Norm Friesen & Grace Chung: Ed Tech in Reverse: Information Technologies and the Cognitive Revolution

(Presented at the 2005 Annual Meeting of the Canadian Association of Distance Education)

As we rapidly approach the 50th year of the much-celebrated "cognitive revolution", it is worth reflecting on its widespread impact on individual disciplines and areas of multidisciplinary endeavour. Of specific concern in this paper is the example of the influence of cognitivism's equation of mind and computer in education. Within education, this paper focuses on a particular area of concern to which both mind and computer are simultaneously central: educational technology. It examines the profound and lasting effect of cognitive science on our understandings of the educational potential of information technologies, and further argues that recent and multiple "signs of discontent," "crises" and even "failures" in cognitive science and psychology should result in changes in these understandings. It concludes by observing how related changes are occurring in other areas of research earlier and similarly "revolutionized" by cognitivism.