Overview+of+the+Readings

In //The Medium is the Message//, McLuhan advocates the study of the media to understand man and society. He maintains that significant shift in technology is the determining factor in shaping and transforming society. This idea that new technology can bring about a whole new way of thinking is a reminiscence of //Pressey’s ‘Automatic Teacher’//. Pressey, the ‘father’ of teaching machine emphasises on the hardware as he believes that the machine is the answer to what he perceives to be the inefficiency of education. Both McLuhan and Pressey seem to take the position of technological determinism as both believe that it the nature of the dominant media that man use and not the content of the media that shape society

Hence, McLuhan exhorts the study of the media rather than its content and this idea was taken up by educators in Larchmont-Mamaroneck school district. Moody in her book, //The Children of Telstar//, wrote that the educators of Larchmont-Mamaroneck school district attributed their decision to incorporate the understanding of media in their curriculum as well as the success of the TV studio experiment to McLuhan.

However, in his article, //Getting a Purchase on 'The School of Tomorrow’ and Its Constituent Commodities: Histories and Historiographies of Technologies//, Petrina reminds us of Foucault and that bureaucracy and technology are inherently central to schooling. This becomes obvious when we listen to //the Magic Box// and examine the process of how the computer got into our classroom.

Looking back at history, the philosophy underlining Educational Technology today is no different from Pressey’s teaching machine. According to Stephen Petrina, people were attracted to Pressey’s idea of individualization. However, the quest for freedom from the confines of mass education may prove to be a contradictory project as seen in Pressey’s attempts.