Technologies of Learning

The essays in this cluster ask a harder question than which platform works best. They treat educational tools as media forms with assumptions built into them — slides, online courses, MOOCs, AI explainers — and ask what theory of learning each one quietly imports.

Technologies of Learning, a 2024 Primer tells the longer history. CAI in the 1960s — the IBM 1500, PLATO at Illinois — emerged out of three converging pressures: cheaper computation, the cold-war demand for “scalable and quality consistent training,” and the foundational instructional-design theories of Skinner, Bloom, Mager, and Gagné. The essay reads PLATO and its descendants as natural extensions of Skinner’s teaching machines, with mechanical levers replaced by terminals and keyboards. The 1980s and 1990s bring multimedia and the hyperlink — “a significant leap from linear learning models to more exploratory and interactive forms of learning.” MOOCs, born in 2011 with Norvig and Thrun’s Stanford AI course (160,000 enrolled, 20,000 completed), make the contradiction explicit: traditional schooling, “modeled after the factory assembly line, sought to make education accessible to the masses but often at the expense of personalization.” MOOCs partly inherit the same factory metaphor in digital form.

The framing epigraph from George Siemens travels through the essay: “The pipe is more important than the content within the pipe. Our ability to learn what we need for tomorrow is more important than what we know today.” That is the sentence that connects this topic to McLuhan-adjacent thinking on the rest of the site: every educational tool is a pipe, and pipes have shapes.

Elearning Demystified adds the practitioner-side argument. Learning is “fundamental to human survival”; “the most effective learning occurs when a motivated individual engages with well-structured content in an immersive way, allowing them to immediately apply new knowledge within their environment.” E-learning, judged by that standard, looks both promising and constrained: convenient and cost-effective, but often built around the assumption that delivery is the hard part. The essay’s quiet move is to insist that motivation, structure, and applicability are not optional features of “good” e-learning — they are the conditions under which any e-learning can do what its name promises.

The Format of the Century goes after the slideshow specifically. Treating slides as a media form with deep historical roots — the magic lantern’s mid-19th-century shift from hand-painted to photographic slides, then its adoption as a pedagogical tool especially in art history — the essay reframes contemporary slide culture as the latest stratum of an old format rather than a recent corporate fad. The implicit critique runs throughout: slides solved a particular problem (projecting images convincingly to an audience), then quietly became the default container for all explanation, even when explanation was the wrong shape for the slide.

Why E-Learning Fails the 70-20-10 Test sharpens all of the above. The 70-20-10 model assigns 70% of meaningful learning to challenging on-the-job experience; the e-learning industry, by contrast, is “an entire ecosystem built almost exclusively around the 10%.” The problem is not technology itself but the way educational systems overinvest in delivery and underinvest in participation, challenge, and feedback. Read together, these pieces argue that the strongest critique of educational technology is not that the tools are bad — many of them are excellent at what they do — but that the theory of learning they encode has not kept up with what we know learning actually is.