. . . and when we got over to England, they didn't
even know what the hell we were. They called us the audiovision
boys. They thought that we had to do with hearing aids, improving
of hearing and so on (Schuller, 1978).
1.1 Introduction
Educational technology is such a young and amorphous field that
confusion about its objects of study, its audience, and the parameters
of its operations is almost as common today as it was for Charles
Schuller during World War II. Yet at the onset, only a few educators
with a common goal to improve education through technology generated
national interest in their cause, devised curricula, started graduate
programs, and produced a spate of diverse texts while establishing
new terrain in the academy. While academic audiovisual and educational
technology programs started in the 1950s and proliferated in the
60s, the intellectual groundwork for this area emerged in the late
20s and peaked in the 40s with the capstone event of programmatic
and extensive war research. Since texts produced during this time,
1932 to 1947, and oral accounts of this period form a solid base
for the establishment of an academic field, we will consider these
documents in our examination of the early history of educational
technology.
Often, educational scholars, in and outside of educational technology,
yearn for and pursue a monolithic academic project that would, once
and for all, provide a unified definition of their enterprise and
offer an objective account of their operations. While this is a
futile exercise for social scientists who study human beings and
their activity, it was and is a legitimate goal for academics working
under the aegis of logical positivism. The fact that past and present
educational technology scholars have failed in this monolithic effort
is to the credit of the field. Heterogeneous texts produced during
the period under consideration and later provide a rich account
of objects of study, theories engaged, methods employed, and audiences
included. The written and oral texts considered here disclose a
set of common goals but are diverse projects whose structures are
contingent on historically accepted concepts and values. They reflect
prevailing notions of learning theory and pedagogy, research methods,
economic, military, and political values, and other elements of
the social milieu in which they were produced. The iterations of
names, concepts, assumptions, and theories in these texts not only
promoted ideas but actually created truisms in the field for the
time in which they were written. The value of these texts cannot
be measured by sophisticated standards of current research, nor
by highly evolved notions of learning theory, but by how they achieved
their common goals when they were written. From whatever perspective
these authors spoke, we might ask how well they made their objects
of study intelligible to specific audiences at specific moments
in time. The rhetoric with which they spoke and the discourses that
spoke through them energized an audience of scholars, educators,
and students to participate in a new field, educational technology.
By any measure they were successful.
It is with respect for the success of the founders of the field
of educational technology that we attempt, from our specific moment
in time, within our own community to describe the discourses of
their early documents. Within this project we value the mutability
and diversity of educational technology.
