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Radio” The Innovation of Technology in Education
Muhammad Syukrianto
A. Introduction
It has long been recognized that technology is developed and changed very fast. Era by era, everyday it has advanced. Radio is one of the important
technologies; by radio we can get information easily although it’s not visual. Radio has advantages such as it is cheap to buy, it can be brought everywhere even it can
be had by poor people because it is the cheapest media of information.
In the globalization era nowadays, there are more new technologies to get information easily than before, for instance: computer, internet, hp, etc. Although
Radio seems an old fashioned media, remember, we can get many important things from it. Radio has been used not only as the medium of information and
communication, but also extensively as an educational medium in developing countries. Published reports confirm that it has supported educational programs in a
wide range of subject areas and in many different countries. Fro example, this year in our country, Indonesia there’s KGRE Kangaroo Radio English the center is in
Bali, it has English programs. Almost all regency has radio station that join in the KGRE’s program. So it is important and useful for the students, more over student
of English to improve their English.
In this short paper we are going to discuss the history of radio, the uses of radio, and how the radio is used as a media of education especially in learning
English.
B. History and invention of Radio
Originally, radio technology was called wireless telegraphy, which was shortened to wireless. The prefix radio- in the sense of wireless transmission was
first recorded in the word radioconductor, coined by the French physicist Edouard Branly in 1897 and based on the verb to radiate. Radio as a noun is said to have
been coined by advertising expert Waldo Warren White 1944. The word appears in a 1907 article by Lee de Forest, was adopted by the United States Navy in 1912
and became common by the time of the first commercial broadcasts in the United States in the 1920s. The noun broadcasting itself came from an agricultural term,
meaning scattering seeds. The American term was then adopted by other languages in Europe and Asia, although Britain retained the term wireless until the
mid-20th century. In Chinese, the term wireless is the basis for the term radio wave although the term for the device that listens to radio waves is literally device
for receiving sounds.
Picture 1. The Invention of Radio
USPTO Patent Decision: Wireless Telegraphy
68 The identity of the original inventor of radio, at the time called wireless
telegraphy, is contentious. The controversy over who invented the radio, with the benefit of hindsight, can be broken down as follows:
Guglielmo Marconi was an early radio experimenter and founded the first
commercial organization devoted to the development and use of radio.
Nikola Tesla developed means to reliably produce radio frequencies, publicly
demonstrated the principles of radio, and transmitted long-distance signals. He holds the US patent for the invention of the radio, as defined as wireless
transmission of data.
Alexander Stepanovich Popov , in 1894, built his first radio receiver, which
contained a coherer. Further refined as a lightning detector, he presented it to the Russian Physical and Chemical Society on May 7, 1895.
Reginald Fessenden
[1]
and Lee de Forest
invented amplitude-modulated
AM radio, so that more than one station can send signals as opposed to spark-gap
radio, where one transmitter covers the entire bandwidth of the spectrum.
Edwin H. Armstrong invented
frequency-modulated FM
radio, so that an audio signal can avoid static, that is, interference from electrical equipment and
atmospherics. Early radios ran the entire power of the transmitter through a carbon
microphone. While some early radios used some type of amplification through electric current or battery, until the mid 1920s the most common type of receiver
was the crystal set. In the 1920s, amplifying vacuum tube radio receivers and transmitters came into use. The following is the picture of radio transmission.
Picture 2. Radio Transmission
C. The Uses of Radio
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