1.3.4.3 Organizational Patterns in the Past
Over the history of educational computing, there has been an emphasis on the importance of formal
procedures to coordinate, communicate and plan the educational and technical nature of projects.
In the past, key tasks and their timing were described as stages. The actual tasks carried out
during the stages varied by type of educational goals. In traditional approaches to describing
educational computing projects, there is a tendency to describe their processes as a series of
steps or stages, which begins with a number of steps that revolve around planning. The actual
development tends to take place rather late in the process, and the fate of the project after
the point of development is only dealt with through cursory statements about planning for
maintenance or evaluation and revision. In general, even in cases were a cycle is implied,
the steps or stages are still represented in a somewhat linear format with some provisions
for feedback. The traditional roles have been distinguished by those which were primarily
content oriented, and those which have primarily required particular skills such as graphic
designer or evaluator.