiple-media devices put on the market in these years attests to the scale of the attempted “electronification” of education (Figure 9).
Multimedia study carrels represented an end-point in the evolution of a related educational technology already in wide use in the late 1950s: language laboratories. Language laboratories became popular in the late 1950s as a way to combat teacher shortages in foreign language education. Laboratories typically included a few dozen study carrels each equipped with a tape player and headphones (Figure 10). They remained popular in the 1960s, though many were updated to include remote-access taped selections—students no longer needed to physically obtain tapes before sitting down to study, but instead selected lessons from a push-button console located in each carrel (Figure 11). By the early 1960s the use of audio-technology in language laboratories was extended beyond language education to include pre-recorded lessons and lectures in all areas of study (see figure 12). ‘Language laboratories’ became increasingly referred to as ‘listening laboratories.’ In 1957 about 240 language laboratories existed; in 1963 over 700 language and listening laboratories were in operation.[2] Just as with instructional television, within a few years of its emergence on the educational scene, the audio-technology used in these laboratories began to reveal opportunities unique to the medium. More and more, taped lectures were punctuated with recorded source material, interviews and news reports—they became, increasingly, assemblages of instruction and recorded media. Time Magazine described such “electronic teaching” this way:
A coed slides into a plastic chair in a soft green three—sided cubicle, consults a mimeographed list, flips a switch, sees a red light blink, dials 1-2-2, pulls on earphones. Into the headset flows the voice of her political science professor, then Adlai Stevenson on the meaning of democracy, finally a discussion of freedom by New York University's Sidney Hook—and thus ends Lecture 1, Second Semester, Political Science 113. An electronic approach to teaching at M.I.T.? A far-out experiment at Goddard? Not at all. This is 15-year-old Oklahoma Christian College, a theologically conservative, Churches of Christ-run school, which, though academically obscure, has just opened the nation's first wholly electronic learning center. Each of Oklahoma Christian's 652 students has his own study carrel, tied to a computer that connects him in seconds to one of 46 tape playback machines. The system can transmit as many as 136 programs at once.
At Oklahoma Christian College, a full two-thirds of freshman and one-third of sophomore lectures were on tape by 1966. Ohio State University had the most robust remote-access audio system. Students there could dial for 8,000 separate programs from 75 courses in 13 departments and hear everything from a reading of Chaucer to a lesson in Chinese. By 1966, student calls into the system had reached a reported 40,000 each week.[3]
Still, multimedia study carrels represented the fullest development in this area. In the early to mid-1960s, they began popping up around campuses across the nation. Some had isolated audiovisual equipment; others were networked into a centralized storage unit for audio, video and programmed instruction. Some were distributed throughout campuses; others were contained within a central laboratory or what were increasingly called, Learning Resources Centers. A full ten percent of colleges and universities surveyed by the National Association of Education’s Department of Audiovisual Instruction in January of 1967 reported using some form of multimedia, self-instructional study unit. New campuses especially began investing heavily in the new technology, imaging a future where remote-access, multimedia instruction was central to the circulation of information on campuses. Three years after its establishment in 1960, for instance, Grand Valley State College in Grand Rapids, Michigan decided to organize their new campus around multimedia carrels. In the words of their Vice President for Academic Affairs and Dean of Faculty, they decided early on to “provide students with individual study booths or carrels” and that these carrels “would become each student’s personal headquarters on campus … equipped to display audio and video materials distributed on the campus AV system.”[4] Having made such a decision early on, they were able to construct a completely wired-up campus, with a network of underground cables connecting nearly all facilities (Figure 10). Their campus contained 118 carrels, each capable of accessing 120 audio programs and eight closed-circuit television channels, all via coaxial cable. All auditoriums and lecture halls on campus could access the same material by the same means. Lectures could be recorded in any auditorium or lecture hall from a central control unit on campus (number 7 on Figure 10), stored centrally and then played back in any carrel or lecture hall in the future.
Advocates for educational technology often saw multimedia study carrels as the best way to plug students into the information explosion—the most effective and efficient way to get students to start processing the ever expanding record of human thought. Some focused again on the capacity of electronic technology to allow for individual differences in learning. Instead of keeping up with the rest of their class, slower learners could take the time to fully comprehend critical concepts. But of more interest to advocates of educational technology were advanced students, who correspondingly, could process the expanding body of information and recorded thought at an accelerated rate. With adjustable speeds, for instance, some argued that students could literally play information as fast as they could comprehend it. In this case, speeding up the learning process meant keeping up with the information explosion—a near obsession for advocates of educational technology in the 1960s. “The Knowledge Explosion is a very real problem for our new generation of students. And to help them cope with it, we must speed the learning process,” ran an ad in Time Magazine (April of 1966) for Sylvania Electronics, “Already, Sylvania is working with educators to project completely integrated systems of educational communications. Developing more sophisticated applications. Information "banks" that incorporate libraries on tape, capable of being comprehended at many times the speed of normal speech.” Others argued that multimedia learning environments were, by their nature critically interactive. In promoting the national expansion of electronic educational technology in 1966, the Subcommittee on Economic Progress summarized the testimony of eight experts in this way:
The student can control the speed of presentation in accordance with his own progress. The presentation can be in written form, through pictures, either moving or still, by voice, or by various combinations of these. Likewise, the student responses can be made by typewriter keyboard, by pressing buttons, or by simply pointing a wand at a tube.
Finally, others felt that multimedia self-instruction—and multimedia teaching in general—allowed students to process information communicated along multiple channels within the human sensorium. Film, television and audio-sequenced slides all combined sight and sound, but together with taped lectures, assigned texts and data-interactive teaching machines or CAI, multimedia study carrels were viewed by many educators, educational technologists, behavioral scientists and members of the electronics industry as cutting-edge human-machine information systems.
As we saw in chapter one, the popularity of cybernetics in the 1960s, both within and without academia, made the concept of information interface between humans and machines particularly intriguing. As one can imagine, educational technology was an arena where this new fascination played itself out. In fact, the sheer variety of new instructional media in the 1960s was only part of what set the arena of educational technology in these years apart from its analog in prior periods. Perhaps more critical was the newly dominant role of communications theory, behavioral science, and systems engineering in the research, development and theoretical rationale behind educational technology in these years. In the early 1960s, the professional field of audio-visual instruction, influenced by thinking in the novel fields of computer science, communications and cybernetics, experienced a reorientation away from a concern with visual aids in the classroom towards a more comprehensive theory of human-machine systems. This reorientation made the field considerably more amenable to the work of behavioral scientists, systems engineers and the electronics industry, all of whom became intimately involved in the construction of educational technology in the 1960s. In 1963 the field attempted to formalize this reorientation with the release of the definitional work, The Changing Role of the Audiovisual Process in Education: A Definition and Glossary of Related Terms, sponsored by the Division of Audio-Visual Instruction of the National Education Association and authored by three of the field’s architects, James Finn, Donald Bushnell and Donald Ely.[5] Their work was, in essence, an effort to put the field, for the first time, on a solid theoretical footing. Imbibing a healthy amount of cybernetic-inspired communications theory from works such as Claude Simon and Warren Weaver’s touchtone, Mathematical Theory of Communication (1949), the authors cast off the field’s prior focus on things—visual and instructional aids—and asserted a more sophisticated underpinning to their domain, the process of information transmission; messages and feedback within “educational-communicant systems” (Figure 11). “Audiovisual communications” was now:
that branch of educational theory and practice concerned primarily with the design and use of messages which control the learning process. It undertakes …the structuring and systematizing of messages by men and instruments in an educational environment. These undertakings include the planning, production, selection, management, and utilization of both components and entire instructional systems. Its practical goal is the efficient utilization of every method and medium of communication which can contribute to the development of the learner's full potential.
“The 1963 definition [characterized] educational technology as a process,” Alan Januszewski has written in his Educational Technology: The Development of a Concept, “The Process was the analysis, development, implementation and evaluation of man-machine systems to deliver instruction.”
This new orientation had two important features for our purposes here. First, it treated humans and machines, at least those capable of responding to input, as mutual communicants in an educational-communicant system. Both were senders and receivers of messages and thus “designated communicants.” Communicants were “complementary organisms which operate within an optimal linkage situation,” that is, the overall design of a learning environment was meant to make optimal communication linkages, between educators, instructional material, students and equipment: “Optimal linkage is designed to show the mutual roles of communicants in the transmission of messages.” Second, this new emphasis on the total process of communication included a “systems approach” to instructional design. Using the communications model outlined above, an effort was made to forecast the most effective way to transmit information to, and thus elicit the proper response from, the learner given the total set of interrelating elements in the educational-communicant system. “The task of the audiovisual specialist may be described as assistance in the appropriate design of a presentation which utilizes the elements of messages, media-instrumentation, men, methods, and environment,” the authors instructed, “The appropriate combination of these elements implies a systems approach.” The Changing Role of the Audiovisual Process in Education merely codified a transformation already taking place in the field. Audiovisual specialists, who ten years prior, had focused on acquiring visual aids for schools based mostly on their content (e.g. history, math or spelling), were more and more educated in information systems theory and applying a systems approach regarding the arrangement of multiple media equipment. Practitioners in the field, for instance, began to increasingly refer to themselves as “audiovisual engineers.”
The new social scientific and systems engineering approach to audiovisual instruction made the field of educational technology incredibly amenable to the method and manner of the electronics industry who, in the mid-1960s, moved full force into the world of education. From the early to late 1960s, with few exceptions, every major electronics manufacturer in the United States began to invest in the research, development and production of educational technologies. Xerox, R.C.A., Raytheon, Sylvania, Victor, General Electric, I.B.M., Honeywell, Remington Rand, Burroughs, Digital Equipment, Westinghouse and Philco-Ford—essentially, the nation’s entire electronics industry moved en mass into the schoolroom.
In one sense, they did it for the money. Education was a booming industry. Direct expenditures for formal education in elementary schools, high schools, and colleges increased from $18 billion a year in 1955 to $40 billion in 1966. By 1975, that number was an expected to increase another 50% to $60 billion. Increased enrollments were only part of the reason. Total enrollment in U.S. educational institutions did rise from 36 million in 1954 to 53 million in 1964 and was expected to reach 63 million by 1975. But at the same time, annual expenditures per pupil in public elementary and secondary schools increased from $321 per pupil in 1954-55 to $478 in 1964-65, and were expected to increase to $660 by 1974-75 while the annual cost per student in institutions of higher learning rose from $881 in 1954-55 to $1,220 in 1964-65, and was expected to climb to $1,537 in 1974-75. In 1966, experts estimated that the educational technology market in the United States was somewhere around $500 million a year, while predicting that it would rise markedly in the next decade to $5 or $10 billion. Indeed, the federal government alone was shelling out 1 billion a year by 1966 towards educational innovation, with 200 million of that going directly to hardware development.
But once inside the classroom, industry took the position that they were there to save education. The tone of industry leaders when addressing educators, often indicated that they felt they had been called on by the government and by detractors of modern schooling to apply the prowess of their technical know-how and “systems thinking” to the large-scale problems of the nation’s educational system. “It is characteristic of our economy to meet new challenges with more effective technology,” John Stark, deputy director of the Joint Economic Committee, framed it historically, “When our historical development required breakthroughs in transportation and communications, to name two important sectors, it was technical innovation that made them possible. It is not surprising to discover mounting enthusiasm among educators for the possibilities of applying our rapidly developing communications technology to education.”[6] Deficiencies in the nation’s educational system—whole uneducated sectors of society, poor national test scores, the inability of educators to keep up with the information explosion, even the inability to successfully transmit traditional values to the next generation at a time of social upheaval —were often blamed on the technological backwardness of education. Some even compared education to a third world country, whose folk culture has successfully resisted modernization. "The aircraft industry would go out of business in 2 years if it changed as slowly as education" one industry leader stated before the Joint Economic Committee.
To their credit, industry leaders did often attempt to allay educator’s fears by stressing the need for cooperation and collaboration. “The goal, of course, is to build a working relationship between schools and industry so that together we can plan, carry out, and evaluate efforts aimed at improving education,” assured Edward Katzenbach, vice president of Raytheon’s Education Division.[7] But they did so with some arrogance. After only a few years working in the area of education, industry leaders again and again felt comfortable telling lifelong educators that the progress of education in America now depended on their getting along with engineers and businessmen.
Industry is strongly committed to utilize its broad technological knowledge; its administrative, engineering, and systems analysis talent; its research and development and manufacturing resources; and its energy in helping to improve education. If these resources are to be skillfully applied … a close working relationship between industry and the academic community must be developed. The continuing and accelerated progress of education in America may well, in fact, depend upon this relationship.[8]
What recourses did industry have? More than just educational technology. For with educational technology came “systems analysis.” Systems analysis was, according to another exec in Raytheon’s Education Division, “the application of scientific methods and tools to the prediction and comparison of the values, effectiveness, and costs of a set of alternative courses of action involving man-machine systems.”[9] In other words, it was a way to forecast and thus properly design and implement the assembly of a multitude of resources geared towards a broad objective, in this case and educational objective. But in the end, the electronic industry’s brand of systems analysis, as they themselves articulated it to educators, essentially called for industrial solutions, specifically the design of “new and exciting” combinations and re-combinations of various educational media components. When the electronics industry talked of “systems analysis” in education, more often than not, they meant figuring out which media components should be used in what order or what configuration to effectively convey a subject or concept. When for instance, should CAI as opposed to multimedia instruction be employed in an overall system? In fact, members of industry often expressed their expectation that educators would one day become something like information councilors, primarily training students to properly employ, and discriminate between, various sources of ubiquitous informational media. “Educational technology may require profound changes in the teacher’s role,” assured Katzenbach, “from that of classroom instruction to that of including the much broader duties of ‘orchestrating’ an array of new teaching tools.”[10] Whether with apprehension or optimism, many educators had similar expectations. In a world where information was everywhere—in print, on your home television, on computers, at the other end of your telephone line, in the air, and who knows where else in the future—students may need, more than anything else, to know how to manage information sources. “I rather think the term 'classroom teacher' will soon be a misnomer, if it is not already so,” argued Lois Edinger, president of the National Education Association in in trying to reassure educators that educational technology was not meant to displace teachers so much as alter their overall function, “for the teacher will no longer be confined to a classroom ... No longer will we think of the classroom in its traditional box shape. Indeed, we may soon call the teacher a manager of learning resources in an instructional resources center.”[11]
Industry also moved into education because they regarded the campus and classroom as key arenas in which to work out the development and implementation of cutting-edge information transmission systems. In particular, the electronics industry believed that education was the first arena where information transmission would move, on a large scale, beyond the bound book and towards electronic systems. This particular vision was behind a sudden spate of large-scale mergers, acquisitions and joint ventures between the nation’s leading electronics firms and publishing houses specializing in educational material in the middle 1960s. In 1964, IBM acquired Science Research Associates, a company specializing in programmed instructional materials while R.C.A. made public negotiations to purchase Prentice Hall, a large publisher of textbooks. Talks between R.C.A. and Prentice Hall fell through in April of 1965, but meanwhile a number of other firms were negotiating similar arrangements. In the summer of 1965, Xerox purchased American Educational Publications and in 1966, Litton Industries acquired the American Book Company, a publisher of elementary, high school and college textbooks and educational records. In that same year, Raytheon Inc. purchased D.C. Heath, another textbook concern and in March, R.C.A. ended up acquiring Random House, the largest of these electronics and publishing arrangements. Joint research ventures between electronics and publishing interests were also popular. In the fall of 1965, General Electric and Time Inc. formed a joint company, the General Learning Company, to produce educational materials, systems and services. The next year, Sylvania Electronics and the Reader’s Digest Association announced a joint group to investigate the potential of electronic systems in education. Alongside these more conspicuous, large-scale transactions, other partnerships were being formed. By 1968, this “rash of mergers of ‘hardware’ and ‘software’ companies” included over one hundred new partnerships.[12]
At the center of these deals, at least explicitly, was a kind of core formula, a formula that, according to Alan Stein, partner at Goldman, Sachs & Co., even investment houses were counting on: in the future, at least in education, publishers would be responsible for producing content and the electronics industry would be responsible for producing the equipment which transmitted that content. Even Bennet Cerf, president of Random House could get behind such synergy. “Publishing and electronics are natural partners,” he argued at the time of his and R.C.A’s merger, “With the revolution in education that is expected in the next ten years, R.C.A. has the equipment that will be used and we have the books.”[13] On the surface, at least, everyone appeared to be in agreement. George Haller, president of General Electric, characterized publishers as “the people who can collect and present learning materials,” while arguing that systems engineers can “do a better job of transmitting the material.”[14] Both groups had reason to be happy about these ventures. The electronics industry needed educational content—well written, edited content—for their instructional systems. Members of the publishing industry who specialized in educational material—the most profitable field of publishing—perhaps convinced that educational material was destined to be transmitted electronically, felt they needed a partner in the electronics industry to stay competitive.
Others were not so sure. In May of 1966, the American Book Publishing Council held a panel discussion with members of the electronics industry to ask them point blank why they were “interested in the book business.” Some feared that educational publishing was only the beginning, that the electronics industry would move inextricably into all areas of traditional text production. Representatives of General Electric and IBM did little to allay such fears at the Council meeting. When asked by the audience of publishers what kind of hardware would transmit the contents of printed material in the future, both representatives talked of a futuristic world where the codex would be nearly irrelevant. D.V. Newton of IBM talked about artificial intelligence programs that would soon determine a student’s learning deficiencies before teaching them, simply by conversing with the student, something a book could never do; George Haller talked about a point in time when a device could be used to pass information directly from one brain to another.
Such fears were not unwarranted. On the one hand, the electronics industry undoubtedly had the expansion of educational communications systems in mind when they acquired these publishing houses. They had, for instance, designs on the American home. When Alfred C. Edwards, president of Holt, Rinehart and Winston, was approached by a “leading electronics executive,” he was told that the firm wanted to “take information out of a book, put it on audio-visual tapes and then … bring the information into homes and schools.” Edwards, who turned down their offer, reportedly asked the executive, “Doesn’t a book do that already?” At the time of its merger with Random House, R.C.A. was in the process of developing a machine that transmitted printed material—text and images—by way of television sets (Figure 12). In yet another example that the television, as a networked electronic device, was initially offered as a viable alternative to the computer for managing the information explosion, six prototypes existed in 1966 and each could successfully transmit a paperback sized page of material in 10 seconds. Customers would ultimately choose between 14 options “scheduled” each day. They would turn a switch to one of 14 points and the corresponding material would be transmitted over the FCC controlled airwaves to their printer. Among the material listed by James Hillier, vice president of R.C.A Laboratories, for possible transmission was news briefs, sports scores, stock market reports, TV program schedules, syndicated columns, news magazines and presidential addresses. Also included was printed material to accompany educational television programs. In the middle-1960s, Sarnoff envisioned this device, or something like it, at the heart of future information transmission. “A true communications revolution,” was coming, he said in 1966, “[where] the telephone, record and tape player, radio, TV, and film projector [will be] merged into one unit that will also publish magazines, and newspapers in your home."
On the other hand, some members of the electronics industry clearly felt that the realm of education was only a first step, that one day soon, a good portion of content traditionally destined for print would be communicated electronically. George Haller, president of General Electric, rather arrogantly declared to the audience at the American Book Publishing Council meeting that the function of their profession would soon be narrowed to fit technological trends: “We are not interested in the book business, we are interested mainly in the information business. I predict that you people will be chiefly information publishers in the future.”[15] R.C.A. clearly envisioned a future where a good deal of published material would end up in electronic systems. Their newly formed “Graphic Systems” division, the division which absorbed Random House, was primarily responsible for designing electronic systems capable of converting printed material into information which could be displayed by a computer onto a cathode ray tube screen (Figure 13). In short, the “Graphic Systems” division was among the first in the nation to develop a method of turning computer memory of a text (inputted in the form of paper or magnetic tape) into a CRT display of that text on a computer screen. One could, for the first time, create a paper tape of a text—any text—by punching out spaces on the tape corresponding to given letters, numbers and punctuation; each punched space would tell the computer to render on a CRT screen, a specific graphic representation, stored in its memory, of a letter, number or punctuation mark. R.C.A. marketed this process to printers as the Videocomp phototypesetter, but they had larger futuristic designs on this breakthrough technology. The central project of the “Graphic Systems” division was the development of “electronic libraries in which all types of printed information could be stored electronically and retrieved immediately.” In short, RCA and other electronic firms, imagined that one day soon, whether with the computer at the center or not, the myriad of new electronic networks and devices would be configured in such a way as to transmit all information more effectively. The arena of education was just a start.
[1] Farrell, Edmund. English Education and the Electronic Revolution. Campaign, Illinois: National Council of Teachers of English, 1967. Pp. 53.
[2] Brown, James W. and James W. Thornton. New Media in Higher Education. Washington D.C.: Association for Higher Education and the Division of Audiovisual Instructional Service of the National Education Association. Pp. 86.
[3] Gilroy, harry. Electronics and Books: Merger Path. New York Times. Feb 6, 1966. Pp. 14.
[4] Potter, George. “Dial-Remote Access.” In Ed. Robert A. Weisgerber. Instructional Process and Media Innovation. Rand Mcnally & Company, Chicago, 1968. Pp. 390.
[5] For an explication of this reorientation see Educational Technology: The Development of a Concept.
[6] Educational Technology: a Communications Problem, 196
[7] Katzenbach, Edward L. “Industry Can Serve,” The Phi Delta Kappan, Vol. 48, No. 5 (Jan., 1967). Pp. 191.
[8] Ibid. pp. 193-94.
[9] Meals, Donald W. “Heuristic Models for Systems Planning,” The Phi Delta Kappan, Vol. 48, No. 5 (Jan., 1967). Pp. 202.
[10] “Industry can serve,” 191.
[11] Keppel, Francis. “The Business Interest in Education,” The Phi Delta Kappan, Vol. 48, No. 5 (Jan., 1967). Pp. 189.
[12] Sharpes, Donald K. “Computers in Education.” The Clearing House. Vol. 43, No. 3, Nov., 1968. Pp. 135. Behrens, Carl. “Publishing Goes Electronic.” Science News, Vol. 92, No. 2, Jul., 1967. Pp. 44.
[13] Gilroy, Harry. “Electronics and Books: Merger Path,” New York Times, Feb 6, 1966. Pp. F1.
[14] Gilroy, Harry. “Newest Bookman Program the Future,” The New York Times. May 27, 1966. Pp. 40.
[15] Gilroy, Harry. “Newest Bookman Program the Future,” The New York Times. May 27, 1966. Pp. 40.
Discussion of "Educational Technology in the 1960s"
Add your voice to this discussion.
Checking your signed in status ...