Rationale
(R)EVOLUTION OF LEARNING MODALITIES
Early societies employed simple methods to pass on their values to successive generations. For the most part, this consisted of language, cultural norms, and vocational skills (thus socialization and education were virtually synonymous). Being pastoral, nomadic, or agrarian, their vocational skills included farming (plowing, planting, harvesting, crop processing) and taking care of animals (domestication, herding, feeding, breeding, and slaughtering). These skills (as with language and customs) were be passed on through familial and small-group instruction in an oral and hands-on manner, and did not require the recording of large amounts of information, or a formal institution or locale for instruction.
As societies started settling larger lands on a more permanents basis, they started separating members of their population for skill specialization, such as implement (e.g. iron-working for farming equipment and weapons), construction material, and large-scale crop production, as well as a bureaucracy for managing these groups (through political positions). In these stratified societies, recordings were made of laws, war exploits and treaties, navigational and territorial maps, business transactions and contracts, deeds for lands, etc. These subgroups needed differentiated instruction (e.g. military strategy and combat skills, like the Spartans; tutors for the royalty and elite, regarding governance; scribes to keep accurate accounts). In recording, precise descriptors of quantities like number, sizes, weights, and distances led to the development of tools like the abacus, measurement units, weight scales, and the ruler. At this stage, technology and education followed societal progress and needs.
The earliest preserved recording devices (after wall paintings) we have are clay tablets, in the Middle East. As the global population expanded and migrated, the Egyptians used papyrus, northern groups used animal skins, and the Chinese used rudimentary forms of paper. Compendiums of knowledge were kept in encyclopedias of increasing volume sizes. The development of tools for recording information corresponded with the medium used for recording. The tablets used a hard-pointed stylus, while papyrus, skins, and paper used pigments applied with varying forms of pens. Earlier applicators were quills dipped in ink, which evolved into implements that sped up writing by having a reservoir to hold the ink, so the implement would not have to be dipped into the ink every few moments. In early Eastern societies like in India, slate was used to write on (the precursor to the chalkboard) when the recording did not have to be permanent. As paper started being mass-produced, and being more standardized with wood pulp, writing implements also became more fine and mass-produced. There were various improvements for the pen (refinements of the ink delivery system and type of ink used, so that it did not smear). Pencils also became more common, and standardized in their dimensions (circumferences) and medium (graphite grades) and erasers used to correct mistakes.
With the industrial revolution, machines like the mechanical printing press, the steam-powered press, pulp mills, and typewriters (with accompanying correction methods like liquid paper) made the reproduction and mass-production of written work feasible. This resulted in the faster spreading of news and ideas. At this time, societies were expansionist, needing specialized and precise tradesmen and labourers, and soldiers. In Prussia, compulsory public schooling was a natural outgrowth of military training, as both used similar methods for similar ends. Horace Mann and his peers imported this system to the United States (beginning in Massachusetts) and it spread to be compulsory in every state within a few decades. This coincided with industrial barons like Rockefeller and Carnegie needing a supply of workers for their factories, a need which was readily met with the waves of immigrants seeking their fortune in the New World. Around this time, standardization through precise grading via report cards became part of schooling. The tools of this era reflected the need to communicate and illustrate concepts to rooms full of people, so instruments such as overhead projectors and public announcement systems were adapted from the technological inventions that were occurring. Since schools were standardized and centrally planned, devices like the photocopier and the fax machine were quickly adopted for the communication and dissemination of information.
This Audiovisual Age was followed by the Information Age, when education began to be shaped by new inventions (rather than the other way around). Some learning was improved through cassettes and tape players (books-on-tape, and most notably language instruction), but the most significant invention was the computer. Its precursors were the abacus, punch-card looms, the Skinner Box, and the calculator. Once computers became affordable and practical (of a manageable size), their mass distribution and use led to the evolution of printers (dot matrix to inkjet and laser), and storage systems (from floppy disks to CDs, and from hard drives to memory keys) as work could be produced much faster and more efficiently than before. This ushered in the Computer Age, which crystallized with the development of the Internet. This last development allowed storage and transmission of information to be realistically independent of paper (there had already been concerns about the sustainability of the global consumption of huge amounts of paper). The intermediaries between the growing mass of novel/niche data on the emerging "information highway" and people looking for it were internet search engines, which culminated in the supremacy of Google. Again, education was being shaped by a new invention.
The next era, which is the one we find ourselves in, is the Interactive Age. At this stage, individual members of the public (including students) have become not only consumers of information and news, but legitimate producers of it. Devices that connect to the internet for two-way transmission and that do not use paper for this interaction are being adopted on a mass basis, in the form of tablets, laptops, and smart phones. As this development takes place, new technologies are also catering to it – we have interactive sources of knowledge (the democratically-peer-edited Wikipedia), entertainment (publicly, yet individually-produced pieces on YouTube), and education [via Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) and sites like Khan Academy]. Thus, technology is back to catering to the needs of society and education rather than society adapting its way of being to advances in technology.
Overall, although learning tools have certainly become more sophisticated technologically, they have served mostly to save resources and time, and allow instruction to be abstract. The hands-on and common experiential learning of smaller and more primitive societies gave way to more organized and stratified societies that involved specialized and compartmentalized function (and accompanying education). These involved academies and tools for the recording of information, which took several millennia to progress to the use of paper (which we still find convenient to use today). Society then became even more stratified and specialized (as reflected by its tools) with industrialization, which was accompanied by almost universal public schooling, but paradoxically became more generic and basic in nature (reflecting the pyramidal distribution and ordering of this stratification). As society now moves away from an industrial and nationalistic model of employment and value-production, we are seeking more individually-tailored and experiential education suited for the global citizen. It would seem that the natural trend for 21st-century learning is the gradual dissolution of the formal and standardized schooling we have had for the last two hundred years, and for the migration of learning onto internet-based virtual networks that simulate experiences and involve visual representation and play to avoid the unnecessary use of non-renewable resources.
Thus, we have observed some cyclical development in organization of societies and resulting education styles, going from more generic, unorganized, and needs-based, with teaching being hands-on and experiential, to increasing organization and more specialized teaching, then reverting to a more generic education (but using symbolic/abstract schooling to produce basic workers ready to be molded to industrial applications). The latest evolution has been for education to again become more individualized, but to keep the abstract nature in transmission of it (online), and move from a textual representation, to a more visual and virtual representation. While education has always been multimodal in that experiential vocational learning used all the senses, schools used auditory and visual learning of various kinds (text, pictures, speaking, music), the latest evolution of learning is a trend back to the experiential/vocational type, but in a virtual format that reduces the restrictions of the earlier mediums of instruction.
Educational tools have similarly followed a cyclical nature. Although new technologies are invented constantly regardless of their applicability, utility, or need in education, their adoption by teachers/students varies. Initially, educational tools were mainly used to record data accurately and efficiently, and less to illustrate ideas. Tools served the needs of society and reflected its state. Following the industrial revolution and audiovisual age, tool developments in the information and computer ages actually dictated how learning and work would change. In the interactive age now, tools are once again reflecting society's interest and tendencies, rather than changing them. Thus, while tools are constantly evolving, their use is sometimes reflective of society's development, and at other times actually is the impetus in society's development.
As societies started settling larger lands on a more permanents basis, they started separating members of their population for skill specialization, such as implement (e.g. iron-working for farming equipment and weapons), construction material, and large-scale crop production, as well as a bureaucracy for managing these groups (through political positions). In these stratified societies, recordings were made of laws, war exploits and treaties, navigational and territorial maps, business transactions and contracts, deeds for lands, etc. These subgroups needed differentiated instruction (e.g. military strategy and combat skills, like the Spartans; tutors for the royalty and elite, regarding governance; scribes to keep accurate accounts). In recording, precise descriptors of quantities like number, sizes, weights, and distances led to the development of tools like the abacus, measurement units, weight scales, and the ruler. At this stage, technology and education followed societal progress and needs.
The earliest preserved recording devices (after wall paintings) we have are clay tablets, in the Middle East. As the global population expanded and migrated, the Egyptians used papyrus, northern groups used animal skins, and the Chinese used rudimentary forms of paper. Compendiums of knowledge were kept in encyclopedias of increasing volume sizes. The development of tools for recording information corresponded with the medium used for recording. The tablets used a hard-pointed stylus, while papyrus, skins, and paper used pigments applied with varying forms of pens. Earlier applicators were quills dipped in ink, which evolved into implements that sped up writing by having a reservoir to hold the ink, so the implement would not have to be dipped into the ink every few moments. In early Eastern societies like in India, slate was used to write on (the precursor to the chalkboard) when the recording did not have to be permanent. As paper started being mass-produced, and being more standardized with wood pulp, writing implements also became more fine and mass-produced. There were various improvements for the pen (refinements of the ink delivery system and type of ink used, so that it did not smear). Pencils also became more common, and standardized in their dimensions (circumferences) and medium (graphite grades) and erasers used to correct mistakes.
With the industrial revolution, machines like the mechanical printing press, the steam-powered press, pulp mills, and typewriters (with accompanying correction methods like liquid paper) made the reproduction and mass-production of written work feasible. This resulted in the faster spreading of news and ideas. At this time, societies were expansionist, needing specialized and precise tradesmen and labourers, and soldiers. In Prussia, compulsory public schooling was a natural outgrowth of military training, as both used similar methods for similar ends. Horace Mann and his peers imported this system to the United States (beginning in Massachusetts) and it spread to be compulsory in every state within a few decades. This coincided with industrial barons like Rockefeller and Carnegie needing a supply of workers for their factories, a need which was readily met with the waves of immigrants seeking their fortune in the New World. Around this time, standardization through precise grading via report cards became part of schooling. The tools of this era reflected the need to communicate and illustrate concepts to rooms full of people, so instruments such as overhead projectors and public announcement systems were adapted from the technological inventions that were occurring. Since schools were standardized and centrally planned, devices like the photocopier and the fax machine were quickly adopted for the communication and dissemination of information.
This Audiovisual Age was followed by the Information Age, when education began to be shaped by new inventions (rather than the other way around). Some learning was improved through cassettes and tape players (books-on-tape, and most notably language instruction), but the most significant invention was the computer. Its precursors were the abacus, punch-card looms, the Skinner Box, and the calculator. Once computers became affordable and practical (of a manageable size), their mass distribution and use led to the evolution of printers (dot matrix to inkjet and laser), and storage systems (from floppy disks to CDs, and from hard drives to memory keys) as work could be produced much faster and more efficiently than before. This ushered in the Computer Age, which crystallized with the development of the Internet. This last development allowed storage and transmission of information to be realistically independent of paper (there had already been concerns about the sustainability of the global consumption of huge amounts of paper). The intermediaries between the growing mass of novel/niche data on the emerging "information highway" and people looking for it were internet search engines, which culminated in the supremacy of Google. Again, education was being shaped by a new invention.
The next era, which is the one we find ourselves in, is the Interactive Age. At this stage, individual members of the public (including students) have become not only consumers of information and news, but legitimate producers of it. Devices that connect to the internet for two-way transmission and that do not use paper for this interaction are being adopted on a mass basis, in the form of tablets, laptops, and smart phones. As this development takes place, new technologies are also catering to it – we have interactive sources of knowledge (the democratically-peer-edited Wikipedia), entertainment (publicly, yet individually-produced pieces on YouTube), and education [via Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) and sites like Khan Academy]. Thus, technology is back to catering to the needs of society and education rather than society adapting its way of being to advances in technology.
Overall, although learning tools have certainly become more sophisticated technologically, they have served mostly to save resources and time, and allow instruction to be abstract. The hands-on and common experiential learning of smaller and more primitive societies gave way to more organized and stratified societies that involved specialized and compartmentalized function (and accompanying education). These involved academies and tools for the recording of information, which took several millennia to progress to the use of paper (which we still find convenient to use today). Society then became even more stratified and specialized (as reflected by its tools) with industrialization, which was accompanied by almost universal public schooling, but paradoxically became more generic and basic in nature (reflecting the pyramidal distribution and ordering of this stratification). As society now moves away from an industrial and nationalistic model of employment and value-production, we are seeking more individually-tailored and experiential education suited for the global citizen. It would seem that the natural trend for 21st-century learning is the gradual dissolution of the formal and standardized schooling we have had for the last two hundred years, and for the migration of learning onto internet-based virtual networks that simulate experiences and involve visual representation and play to avoid the unnecessary use of non-renewable resources.
Thus, we have observed some cyclical development in organization of societies and resulting education styles, going from more generic, unorganized, and needs-based, with teaching being hands-on and experiential, to increasing organization and more specialized teaching, then reverting to a more generic education (but using symbolic/abstract schooling to produce basic workers ready to be molded to industrial applications). The latest evolution has been for education to again become more individualized, but to keep the abstract nature in transmission of it (online), and move from a textual representation, to a more visual and virtual representation. While education has always been multimodal in that experiential vocational learning used all the senses, schools used auditory and visual learning of various kinds (text, pictures, speaking, music), the latest evolution of learning is a trend back to the experiential/vocational type, but in a virtual format that reduces the restrictions of the earlier mediums of instruction.
Educational tools have similarly followed a cyclical nature. Although new technologies are invented constantly regardless of their applicability, utility, or need in education, their adoption by teachers/students varies. Initially, educational tools were mainly used to record data accurately and efficiently, and less to illustrate ideas. Tools served the needs of society and reflected its state. Following the industrial revolution and audiovisual age, tool developments in the information and computer ages actually dictated how learning and work would change. In the interactive age now, tools are once again reflecting society's interest and tendencies, rather than changing them. Thus, while tools are constantly evolving, their use is sometimes reflective of society's development, and at other times actually is the impetus in society's development.