Episode 10.
The history of any technology plays an important role in defining its future.
The devices that exist along with the social conventions surrounding those devices become
the foundation for all future activities.
It requires time, energy, financial, and even political resources to modify the social practices
and the technological landscape of a school.
So extent technology, that stuff that we already have there and those things that we are already
doing there, affect future directions.
So, if we want to understand the current and future realities of IT and schools, it helps
to understand its past.
Yeah, I think so.
How far back do we go?
Well, historians of technology trace the beginnings of computers back to the analytic
machine that was invented by Charles Babbage and programmed by Ada Lovelace in the 19th
century.
The history of electronic digital computing is usually marked from the creation of the
electronic numeric integrator and computer, or INEAC, that computer is built to handle
the massive computations necessary for military applications, including, unfortunately, the
Manhattan Project which designed the nuclear bombs during World War II.
So some of us believe that the computers actually had a rather dark beginning.
After the war, computers were slowly introduced into other information-rich industries, including
those related to continued military production, insurance companies, airlines, things like
that.
In the years immediately after World War II, the annual sales of computers could be counted
in single digits.
After that slow start, however, the computer industry grew rapidly with both industry push
adding new models and market pull driving innovation and defining new computational needs.
As the market expanded, more money became available to support research and development
by computer companies.
These investments led to advances that expanded the capacity of the computers while reducing
costs.
Both of these factors expanded the potential consumer base for computers into more organizations
that had more diverse needs and more modest budgets.
Since computers arrived, educators had been refreshing their practices for new generations
and each has negotiated how that technology will affect their work.
What can you tell us about how computers entered schools?
Early in the 1960s, the price of mainframe computers had decreased to the point where
sales to education markets became possible.
At about the same time, the potential of using computers in schools was recognized, but some
observers suggest the educational applications of computing were invented so that sales could
be made in that market.
Regardless of the goals that motivated early advocates for computers in schools, computers
did begin arriving in schools within about a decade and a half of their invention.
Don Bushnell writing in a monograph for the Department of Audiovisual Instructions for
the National Education Association in 1963 predicted, and I quote, the digital computer
and its peripheral equipment will support most of the subsystems and the total school
complex.
That ends as quote.
Bushnell predicted computer rich classrooms would be places in which a standardized curriculum
would be delivered to all students via computer terminals.
Students learning would be measured based on their ability to provide correct answers
to questions posed by the computers.
The correctness of those answers, of course, would be judged according to whoever programmed
the computers.
This picture of a highly standardized computer mediated curriculum instruction was promoted
as a very efficient method of instructive, and it really reflected the dominant pedagogy
at the time.
In the teaching and vision by Bushnell, students and teachers would interact with information,
but the computing devices would remain unseen by and untouched by students and teachers.
But this is not unlike the model of computing in other businesses and industries at the
time.
Computer deficiency and productivity were predicted for all computer mediated tasks,
even when technicians still operated the computers and computers were programmed by
physically reconfiguring their circuits or by punching cards.
The development of the general purpose computer that sat on a desktop and came with a graphic
user interface to facilitate use by almost anybody to perform almost any tasks they desired
was still decades in the future.
But still advocates for information technology were predicting increased efficiency through
the use of computers.
Was this ever realized in schools?
Some public schools did establish connections to mainframe computers located at colleges
and universities that were away from their campus.
Students and teachers and other users would program data on teletype terminals in the
schools to write programs.
Commands were entered in the teletypes, then sent over plain old telephone system connections
to the mainframes where they were executed.
The results were sent back over the same telephone lines and displayed on the terminal.
One of the largest expenses associated with these efforts was the cost of long distance
telephone charges.
These efforts tended to be localized near colleges that were willing to support them.
While many of the original projects are largely forgotten, except for by the participants,
some projects that emerged out of them are very well known.
Basic for example emerged out of New Hampshire.
The effort in Minnesota led to the development of the Oregon Trail which was used and loved
by generations of students.
In Illinois the PLATO system included many tools that later became central to the internet.
The institutions hosting these systems were recognized as early leaders in computer science,
research and education.
While there's a rich narrative that the technology gurus working in Silicon Valley
were the innovators who built the computer revolution, historian Joy Leasy Rankin claimed
the teletype users in schools were as important in laying the foundation to our current computing
landscape as those technology gurus in Silicon Valley.
Check out her 2018 book, The People's History of Computing in the United States for the
full story of these projects.
And actually I do have first hand experience in these.
I graduated from a New England high school in 1983.
My school had a book storage room that had been converted into a computer lab where there
were six computers.
Two of these were standalone computers with programs loaded from five and a quarter inch
floppy disks.
The others were connected to Dartmouth College's shared time computing for high school students.
I used the standalone machines a few times and I watched others scroll through the screens
filled with green text to accomplish something when they were connected to Hanover but I
was not really sure what they were doing.
What about desktop computers?
In the United States desktop computers arrived in classrooms beginning in the late 1970s and
early 1980s which is when they arrived on the consumer market as well.
If you walked into a classroom where those first desktop computers were installed you
probably would have seen one or two computers on the margins of the classrooms.
Nearby there would have been a box of disks with applications and another box of disks
with data stored on them.
To start a word processing program for example you'd insert the disk with that application
then boot the computer.
Another disk would be inserted to load the documents that you wanted to work on.
To use a different application the user powered down the computer, took out the application
disks, inserted different application disks and rebooted the computer.
Eventually both the teletype systems and the one or two computer classrooms were abandoned.
As demand for computer courses increased larger numbers of desktop computers were installed
but rather than placing them in individual classrooms technology leaders installed them
in computer labs which was a dominant model of computer based education until early 2000s.
In elementary schools classroom teachers typically took their students all at once to the computer
room for special instruction at regularly scheduled times and in high schools students
enrolled in computer literacy or programming courses as electives or teachers took their
students there to work on special projects or lessons typically typing up research papers.
The computer lab model of technology based teaching generally found all students doing
the same type of work at the same time and in the same place.
How did the internet arrive in schools?
Late in the 1990s two programs supported by the federal government increased the computing
infrastructure in schools in the United States.
Technology Literacy Challenge or TLC grants provided funds to schools to purchase computers
and to support the professional development of teachers.
The schools and libraries program of the Universal Service Fund or e-rate provided financial
support for local area network infrastructure and to defray the cost of internet access.
Schools have largely assumed responsibility for purchasing devices and teaching teachers
while e-rate funds continue to support internet access in schools.
IT professionals are usually assigned the task of preparing and submitting the schools
e-rate application each year.
Another effort led by local activists were called net days.
These found volunteers installing the cabling necessary to connect the new computers or
purchase with TLC funds to the internet connections that were supported by e-rate.
This was necessary because the schools were built before computer networks were necessary
and few budgets allowed for the considerable capital expense of installing cat 5 cables
throughout older buildings.
Such amateur endeavors are no longer common in public schools but the fact they were once
common is an interesting reality of the history of computers in schools.
So you have told us about technology.
What about how it is used?
At about the same time schools were getting online the findings from Apple's Classrooms
of Tomorrow project were influencing many educational technology initiatives.
One of the important observations was that access to computers was not sufficient for
teachers to create effective lessons.
They needed help understanding how to use computers and also how to use computers in
their teaching.
This explains in part the inclusion of support for professional development and the projects
that were awarded TLC funds.
Even today IT professionals are frequently involved with training teachers how to use
the IT systems and in some cases even teach with the systems that they manage.
As computers arrived in schools that had high speed internet access in each instructional
space and as teachers began to gain experience teaching with them there was increasing interest
in moving computers back into the classrooms.
It was reason that teaching with computers required they be in the classroom so they
would be available when students were engaged in all of the classroom activities and in
the same space where other materials were available.
More frequent access to computers in classrooms allows for easier technology integration which
has become the most popular model of organizing technology-rich teaching.
How about the more recent history?
Since about 2010 one-to-one computing and cloud-based computing have come to dominate
school computing.
In many schools students carry Chromebooks with them and sometimes even take them home.
While the market share for educational computing devices is difficult to ascertain with certainty
estimates are that Chromebooks represent over 60% of the devices that are in schools.
Some schools do continue to maintain computer rooms for special purposes and they have computers
with full operating systems for administrative staff but in many schools Chromebooks are
the only devices maintained by IT professionals.
And this can be a less than optimal situation for many educators.
Google Workspaces provides most students with productivity applications.
Student information systems including grade books and things like library card catalogs
and learning management systems are all web based now so students can access them from
home or from school.
Because those systems are based in the cloud, robust, reliable and secure networks are essential
to school function.
While the move to cloud-based computing has many benefits for students, teachers and IT
professionals it has introduced some inequity into education.
The term digital divide has been used to describe inequitable access to digital learning for
generations.
Originally it was used to describe the fact that marginalized populations often intended
schools with fewer computing devices.
It's also been used to describe inequitable access to high quality instruction with digital
tools.
As cloud computing has become ubiquitous it has been used to describe inequitable access
to network connections away from school.
That problem was particularly cute during the remote teaching necessitated by the pandemic
in 2020 but it continues to be a problem.
So where do we stand today?
Yeah, you know, it sure depends on local circumstances.
The technology infrastructure determines much that we can do.
Cloud teachers have been using technology affects what decisions they believe are appropriate.
And the degree to which leaders play an active role in determining the direction of technology
in the schools matters as well.