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1100
Wooden Notebooks: Slates
Slate boards (which can be described as the smaller version of the blackboards) were being utilized for educational purposes in the classrooms of India around these years. Slates can be regarded as the pioneers of our modern-day notebooks with a great downside, however, which is the fact that there is only one page available to jot down your notes. -
1200
The Elder Scrolls
In around these years, there can be found Scrolled Manuscripts that were handwritten by the Monks, which is actually an indicator as to who possessed the opportunity to receive education in the middle ages; that is, clergy and people of noble origins. -
1440
Printing Press
The first presence of the printing press in Europe was thanks to the invention of the Gutenberg Press by a German inventor Johannes Gutenberg while in exile in France. The impact of the printing press on education was tremendous, making written information relatively cheaper, which resulted in an enourmous increase in written documents. Therefore, the government officials and business people of Europe had to be literate, which in turn led to the growth of formal education for the public as well. -
A Gigantic Slate?
What had been started to use in India in the 12th century, the slate board, was still used by the students of Europe and America until the end of the 18th century. Although slates were useful to keep notes, it was hard for the teachers to assign students the same work; instead, it was done one by one for each student's own individual slate. To solve it, James Pillans, a geography teacher in Scotland, invented the first modern blackboard by just hanging a big piece of slate on the classroom wall. -
Distant Learning
With the transport infrastructure developing in the 19th century as well as the establishment of a cheap and reliable postal system in the 1840s, the first official correspondence education, namely the Open University offered by the University of London, made its presence in this year. In the correspondence education process, written communication was established through the means of transportation systems so that the learners from distant places could be provided their education. -
BBC Broadcasts Education!
UK's British Broadcasting Corporation first started to broadcast for educational purposes in this decade to provide education to the public for adults as well as the students in the schools. -
Computer-based Learning
A behaviorist, B.F. Skinner initiated his experiments with teaching machines utilizing the programmed learning with the aims of computerizing the teaching progress, without any human internvention, by being capable of
1) Structuring information,
2) Assessing learner's knowledge, and
3) Providing immediate feedback to the learners.
These machines were the pioneers of the computer-based learning which then would be made use of in the Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) as well. -
The Modern Open University
By utilizing the advances of television and radio networking in partnership with the BBC, the British Government established the Open University (OU) to make the higher-education lectures accessible for all "to promote education and learning". In OU, the broadcast radio programs were mainly done orally; however, the TV programs of the university were formatted in more of a documentary and/or demonstration form of the processes involved in the course. -
The Wide Web of the World?
The World Wide Web, an application running on the Internet that connects the users from one end to another without the complexity of having to encode their documents into computer codes, made its presence. Thus, the appearence of the WWW was a great relief in that finding a document, video or an audio file was now easy and not a big burden of tasks. -
Stanford University's MOOC
Based on lecture-capturing system (which can be described as the general term enabling teachers to record their lesson to make them available online) and computer-based learning, a Massive Open Online Course was established by two professors of the Stanford University, which appealed more than 100,000 students. As of this year onwards, MOOC lectures have been still spreading around the globe. -
References
Visual References
*Stock Photos from https://www.pixabay.com
*Photos Found via https://oldsearch.creativecommons.org
Textual References
*My Lecture Notes (PPT Slide Notes)
*https://education.cu-portland.edu/blog/classroom-resources/the-history-of-the-classroom-blackboard/
*https://opentextbc.ca/teachinginadigitalage/chapter/section-8-1-a-short-history-of-educational-technology/
*https://www.history.com/topics/inventions/printing-press
