The future of teaching the past: computer-assisted instruction in history

Abstract

In its 1928 report to the Council of the League of Nations, the International Educational Cinematographic Institute announced that it had begun to study the potential educational applications of television. Although it was only four months since the Institute, which had been founded by the League's International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation, had opened its doors in Rome, its directors and staff had already begun deliberating several issues. Apparently most exciting to them was the educational use of television. The Institute had been created to encourage the production, distribution, and exchange among the various countries of educational films concerning instruction, art, agriculture, commerce, health, and social education. The Institute's report argued that television would make possible the distribution and exchange of such films in unprecedented ways. The international transmission of educational information over the airways would, by circumventing national taxes and tariffs on educational materials and bringing these materials into individual homes, foster international understanding. A television delivery system would make realizable the aims of the Institute, the International Committee, and even the League itself. 1 Fifty-six years later, even as we commend the Institute for its early recognition of television's potential, we must