“Technologies may change, but the innovations in pedagogy bring lasting benefit”

Those explore how innovations in technology might influence education; we examine how innovations in pedagogy might be enacted in an age of personal and networked technology.

One hundred years ago, in July 1913, Thomas Edison was quoted as saying, “Books will soon be obsolete in the public schools. ... It is possible to teach every branch of human knowledge with the motion picture. Our school system will be completely changed inside of ten years.” A century later, children continue to read books in school.  Substitute the word ‘tablet computer’, ‘netbook’ or ‘Smartphone’ for ‘motion picture’ and it would be hard to predict whether these technologies will completely change schools in five, ten, twenty years, or ever.  But, in the same newspaper article, Edison also referred to a new way of learning “through the eye”, whereby children come to understand scientific concepts by viewing pictures in motion, “making the scientific truths, difficult to understand from text books, plain and clear to children.”  Learning from short animated movies is still a hot topic of research and is being integrated into game-based learning. New interactive software apps such as an animated periodic table and a virtual planetarium offer ways to learn “through  the eye” that would have delighted Edison.  The technologies may change, but the innovations in pedagogy bring lasting benefit.