Today, it is common to offer instructional technology (IT) as an answer to whatever problem faced in the education system. For instance, more ingenuous and pervasive uses of IT are often portrayed as a key to raising the national scores in PISA studies. This can be understood as a part of a larger technological understanding of the school, where education is conceived as a sphere of objects to be measured and manipulated toward predetermined ends (Gur & Wiley 2007; Hautakangas & Kiilakoski 2004). Moreover, the uses of IT in governing education systems can be seen as a part of a panoptic form of disciplinary power (see Foucault 1977) that entails elements of individualization, documentation and surveillance of human behaviour (Gur & Wiley 2009).

We contribute to this critical discussion of instructional technology in education by focusing on the spatial and material aspects of instructional technology. We produce theoretical insights on how conceptual ways of describing spaces of learning are materialized in the concrete assemblages of instructional technology where human behaviour and technological devices are brought together.

As a case in point, this paper examines the emergence of instructional technology from 1920s to early 1960s and its attempts to combine psychological knowledge of learning with teaching machines and to bring these ideas into use in classrooms. The focus is on Sidney Pressey’s early designs of teaching machines, and Burrhus F. Skinner’s and Lawrence Stolurow’s programmed instruction.

We analyze how the aforementioned pioneers of instructional technology have studied and theorized human learning and how they have sought to implement those principles in constructing teaching machines for use in schools.

For instance, we take a close look at how Skinner experimented with animals on his famous Skinner box, which was already a technological form of disciplining and studying behaviour. These experiments engendered theories of operant conditioning, which in turn informed the construction of, inter alia, teaching machines. This means that in the interplay between theory and practice of IT, one can always begin and end with technology: technological disciplinization of behaviour plays a key part in producing theoretical mappings of learning as well as how to implement them in practice.

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