Techno-News Blog

December 27, 2013

How to Use Technology in Education: Just remember how the book revolutionized teaching – Frederick M. Hess & Bror Saxberg, National Review

Filed under: Uncategorized — admin @ 12:25 am

The book first became available to the masses after the invention of the printing press in the mid 1400s. Previously, teachers and students had relied on painstakingly hand-inscribed parchment. As statistician Nate Silver has observed, “Almost overnight, the cost of producing a book decreased by about three hundred times, so a book that might have cost $20,000 in today’s dollars instead cost $70.” The availability of books skyrocketed. Educators today have expressed plenty of questions about new technologies, so it’s useful to recall that educators also didn’t exactly welcome the printing press. Schools were predominantly church-run affairs, and religious leaders worried about the lack of moral and interpretive guidance for learners left to their own devices. There were also fears that printed books would be a poor, cheap substitute for the rich experience of reading a scribe-written book. In 1492, abbot Johannes Trithemius fretted about the loss of “devotion to the writing of sacred texts. . . . Printed books will never equal scribed books, especially because the spelling and ornamentation of some printed books is often neglected.”

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/366375/how-use-technology-education-frederick-m-hess-bror-saxberg

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