Selected Major Issues in Instructional/Communication Technology

Abstract

Instructional/Communication Technology has come to mean, in a narrow sense, media hardware or a set of tools enabling human beings to overcome their physical limitations. Etymologically, it means one or more techniques, both concrete and abstract, that help human beings solve problems. By extension, instructional technology (IT) means all tools at our disposal for facilitating learning. Tickton (1971) defines the purpore of IT as making "education more productive and more individual, to give instruction a more scientific base, and to make instruction more powerful, learning more immediate, and access more equal." While the technology itself might be neutral as a medium and as a means of instructional communication, it is the natw of its use, in terms of timely and appropriate messages, that is the key to understanding its consequences. It is this final factor upon which society needs to focus. The tecent combination of computer, video, fiber optics, satellite television, and other state-of-the-art technologies has enabled a small group to control the lives of billions. Instructional technology has also Merited its own share of this instantaneous global power. As a result traditional boundaries between IT and mass media communication have blurred so much that IT sounds like a misnomer. It has now become a platitude to say that the nation that controlled the sealanes in the nineteenth century, or that controlled the airways in the twentieth century, controlled the whole world. In the twenty-first century, it appears that whoever controls the airwaves will control the world and whatever is beyond it. Thus the most explosive confluence of ...