As I was reading Audrey Watters’s Teaching Machines: The History of Personalized Learning, recently published by MIT Press, the word “landmark” kept occurring to me.[1]
This is a landmark book. It is a landmark book in both senses of the word: one, a marker by which we can establish a present location, and two, a turning point after which we can see a clear change in trajectory.
At least I hope that’s going to be the case, because Watters’s history of personalized learning reflects Faulkner’s aphorism from “Requiem for a Nun” — “The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.” Better understanding this presence may make for clearer decision making for how we integrate technology into teaching and learning.
Reading Teaching Machines is like donning a pair of glasses that suddenly makes much of the present more explicable. This is why I want to urge people to read this book with all possible haste.
It isn’t even a matter of history repeating itself so much as the forces that have governed the pursuit of a teaching machine being ever-present in education atmosphere where humans and their variable behaviors and specific needs are treated as defects that need remedying. The vision of the creators of these teaching machines suggests that if we could just get everyone with the program (pun intended), we could save ourselves a lot of trouble.
Teaching Machines is several books rolled up into one. It is a history of the teaching machines themselves, including chapters on Sidney Pressey’s “Automatic Teacher” of the late 1920s and early ’30s, B. F. Skinner’s multiple attempts through the 1950s, and the multiple space race-related efforts of the ’60s, as education technologists promised that a device straight out of the Jetsons was always right around the corner.
These teaching machines were by their nature, design and philosophies essentially behavioralist, not at all removed from Skinner’s operant conditioning work with pigeons, the bird that has served as a symbol of Watters’s long-standing work at her Hack Education blog.