This symposium was designed to stage debate between leading psychologists promoting educational technology and educational researchers who are critical against technological movement. Kazuo Numano, a leader developing numerous programs and Takashi Sakamoto pursuing integrated multi-media approach and micro teaching were asked to represent technology oriented psychologists. Kunio Komabayashi who is leading a group of teachers in structuring instruction based on Russian instructional theory and Takao Mori, a professor of educational administration who argues that instruction is the most difficult portion of entire educational system for machines to take over, were asked to represent critics.
The issues debated were:
1) Criticism: Educational technologists often claim that most of teaching activities can be replaced by technological devices, entirely overlooking that the core of the teaching activity is highly creative and hard to program.
Defense: We propose to introduce technological devices to replace unimportant trivials of teachers' activity which are eating up 80% of their time and have them work harder on more human and creative aspects of teaching which many of them are now putting aside.
2) Criticism: The press to define objectives behaviorally tend to eliminate important goals which are hard to define operationally and thus make educational efforts biased for short term training.
Defense: Objectives which are hard to give operational definition are usually the ones the concept of which differ from person to person. Unless the teachers agree upon what is meant, consistent long-term effort will be impossible.
3) Criticism: The places in the school where technology pays off best are adminstrative ends. We should divert efforts directed to mechanizing instruction to those areas.
Defense: While there is no objection to developing administrational technology, we see no reason why we should divert our own attention from instruction.
As it is obvious, the issues are not ones to be settled in two hours' symposium. We may have imposed another dichotomy; localist versus systemist. The principal concern of a localist is the process of classroom teaching. The principal concern of a systemist is a larger educational system although it certainly includes the teaching process as a sub-system. Two localists can agree or contradict among themselves since they are cognitively colinear,but a localist and a systemist tend to be indifferent to each other. Perhaps future development of educational technology will hinge upon whether localists and systemists can establish close communication.
