Part+I

Let's begin by taking a closer look at each of the items on the list below.

 * ====Connection between **technology and education**====
 * ====**Contemporary learning theories**====
 * ====a **rationale** for using educational technology====
 * ====**Benefits** and **criticism** of educational technology====
 * ====Technology in education: **examples**====
 * ====What **educational problem**? **Which educational technology**?====
 * ====**How** does the identified **educational technology tool help solve** the **educational problem**? Demo Wikispaces====

**Connection between technology and education**
===="Technology has the potential to revolutionize the traditional teaching and learning process. It can eliminate the barriers to education imposed by space and time and expand access to [...] learning. Students no longer have to meet in the same place at the same time to learn together..." (2)====
 * ====Technology can provide more elaborately created content, adding to the breadth of learning opportunities.====
 * ====Technology can help instructors manage learning content and student work.====
 * ====Technology can make the job of evaluating demonstrations of learning submitted by students more transparent.====
 * ====Data provided by electronic learning management tools or systems help instructors find out if and how learning outcomes were achieved.====

//**What is Connectivism?**//
===="A learning theory for the digital age," developed by George Siemens and Stephen Downes based on their criticism of other learning theories. Connectivism seeks to explain the effect technology has had on how we live, how we communicate, and how we learn.====

//(Source: Clarissa Davis, Earl Edmunds, Vivian Kelly-Bateman, Department of Educational Psychology and Instructional Technology, University of Georgia. "Connectivism," http://projects.coe.uga.edu/epltt/index.php?title=Connectivism.)//

Back to Top

**Rationale for using educational technology**
===="Technology could make constructivist (and, I might add connectivist) approaches to learning more attainable. Hypermedia environments that allow for non-linear learning and increased learner control are frequently mentioned in the literature," and are particularly useful in this context (Mergel, 1998). Multimedia and the Internet are also alternatives to the linear structure and facilitate data gathering techniques... As an experiential learning tool, virtual reality is also considered an enactive knowledge-creation environment. In general, the emergence of environments - such as toolkits and phenomenaria, multimedia, socratic dialogues, coaching and scaffolding, role-playing games, simulations, storytelling structures, case studies, holistic psychotechnologies - could promote instructional strategies that facilitate more active construction of meaning (Wilson, 1997). Moreover, microworlds and virtual reality simulations could stimulate authentic learning while the World Wide Web in general and Web Quests as innovative teaching strategies in particular could offer multiple representations of reality." (3)====