Technology or Craft: What Are We Doing?.

The origin of this essay was a request from the Editor, Larry Lipsitz, for a reflective article on where we currently stand and where we are going in Educational Technology. His concern is based, in part, on the perception of a number of people who have monitored educational technology scholarship over the years (for example, Clark, 1983, 1988a, b, 1994; Cuban, 1986; Ellul, 1990; Heinich, 1984; Kaufman, 1998; Kearsley, 1998) that well-designed research and evaluation does not provide evidence for expected educational technology results. In addition, many scholars since the turn of the century have suggested that our field is founded on a shared misunderstanding of technology and thus cannot hope to find the best solutions for many of the problems it is addressing. Our involvement in this issue is both personal and professional. For a number of years, both of us have balanced teaching, research and practice in educational technology. We both experience more people today who are enthusiastic about educational technology solutions that have face validity and seem intuitively correct but lack supporting evidence. We also notice, along with Greg Kearsley (1998) and others, that most people in our field continue to define technology as “machines and media”. Even more distressing is our impression that good evidence more often suggests a lack of effectiveness for many uses of educational technology as