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In the mid-1960's when I started elementary school, the apex of Instructional Technology was the 16mm movie. On rainy days, they would wheel in the clattery projector, and we would watch 20 minute movies of foreign lands and interesting customs. In the darkness of the classroom, the saturated reds and yellows of the Kodachrome film would accentuate the exoticism of the cultures that our nation was rapidly destroying. The film would get caught in the gate and the narrator's voice -- often the same from one film to the next -- would warble as if he was talking while gargling. There was a reassuring sameness to the process. The content was sometimes, but not always, related to our studies.
As the seventies dawned, my classmates and I were the focus for two new trends in education called "the open classroom" and "whole learning." In the open classroom, we had some autonomy to direct our learning according to prescribed units. Different areas of the classroom would be set aside for reading, math, science, and other activities, and we would direct ourselves to these areas to complete assignments on our own. The vision, if not the reality, was of students as independent worker bees in a hive of exploration and self-actualization. With whole learning, we would devote a multi-week block of time to a subject, and approach learning it through a variety of activities. A memorable example was the study of Africa, in which we made tie-died dashikis and groundnut stew, while learning about the history and geography of the country.
The pedagogy of these two approaches is conceptually similar to Constructivism. As for technology, the 16mm movie had been replaced by the filmstrip. Many of the units, particularly in science and history, included workbooks and activity sheets which were built around filmstrip series. The filmstrips were accompanied by audio tapes which beeped when it was time to turn to the next frame. We could watch the filmstrip in an individual viewer with headphones, moving through the material with the beeps, and completing activity sheets which demonstrated comprehension of the material. An accompanying workbook repeated the text and images for review.
The methodologies employed in my open classroom experience persist in the Integrated Learning Systems model. It was interesting to read in Thomas Reeves' report "The Impact of Media and Tecnology in Schools" (University of Georgia, 1998) that according to Becker's research, "ILS are most effective for those students with either low or high aptitude for regular classroom instruction, but that the 40% of the students in the middle range experience no improvement from ILS over regular classroom instruction." Being curious, independent, and a good reader, I was an ideal learner for the open classroom and whole learning, and have fond memories of these experiences.
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2/5/03
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