Educational technology — adolescence to adulthood

As a discipline, educational technology is about to pass from its late adolescence into early adulthood. If its birth can roughly, and perhaps arbitrarily, be placed in the late 1950s, then educational technology is nearly two decades old. Some would say that a discipline about whose name there is no certainty is no discipline at all, and educational technology has a variety of other labels--instructional systems development, instructional design, and, occasionally, educational engineering. Putting aside for the moment these variations in name preference, it may be useful, as we anticipate our "coming of age," to take stock of where we are, where we came from, and where we might be going. It could be argued that educational technology is still trying to become a legitimate academic discipline. We have no professional society exclusively ours, though educat ional technologists find acceptance in other associations, such as the American Psychological Association and the American Educational Research Association, and in some of the traditional education societies. We have few journals. However, an increasing number of institutions offer graduate degree specialties in educational technology, and there is a sizable and growing body of research literature in the field. The academic programs at such universities as Indiana, Southern California, Brigham Young, Syracuse, Florida State, and