Larry Cuban has been writing a series of blog posts focused on technology integration. The second post in this series is an attempt to define what technology integration means. There is often confusion in education when terms have both a common, general meaning and also a specific, more academic meaning. Things get messy when a word or phrase is used in both ways.
Here is why I am commenting on this topic. My wife and I wrote a textbook, copyright 1996, titled “Integrating Technology for Meaningful Learning”. If you understand how the copyright date for textbooks works, you realize that a 1996 copyright really means that the book is available to students for the Fall 1995 semester. This dating strategy is used to assure a book appears as recent as is possible. The first edition of a textbook takes longer than subsequent editions because more work is involved and because the companies backing the book do more with reviewers to assure the book will sell. So, we were using the phrase technology integration in 1994 or so.
We believe our book was one of the first and probably the first to describe the focus of the book as technology integration. We know what we meant by the phrase at that time and I don’t think I would regard our meaning as a technical term. Our concept was based in the book “Mindtools” authored by the late David Jonassen. I regarded Mindtools as more focused on college academics rather than teachers and I thought the tools Jonassen promoted could be expanded. We were particularly interested in Hypercard and applications such as Kid Pics as additions to Jonassen’s focus on traditional productivity tools – word processing, databases, spreadsheets. Jonassen and a colleague did eventually write a book more applying these ideas for future teaches. The idea of mindtools and our original use of technology integration was that the types of tools already available could be used within content area instruction to allow generative exploration of the topics addressed in these content areas. Writing to learn was a perspective that was generalized in my own thinking. I now prefer authoring to learn, but writing to learn had greater general familiarity. This integration of such tools in content areas could be contrasted with approaches such as computer-based instruction, computer literacy or programming (although the early LOGO experiences also encouraged the use of LOGO to explore other content areas).
Our focus in the published book was expanded to include a greater breadth of topics (we did include chapters on computer based instruction and programming), but the application of a variety of technology-based tools across the curriculum was and remains a focus of our writing.
So, our meaning of technology integration was the use of technology across the curriculum. It was not intended to be a formal term, but rather a recognition that technology can be applied in flexibly ways to benefit the learning process. My only motivation in offering my perspective is protecting our general use of this term and challenging those who might suggest we are using the phrase in an inappropriate manner.
Our present edition is available as a Kindle book. Our transition from a traditional, big company textbook to our present publishing approach (a Primer in combination with web resources) is a story for another day.
