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TECNOLOGÍA: INFORMACIÓN

Social perception of distance education on the basis of its dominant technological paradigm

Dr. Alejandro Pisanty

Introduction
Schematic history of technologies for distance education

Distance education has been supported by many different technologies and media along its rich history. Three main waves can be distinguished, particularly for the purposes of this paper, in which the main supporting media have been printed matter sent over mail, television, and the Internet and its antecedent networks.

The period in which printed matter was the main support for distance education can be associated with an age in which the printing press was widely expanded and the unit costs of printed matter came down, and in which the expansion of railroads and mails made it possible to deliver all sorts of objects to widely spread out places.

That is also the era of the locomotive, in which trains and railroads were a symbol of progress, and when catalog shopping became an emblem of the ability of "civilization" reaching into far confines. This is true at least for large parts of the United States and of Europe, where this form of distance education expanded in the late 19th century.

The expansion of print-based distance education continued well into the 1950's and was not superseded by the following, television-based wave. Distance education went ever further afield in subject matter along this period. Having started in practical matters for agriculturalists and in expanding university-level knowledge, it carried all sorts of subjects including remarkable examples of bodybuilding, and the contribution to a career start of many an engineer who first trained as a radio technician.

In the 1950's, television began to expand commercially in the US and as a public service in much of Europe. Significant educators of the 1950's and 60's held great expectations for the power of television to aid them in expanding the reach of education to isolated communities, to people in cities held away from schools by work and family obligations, and to all other more conventional students, and to enrich education enormously through television's unprecedented powers for representing reality and simulations.

Among the most important large-scale projects in distance education which counted on television, one must count the United Kingdom's Open University (UKOU), Mexico's Telesecundaria (tele-junior-high-school), and other projects which flourished in the 1970's. In the same period, television's penetration expanded (in some countries to almost every household and person), restricted (ie cable etc.) televison also expanded widely, and satellite communications became themselves the sign of modernity.

Alongside the development and deployment of computers and networks came their educational use. Landmark initiatives like the Plato project, as well as many CBT and CBI systems, used the power of computers to automate routine training and learning tasks, as well as to graphically represent rapidly changing models of abstract reality, to aid education. Many of these projects were not much into distance education as they had to be used in-house, but in institutions with significant networking they slowly trickled into less conventional learning environments.

The Internet was basically created in 1969, and for many years thereafter the computer and network based projects for education started using networks like Arpanet, Bitnet, etc., which would be fused for users as the Internet and put into widespread use in the 1990's. The creation and rapid expansion of the World Wide Web accelerated the adoption of networks for all fields of human activity, with education frequently at the forefront or nearby (the pornography industry has been quoted also in this context) of the developments.

By the year 2000, the easy availability of the Internet, and the power it gives to a person or institution to become simultaneously author, publisher, distributor, librarian, etc., has led to the creation of numerous unique organizations dedicated to work exclusively through the networks, under novel operational and economic principles.

Together with the Internet, other information networks have prospered and been used in distance education. Some, like interactive videoconferencing, have contributed to profound reconceptualizations of distance education, as they allow for symmetric, equalitarian interactions among all participants in educational projects.

Digital convergence, or convergence alone, has become a continuing henomenon, in which different forms of communication, previously separate, like mail, publishing, text, video, television, telephony and data communications are more and more represented in digital form, transported over digital networks, and converted between different formats, so that categories as the Global Information Infrastructure are emerging and consolidating.

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