Education Systems and Technology in 1990, 2020, and Beyond
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ORIGINAL PAPER
Education Systems and Technology in 1990, 2020, and Beyond Theodore W. Frick 1 Published online: 13 August 2020 # Association for Educational Communications & Technology 2020
Abstract In Restructuring Education Through Technology, I incorporated systems thinking to identify seven types of relationships in educational systems: teacher-student, student-content, student-context, teacher-content, teacher-context, content-context, and education system-environment relationships (Frick 1991). I now revisit these education system relations and discuss potential futures of education. The World Wide Web did not exist when I wrote the original treatise, nor did wireless smartphones and tablets, Google’s search engine, YouTube, Facebook, or Wikipedia. However, one important education system relationship should not change: the affective bonding between teachers and their students. Keywords education system . computer technology . systems thinking . educology . system component relationships . adaptive instruction . future education systems
Introduction As we enter the 2020 decade, 30 years have passed since I wrote a small book in 1990 called Restructuring Education Through Technology (Frick 1991). It was published about the same time as the World Wide Web first became available to the public, in August, 1991 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web). In the present article, I discuss important differences and similarities in education systems and technology in 1990 and 2020. I provide examples of education system affect-relations and system properties, then and now. I conclude with a strong philosophical stance on what is most important in the future.
What Is a System? Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1950a, 1950b, 1972) was a biologist who is well-known for his initial development of general system theory (GST). GST was intended as an organizational framework or paradigm applicable to many scientific fields, what von Bertalanffy originally considered a unifying science. Many
* Theodore W. Frick [email protected] 1
Department of Instructional Systems Technology, School of Education, Indiana University Bloomington, 201 N. Rose Ave., Bloomington, IN 47405-1006, USA
others built upon von Bertalanffy’s foundational work, including Maccia and Maccia (1966), Wymore (1967), Mesarović (1972), Cornacchio (1972), Weinberg (1975), Berlinsky (1976), Lin (1999), and Ackoff and Emery (2017). Thompson (2006a, 2006b) briefly discussed the history of GST through the twentieth century, including the significant contribution of the SIGGS Theory Model (Maccia and Maccia, 1966). Predicate calculus was used to logically define approximately 80 terms. Thompson (2019) further refined these and other terms in Axiomatic Theories of Intentional Systems (ATIS). Underlying these efforts is the fundamental goal of logical precision in use of terminology which describes general system, education, and education system. For example, system/negasystem flows were identified such as feedin, feedout, feedback, and feedthrough, and system structura
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