Frameworks of Educational Technology

What is Educational Technology? We know it is the use of media in the classroom to enhance learning, but it's not just media output. It's an interdependent relationship. It's how learners absorb media content and what how they synthesize and understand that information. However, such information is not meant to be simply internalized, it is to be used an applied to real world situations. Through technology students learn not to heavily depend on technology but to grow with it, so that they learn to make their own decisions and draw their own conclusions.

"For each nation, the conceptual base for educational technology is derived from its unique culture and education infrastructure." (Ely 245).

[e]ducational technology ... as a subject ... has no clear boundaries.The spread of interest crosses the path of many other specialist’s subject areas, thus making it very difficult to define the field from the point of view of information retrieval. It is a subject area that comprises a highly practical element at the same time as enveloping an element of very complex research and highly theoreticalwork. The merging of these two aspects has already been seen through the literature to cause severe communication problems, and consequently problems of information transfer" (Duncan, Anderson & McAleese, 1978).

It is unlikely that the field of instructional technology will shed its technological image. ‘Technology is more commonly understood as hardware and software rather than as the ... theory and practice of design, development, utilization, management and evalu- ation of processes and resources for learning’ (Seels & Richey, 1994). As practitioners demonstrate the principles described in this definition, the field may begin to better understand from a new perspective (Ely 249).