Miscellaneous Articles from various sources

RMC, conferences, other students, Internet contacts, etc.
File updated 8/15/98

Web Sites

Synopses of articles

Analogy
Stepich, D.A., & Newby, T.J. (1988, October). Analogizing as an instructional strategy. Performance & Instruction, 22-24.

They equate analogies and metaphors and say that they both are effective for instruction. Analogizing means describing one thing by comparing it with something else (red blood cells work like trucks; they both transport materials from one point to another). There are four parts to an analogy:

  1. subject - the new information to be learned (red blood cells)
  2. analog - existing knowledge to which the new information is compared (trucks)
  3. connector - which establishes the similarity (work like)
  4. ground - which describes the similarities and differences (common

The cornerstone of analogizing is the connector "is like". By specifying the similarities, the analogies allow learners to connect new information to prior knowledge. The existing knowledge, serving as an analog, provides a context for understanding the new subject, making it more comprehensible and memorable. It is most useful when the subject is difficult to understand, or abastract. It describes the new subject in terms of simpler, more familiar information.

Guidelines for constructing an analogy:

  1. Analyze the subject - what's the most important thing to understand?
  2. Brainstorm potential analogs - what concrete items have similar attributes?
  3. Choose an analog - which candidate is most familiar or understandable to the learners, and which matches the subject's attributes most closely?
  4. Describe the connector and ground - how are the subject and analog alike (and different)?

Curtis and Riegeluth suggest that the power of an analogy can be increased by identifying its boundaries and limitations - including both similarities and differences w.r.t. the subject.

Guidelines for presenting an analogy:

  1. Analogize early - present it along with the initial description of the subject
  2. Deliver in combination format - both verbal and pictorial
  3. Assimilate elaborations - as you elaborate the subject, assimilate the elaborations into the analog
  4. Provide practice - give situations asking for application of the subject information, provide corrective feedback
  5. Test - give new situations asking for application of subject information.

Bosley: Academic/Industry partnerships
Bosley, D.S. (1995). Collaborative partnerships: Academia and industry working together. Technical Communication, 42(4). 611-619.

Dr. Bosley notes that academicians and practicing professionals tend not to talk to each other - "the reasons for such suspicions are a function of each arena maintaining differing concepts of the discovery of knowledge, the purpose of research, and the emphasis on theory and practice".

Faculty traditionally emphasized theory over practice because university education was divorced from the world of work, because the purpose of such education was to prepare students for graduate work, not for the world of work. Industry traditionally viewed theory as generally unnecessary because workers were paid to do tasks, not to think about processes. However, her Table 2 shows striking similarities between academic and industry tech comm. environments. Both arenas are being transformed by computers and the information age, resulting in a blurring of lines between academia and industry. Partnerships are needed. Industry wants universities to turn out graduates who are in touch with the demands of the real world.

Academics will value such alliances because faculty must have access to the environment in which students must work, they must understand the industrial culture, they need to develop innovative curricula, alleviate misconceptions corporate folk may have about academia, as well as create linkages to broaden their financial resources. Corporate folks value these alliances because they can recruit students with good preprofessional experience, provide students and faculty with up-to-date technology, develop collaborative training programs, increase profit through partnerships for R&D, underscore the need for universities to move from classroom to global environment, and alleviate academic misconceptions about industry.

She comes up with a set of research questions for both industry and academia, for developing linkages between both.

For academia:

For industry:

The types of linkages are:

  1. classroom and curricula activities
  2. student-faculty on-site opportunities
  3. professional conferences and community organizations
  4. employment and alumni opportunities
  5. product and data research
  6. corporate, textbook, and journal publications
  7. liaison functions
  8. grants, funding, and donations

These are not without impediments. It is difficult to find a faculty member whose sole responsibility is to create corporate linkages. It is also difficult for a university person to return to industry.

Rewards are developing new learning styles to turn out adaptable and thoughtful workers for industry, improving vocational education by making it more relevant to workplace practice, creating new industry/academia linkages, broadening teachers' experiences of "the world outside", applying corporate knowledge to educational management styles, and changing industry practices - particularly in recruiting and training.

Bereiter & Scardamalia: Cognition and Curriculum
Bereiter, C., & Scardamalia, M. (??) Cognition and Curriculum. Chapter 19 of a book - The Curriculum as a Shaping Force.

Basically, educators are interested in finding out what's going on in the minds of teachers and students, and using this knowledge to shape curriculum and instruction. Three cognitive concerns are:

  1. conceptual change - what's a misconception? what underlying, tacit belief system gave rise to it?
  2. process-tracing research - does a think-aloud protocol distort what's actually going on in the student's mind? is process-tracing research either superficial or dangerously speculative?
  3. expertise - we need more applied and theoretical research on this. what early experience will lead to expertise in later life?

Cognitive Science: the scientific study of the mind and mental (not neurological) activity. (Behaviorists don't care if mental activity is rule-based; cognitivists would like to know but don't.) Cognitive science began in 1956, with Simon and AI, and Miller and short term memory. Later, there was interest in discourse that builds knowledge, cognitive skills that generate it, and schemata that organize it. Cognitive science tends to ignore culture and emotion.

Curriculum: it emphasizes formal knowledge rather than reason. Background knowledge is hierarchically structured in schemata. Expert knowledge lies in recognizing and remembering meaningful patterns. Expert systems have simple engines that search substantial knowledge bases. Implications for curriculum are: teach lots of knowledge, and a system for finding it. However, we know that people can't access isolated items of information from memory without meaningful connections. They can't use inert knowledge, but they can use mental models and procedural knowledge as functional forms, and metacognition as a way of regulating their mental processes.

Let's talk about these 3 things:

  1. Mental models: people create models of situations and use them to generate possible outcomes. Idealized, formal models are rule-based. The really useful ones are informal - causal, weakly quantitative, dynamic, pragmatic, and concrete. Children develop naive mental models based on everyday experience, leading to flat earth, comic book trajectories, and other misconceptions. These are revised, but not abandoned, through formal instruction.
  2. Procedural knowledge: declarative knowledge is not translated directly into actions, but is translated into goals, which are then pursued using available procedures or new predures devised through problem-solving.
  3. Metacognition: these are self-regulatory strategies, or conscious monitoring of cognitive states and processes. They also include knowing the nature and purpose of what is being learned, students' implicit theories of learning (i.e. they want me to memorize facts to pass a test), setting objectives and judging what is important (which the teachers usually pre-empt), and thinking (aloud or internally) and responding to every interaction in a discourse. There's also shared metacognitive activity, as in instructional discourse.

Problem-solving: problems exist in a problem space, which is populated by knowledge states. These are mental representations of the initial state, goal state, and intermediate states of the problem. Operators are moves that get you from one state to another - like epistemic games. For an ill-defined problem, there are many paths to get from initial to goal state; each step changes the problem space. One way to solve a problem is means-end analysis: work back from the goal to an intermediate state, repeat the process until a subgoal can be reached from the initial state, like the Tower of Hanoi.

Applying problem-solving to curriculum:

Decreasing cognitive loading:

Intermediate states of competence:

There are three curricular implications for cognitive science:

  1. Cognitive teaching - cognitive apprenticeship is one way. It includes modeling, coaching, scaffolding, articulation, reflection, and exploration. It incorporates mental models, shared metacognitive activity, problem solving, and the active cultivation of intermediate states of competence. Going beyond this, we have principled understanding (Lampert and math), and an increased emphasis on the student's role as an agent in the learning process, taking over his/her own metacognitive efforts.
  2. Computer environments - both instructional (closed) and environmental (open). Intelligent tutoring systems like Anderson's geometry tutoring system "know" geometry - it contains representations of principles and procedures that enable it to prove theorems that have not been presented to it before. These have flexible interaction with the learner. Also, computer-based communication environments (e-mail, conferencing) exchange information among members of a COL.
  3. Education for expertise - we need information about

Future implications:

Emerging insights - how to distinguish culturally important learning which occurs naturally from that which does not; how to teach counter-intuitive ideas (Newtonian mechanics); and how to exploit naturally occurring knowledge endownments in the service of more advanced learning.

Duffy: Strategic Teaching Framework
Duffy, T.M. (in press). Strategic Teaching Framework: An instructional model for learning complex, interactive skills. To appear in C. Dills & A. Romiszowski (Eds.). Encyclopedia of Educational Technology. Englewood, NJ: Educational Technology Press.

This is basically a highly interactive videodisk. It has 2 parts: a hypermedia based information system (STFIS) and a reflective, problem solving instructional system. It's related to teacher education, but can be applied to any complex system where performance is dynamic (you have to adapt to situational cues) and involves an ongoing complex interaction.

Currently, instruction focuses on the acquisition of knowledge with little instruction focusing on the use of that knowledge in larger contexts. New emphases, like NCTM math, try to engage the learner in real world uses of information, to increase the learner's responsibility and ownership of the learning activity, to engage the learner in authentic activity that is anchored to a larger context, and to try to create a discourse community for sharing and testing ideas against alternative perspectives. The teacher is there to support, challenge, and stimulate the student's thinking about the problem.

Basically, this is PBL. It means the teacher shifts focus from delivering instruction to the assessment of and responsiveness to the child's learning, and that teaching is also dictated by the current situation (cf. Suchman). To be effective, teachers must be guided by a stable pedagogical framework, and be able to reflect and apply that framework in an automatic fashion while responding to the classroom dynamics. (cf. Kliebard - it's not a knowledge base.)

This means teachers have to develop new teaching strategies, like having the kids work collaboratively in groups, and to use PBL activities where students use or apply information rather than "mastering" the domain. It also means the kids are involved in discourse that leads to investigation, the growth of ideas, and deeper understanding. Teachers need to construct a model of learner-centered teaching, from a collaborative environment of their own, where they can evaluate alternative perspectives and ideas. Their assumptions about learning are:

  1. situated cognition (knowledge is in interactions with the environment): this involves an ongoing evaluation of teaching effectiveness, or reflection-in-action
  2. learners test their constructions against alternative representations through discourse: does our idea explain the world?
  3. intentional learning, puzzlement, cognitive dissonance: it's the goal of the learner to determine what is learned, rather than learning to a test

The constructivist learning principles (above) lead to the development of an instructional model with 2 basic components: an information system and an instructional strategy. This is STFIS. Its design starts with a master teacher so that teachers can observe him/her on video: a person who works with collaborative groups, is judged as exemplary by experts in the field, and could articulate what he/she was trying to accomplish.

Four design principles are used:

  1. focus on teaching strategies within content domains: they did not teach how to structure the course, but emphasized selecting and reflecting on the effectiveness of different strategies used
  2. bring the richness of the classroom to the teacher-trainee: capture the interactivity of how the teacher deals with THIS class in THIS context (situated action); also not focus on isolated teaching strategies, but see the richness of instruction over the entire class period
  3. support teacher-trainees in constructing and testing their own understanding of the instruction by providing multiple models (3 examples of teaching the same course) and multiple perspectives (the master teachers comment on why and how they did xxx)
  4. support teacher-trainees in becoming part of a COL: users can write notes and append them to the video; they also provide Internet access so teachers can collaborate with each other (here's how we can do our own professional development)

They describe the video. Next, they talk about the design principles fo the STF reflective problem solving instructional system. It is process instruction or coaching, not content instruction. Principles are:

  1. maintain complexity: cognitive apprenticeship in the complex environment helps to overcome persistent misunderstandings which simple-to-complex environments bring about
  2. use a PBL instructional strategy (Barrows' model): start with a problem; learners are responsible for all decisions; learning is collaborative; instructor is a facilitator; the desired outcome is for the trainees to become self-directed learners
  3. move from simple to complex in an authentic teaching environment
  4. promote reflection on the teaching of others, then on your own teaching; shorten the time between action and reflection. Start with a model of a master teacher, then the analysis (how do master teachers interact with kids) - implementation (target a change you'd like to make; try it in your classroom) - reflection (reflect on your tryout and make revisions) cycle.

In summary, this model uses video clips from expert teachers in real classrooms; the expert teachers reflect on their own performance; the trainees and their peers take notes and interpret these resources, then try to implement them iteratively in their own classrooms. Through analysis, adaptation of techniques, testing of their effectiveness, reflection on their success, revision and retesting, and extending the repertoire with strategies that work, the trainees take on more and more of the expert performance.

The WWW as Social Hypertext
Erickson, T. (1996). The World-Wide Web as social hypertext. Communications of the ACM, 39(1), 15-17.

Personal pages construct the author's identity
Why is the WWW fundamentally different from the WAIS and Gopher systems that preceded it? Because personal pages are not being used to "publish information",they are being used to construct identity. Useful information is just a side effect. Thus the author characterizes the Web as social hypertext, because the nodes are representations of people.

Socially driven search strategies
A common feature of a personal page is a list of pointers to "interesting people and places". This is socially salient information. Hence, casual surfers, looking on the WWW for people who might otherwise use search engines, can use socially driven search strategies to navigate from one personal page to another, seeking "who would know" the answer to their question.

Nonmutuality of knowledge
The "person in the know" doesn't know this is happening. There is no commitment on the seeker's part to contact the author and request a copy of a document, thus incurring personal indebtedness to read it and give feedback on it to the author. Thus, this nonmutuality of knowledge is one of the characteristics that makes social hypertext different from more direct forms of communication.

Of these 3 characteristics, personal portrayal will have the most profound effects, because while it is new on the Internet, it is very ordinary behavior in the real world (how people act in public, how they dress, how they use consumer goods). On the Web, they can portray themselves personally by projecting detailed information about themselves, without incurring the expense of accumulating consumer goods to do this. "If personal pages are indeed a new manifestation of the human impulse to manage personal representations, we need only look at markets like cosmetics and clothing to get an idea of the force behind this impulse."

These personal pages create debates within the organization in which they are created. Some people are quite aware of potentially negative consequences of their personal portrayals, and have begun to depersonalize them by removing whatever might project bad self-image to a potential recruiter, fairly strong political statements, and the like. Management concerns range from accidental revelation of confidential information to the question of how personal these personal pages should be. Clearly, there are well-established policies and procedures governing publication of research and other professional information, but no policies about what to do if employees wish to publish "poetry, samples of music from their punk garage band, or political satire." Nor is management eager to enter this new frontier of corporate policy.

Apple's Advanced Technology group, which values its reputation as an innovative, cutting-edge organization made up of a diverse community of creative individuals uses the strategy of encouraging a community-based approach to defining what is acceptable. New personal pages are reviewed within the organization so that people can work out their methods and appropriate norms with their management and their peers, before publishing their pages on the WWW. The creation and evolution of social norms is a community-based process, not something centrally determined - and so far it seems to be working.

Implications

"Although the Web may be just the latest fashion to sweep the Internet, if it turns out to be a medium that allows the construction, negotiation, and propagation of the styles of appearance we refer to as fashion, its impact may be profound indeed."

Garofalo & Lester: Metacognition & Math
Garofalo, J., & Lester, F.K.Jr. (1985). Metacognition, cognitive monitoring, and mathematical performance. Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, 16 (3), 163-176.

This paper starts with the topic of metacognition and moves on to its applications for math. They do a lit review and build their own model, starting with a definition of metacognition:

"Metacognition" refers to one's knowledge concerning one's own cognitive processes and products or anything related to them, e.g., the learning-relevant properties of information or data...Metacognition refers, among other things, to the active monitoring and consequent regulation and orchestration of these processes in relation to the cognitive objects on whaich they bear, usually in the service of some concrete goal or objective (Flavell, 1976, p. 232).
Metacognition is also known as reflective intelligence (Skemp, 1979) or reflexive abstraction (Piaget, 1976). However, it is often difficult to distinguish what is metacognitive vs. what is cognitive. A good way is that cognition is involved in doing, whereas metacognition is involved in choosing and planning what to do and monitoring what is being done.

Knowledge of cognition

This is concerned with what a person knows about cognitive abilities, processes, and resources in relation to the performance of specific cognitive tasks - including beliefs, knowledge about what makes some tasks more difficult than others, and having a knowlege of general and specific cognitive strategies along with an awareness of their potential usefulness for approaching and carrying out certain tasks. The metacognitive aspect of such knowledge lies knowing where it can be used, and when and how to apply it.

Regulation of cognition

This aspect of metacognition influences the decision to employ a specific strategy, to monitor one's task understanding, and to regulate one's strategy usage. This monitoring process also includes self-correcting mechanisms or "fix up" strategies, while working through a cognitive task or problem. These strategic behaviors take time to master, and novices need to develop the monitoring and assessing skills required to use them effectively.

Metacognition and mathematical performance

It is the interaction of person, task, and strategy, including preferences, familiarity with, and confidence in using potentially useful strategies. For example, if a student knows he/she is prone to making arithmetical errors, the student will engage in some sort of monitoring process that includes checking results.

This includes one's assessment of one's own capabilities and limitations with respect to mathematics in general and also particular topics and tasks. Such knowledge also includes one's beliefs concerning the nature of mathematical ability, the relationship of performance in math to performance in other areas, and the effects of affective variables such as motivation, anxiety, and perseverance.

Mathematical task knowledge includes an awareness of the effects of task features such as content, context, structure, and syntax on task difficulty. Mathematical strategy knowledge includes knowledge of algorithms and heuristics; it also includes a person's awareness of strategies to aid in comprehending problem statements, organizing information or data, planning solution attempts, executing plans, and checking results.

This is especially important in mathematical problem-solving. Problem-solving involves two things:

The authors quote Schoenfeld (1981) who feels that tactical behaviors have been well studied, but little is known about the managerial decisions. Polya (1957) has a four phase model: understanding, planning, carrying out the plan, and looking back; the authors say this doesn't encompass metacognition. They cite the work of Sternberg (1980, 1982) who categorized six control "metacomponents" to problem-solving: Garofalo and Lester have invented their own framework:

Implications for instruction

They believe that the algorighms and heuristics have been taught enough, and that the failure of most efforts to improve students' problem-solving performance is due to ignoring the managerial skills necessary to regulate students' activities: how, when, and under what conditions to use what algorithms, strategies, and heuristics. They cite Brown & Palincsar (1982) who state that informed training that combines instruction and practice in using a strategy with informatino about the significance of the strategy is most important. Moreover, there should also be training in planning, monitoring, and assessing the implementation of that strategy.

Harnad: Implementing peer review on the net
Harnad, S. (1996). Implementing peer review on the net: Scientific quality control in scholarly electronic journals. [On-line.] Full path: http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/

Electronic networks have made it possible for authors to shift from a "trade model" of publication, in which the author sells his words (and delivers the copyright) to a paper-based journal that in turn sells their magazine to an audience, to a collaborative model in which his/her distribution is much broader, and the costs are borne by the university, library, or scholarly society rather than the journal itself. One problem with this is that the journal could lose money because of either contraband or pre-press versions of the manuscript.

Back in 1994, Harnad and others also recognized that the timeliness of electronic publication implied a lack of peer-review. This article addresses that issue. Peer review can actually be implemented more efficiently and equitably via Internet than by "snail-mail" and paper drafts which often sit unread on reviewers' desks for a long time. This separate issue has nothing to do with cost - reviewers usually review papers for free anyhow. Peer-review is not medium-dependent: "the filtering of scholarly and scientific work by some form of quality control has been implicit in paper publication from the outset, yet it is not, and never has been in any way peculiar to paper." Often the slowness of paper publication has nothing to do with paper, but with the peer-review process itself.

Harnad's idea is to raise electronic publishing to the same "prestige" level as learned paper journals in each discipline. This means peer-review, and that means an editor and an editorial board of learned referees who advise the editor(s), sometimes anonymously, sometimes not, evaluating the manuscript and making recommendations about acceptance/rejection and possible revisions. A good editor chooses his/her referees well and trusts their judgment.

The beauty of the net is that once the manuscript is online, it is answerable to the peer community as a whole, within the discipline or specialty - not just to the referees. Plus, the net offers the possibility of distributing the burdens of peer review more equitably, and selecting referees on a broader and more systematic basis. It also improves the speed with which a manuscript can be circulated electronically.

Once peer review is in place on the net, and the quality hierarchy established, serious scholars will no longer have reason not to publish their best works electronically. (cf. EJVC journal)

A third factor is called "scholarly skywriting". This is like AERA's VIRTCOM III - a new form of interactive publication. The electronic manuscript, once refereed and accepted, is circulated to many potential commentators across specialties throughout the world, who are invited to submit critical commentary, to which the author will respond. Referees choose papers for which open peer discussion and response on that paper would be valuable to the scholars in the fields involved. This electronic form of knowledge-building and progressive discourse promises"life for more of these potential brainchildren, those ideas born out of scholarly intercourse at skyborne speeds, progeny that would be doomed to still-birth at the earthbound speeds of paper communication." He adds: "Peer commentary, after all, whether refereed or not, is itself a form of peer review, and hence of quality control."

His argument is basically this: conventional peer review is a good means of controlling quality, whether on paper or on the net. However, once such rigorous and conventional restraints are in place, "there is still plenty of room on the net for exploring freer possibilities, and the collective, interactive ones, are especially exciting."

Not every article is amenable to "scholarly skywriting", and not every conversation is valuable - there's a lot of "psychobabble" on the net. The system is not foolproof. But it can increase individual scholars' productivity without sacrificing peer-review. He foresees a hierarchy of journals from "vanity press" to "prestige journals" - electronically - just as they exist in paper - and each scholar can find a niche at the level where his/her research ought to be published.

Steven Hodas: Technology refusal
Hodas, S. (1993). Technology refusal and the organizational culture of schools. ASU EPAA Journal, 1(10). [on-line].

Any technological advance that goes against the "cast-in-concrete" organizational culture of the school will not be implemented by classroom teachers, even if is adopted by the administrators, district "powers-that-be", or students.

William Horton: How we communicate
Horton, W. (1994). How we communicate. Presentation for the Rocky Mountain STC Chapter. Available: William Horton Consulting, PO Box 4585, Boulder CO 80306-4585.

Horton's grand unified theory of communication with heuristics for designers is very simple: the creator has an idea, turns it into an image, represents the image in some sort of presentation in the environment (via some sort of media); then the consumer picks up the image and turns it into an idea. It's the old IP model, but with a subtle twist.

Let's take this step by step.

  1. Idea: what you want the consumer to do, know, or feel
  2. Encode the idea into an image
  3. Image: what you want the consumer to experience
  4. Represent that image in a presentation
  5. Presentation: the work or act of communication
  6. The consumer perceives the presentation
  7. Image: what the consumer experiences
  8. the consumer decodes the image
  9. Idea: what the consumer does, knows, or feels.

Only one problem: you can't get inside the consumer's head to see his/her image; so the resulting may or may not be the one you intended at all. So how dos an image provoke an idea? We're back to context here. The idea depends on more than just the image; the image is interpreted in context.

  1. Start with an image.
  2. Add context: environment, situation, other text, sounds, graphics
  3. Add the consumer's mind: memories and associations, emotions, inference and reasoning, curiosity and interest
  4. Mix these all up and you get the resulting idea.

Horton's solution to this problem is his "formula for encoding" or "golden rule": communicate unto others as they would communicate unto themselves. In practice:

  1. You want the consumer to have YOUR IDEA
  2. So figure out what image in HIS CONTEXT and HIS MIND triggers YOUR IDEA
  3. And use that image to build your presentation.

Sounds easy...anyhow he goes on to give various types of images, icons, and cognitive research information on what sort of ideas these images conjure up in the consumer's mind.

Miles: Teaching tech writing through e-mail
Miles, T.H. (1995). Teaching technical writing through e-mail: Making hyperspace personal. Technical Communication 42(4), 658-660.

Miles teaches tech writing at the university level, through e-mail. He has two major concerns:

  • The fall from the illusion of narrative consciousness into the reality of "hypertext consciousness"
    Writing with hypertext allows live links from abstract (or meta-index) to text, or from text to full-text versions of cited articles. However, can we really rewrite a paper without having it in hard copy, trying to keep in our mind what's several screens down from where we're rewriting now? Writing with hypertext destabilizes a person, and implies a restructured consciousness - one deprived of narrative illusion and essentialist coherence. Tech Comm practitioners have been working conscientiously to de-energize this movement.
  • The impersonality factor
    Teaching via e-mail can be impersonal. Losing personal contact and weakening the student-instructor interaction because of an electronic environment is a serious concern of half his students. However, what's personal about a large lecture hall? "...ultimately the technology will spur universities to put lectures on a server, thereby freeing lectures to interact more with students, and that interactivity is...the key to learning" (citation from Weiss). Conversely, do teachers run the risk of isolating students - as if they were self-contained monads - at a computer terminal and encouraging them with the illusion of solipsistic power? Does e-mail encourage impersonality and, therefore, alienation? Can electronic access to one's instructors and other learners ever be as satisfying as the dynamic of a "personal" contact? Or, in a presentation to a group of 100, is this personal contact more an illusion than a reality anyway?

    He ends by referring to Indra's Net, saying that instead of becoming more isolated by using electronic instruction, educators and students may forge a new community. Instead of being isolated, users, through e-mail, may be mirroring forth both themselves and the group in a synergistic whole, as can happen in high-level discussion groups when one person's comments can be read instantaneously by all the list's subsdcribers, thereby forming an extended, electronic neural net in virtual time.

    Change agents' required skills: Ontario research report
    Miles, M.B., Saxl, E.R., & Lieberman, A. (1988). What skills do educational "change agents" need? An empirical view. (Curriculum Inquiry 18:2, 1988). The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

    This article reports findings from a two-year study of 17 change agents working in three New York City school improvement programs. Of three research questions, this paper focused on "is there a basic set of core skills needed by assisters?" By skills they mean "how to do something", not a knowledge base. They wanted to know if assister skills were generic or program-specific, and what skills differentiated average from outstanding change agents, without stripping away the context in which the skills appeared. Qualitative and quantitative data analysis encompassed:

    1. review of skills appearing in specific critical incidents where assisters were actively involved:
      • interpersonal ease: people management, human relations, using other people's skills effectively
      • group functioning: leadership training, sensitivity training, group dynamics skills
      • trust/rapport building: able to gain confidence and respect
      • confrontation used when necessary
      • program knowledge: shows people what they have to do, uses monitoring/evaluation strategy
      • getting resources: sharing on detailed level
      • multiple skills: combinations of the above
    2. comparison of outstanding vs. average change agents: do outstanding assisters achieve more difficult outcomes than average ones? It is unclear:
      • easy outcomes (short-run success, use of specific products, positive relationship between assister and client) vs. difficult outcomes (student achievement, improved capacity of teachers or staff, institutionalization of the program) - no correlation with excellence of change agent
      • the relationship between ease of attainment of outcome and "outstandingness" of the assister was confounded by the number of years on the job and the quality of the school
      • the nature of the program itself also affects outcomes: some are aimed at improving the capacity of individuals rather than institutionalizing programs.
    3. tabulation of frequency of skills mentioned
      • general skills:
        • communication (talking, reading, writing),
        • interpersonal ease (getting along well with people),
        • group functioning,
        • training,
        • educational (content/instructional expertise),
        • administrative/organizational skills
      • specific skills:
        • personal (initiative, tenacity, humor, energy, calmness),
        • social process (legitimacy-building, trust/rapport building, support, confrontation, negotiating, motivating, problem-solving, etc.),
        • task (goal-setting, diagnosis, planning, managing, monitoring), and
        • educational (bringing ideas & solutions, getting resources, demonstration, implementation, developing materials)
      • most frequently mentioned skills were interpersonal ease, training, educational content, administrative/organizational, general educational background, and group functioning.
    4. tabulation of skills mentioned as strengths (in order of importance)
      • trust/rapport building
      • training/running workshops
      • demonstration
      • support
      • conflict mediation
      • negotiation/diplomacy
    5. tabulation of skills ranked as "typical" by managers and change agents
      • general skills: primarily interpersonal ease, and training/doing workshops
      • personal skills: initiative-taking, taking things with a grain of salt
      • social process skills: facilitating participatory decision' making and building rapport with others, promoting team effort
      • task skills: diagnosing the situation and organizing the work
    6. skills they recommended for training attention:
      • program managers emphasized group functioning, interpersonal ease, dianosis, managing, educational content
      • assisters emphasized interpersonal ease, dignosis, program knowledgeability, relationship negotiation, problem-solving, collaboration, providing resources

    A synthesis of findings resulted in a list of 18 key skills for assisters (educational change agents). These included six general skills (similar to general skills listed above)

    1. interpersonal ease (relating simply and directly to others)
    2. group functioning (understanding group dynamics, facilitating team work)
    3. training (direct instruction, teaching adults in a systematic way)
    4. master teacher (wide educational experience, able to impart skills to others)
    5. educational content (knowledge of school subject matter), and
    6. administrative/organizational ability (defining and structuring work, activities, and time).

    Twelve specific skills appeared, in four areas.

    1. Personal area: initiative-taking (starting activities, pushing to action)
    2. Socio-emotional process area: trust/rapport-building, support and nurturing, confrontation without generating negative affect, conflict mediation and resolution, collaboration, and confidence-building
    3. Task area: individual diagnosis as a basis for action, organizational diagnosis as a basis for action, and managing/controlling or orchestrating the improvement process
    4. Educational content area: locating/providing information, materials and equipment, and demonstration or modeling of new behavior in classrooms or meetings.

    They studied three different programs, each with a different context: one school-wide program based on five factors by Ron Edmonds (forming a schoolwide planning committee, assessing needs, setting goals, making a plan, and implementing it), one centered in the school district office, and one directly aimed at enhancement of skills of individual teachers. The 44 assisters who were studied were not supervisors. They had quasi-temporary jobs tied to school improvement. They do not deal with district-wide curriculum development. The sample is one of competent, well-motivated people, who have been on the job at least two years. The instrument was a semi-structured interview.

    Findings:

    Implications:

    Reiser: History of IT
    Reiser, R.A. (??) Instructional technology: A history. Chapter 2 in a book.

    It is considered a set of instructional media (A/V media: audiovisual devices) or a process (ISD process: the systems approach process). AECT emphasizes the individual learner and his unique needs, using a systematic approach to the development of learning resources. AECT's dictionary definition of educational technology is:

    a complex integrated process involving people, procedures, ideas, devices, and organization for analyzing problems, and devising, implementing, evaluating, and managing solutions to those problems involved in all aspects of human learning.
    History
    The history starts with A/V media (radio, movies), which could present concrete representations of abstract concepts. During WWII, the military used films and overheads for training the troops. After WWII, researchers became interested in communication models as processes. NDEA poured money into applying the systems approach to education, providing more individualized instruction, and securing greater teacher acceptance of the new media. In the 1950's they tried instructional TV, but the "talking heads" added nothing new, teachers didn't like it, it was too expensive to install and maintain, so it died. In the 1960's the emphasis shifted from A/V media to message design. It also focused more on the learner, not on the technology.

    Systems approach
    This is basically an empirical approach to the design and improvement of instruction, not a theoretical approach. In the 1960's it went through

    Early systems approach models were like the military (Rand, MITRE), were based on behaviorist principles, and were supported by the US Government through the NDEA. Formative or interim evaluation, pilot testing, and revision were added to ISD. This is the first time educators were required to collect evaluation. Tyler came up with the feedback loop in formative evaluation, making this an iterative design process.

    In the late 1960's and 70's, the systems approach was pervasive: education, military, and corporate. By the 1980's, behaviorism faded, and cognitive psychology became important. Of course, this wrecked stating behavioral objectives for nonobservables (I guess this is how outcomes became important).

    Individualized instruction
    This brings up the problem of learner control vs. lesson control.

    Conclusions
    In each of these 3 areas: audiovisual, systems, and individualized instruction, interest waxed and waned. We have yet to see a good synthesis of these three aspects, nor any great accomplishments of IT in education and training so far.

    Herbert A. Simon and AI
    Simon, H.A. Interview. (1994, June). Omni Magazine, 16(9), 70-89.

    He argues that everything the brain does can be adequately explained in terms of information processing. A computer could do these things just as well. He believes that computers can think, and that creativity can be automated. It means making selective searches, recognizing cues that index knowledge in given situations.

    His computers use heuristics. E.g., every time you set up a problem, it locates some method or tool stored in its memory that will decrease the difference between some initial and some final state. Or it will use heuristics like multiplying two quantities if one increases while the other decreases, to see if the product is constant. He says his chess playing computer has the same insight as a human player, to look at all of the important squares and none of the unimportant ones, for a given configuration of pieces. It also recognizes familiar patterns of pieces, and situations where it knows the opponent has made an error.

    Empirical knowledge, not theory, must guide computer system design. You have to see how humans draw lessons from the bumps and bruises they get, how organizations make decisions with limited information - on an individual, not a group level. You choose what's "good enough". Thus, by knowing the rules of art or music, a computer can create an acceptable painting or a decent musical score - but not work of genius scope.

    Suchman and situated learning
    Streibel, M.J. (1991). Instructional plans and situated learning. in Gary J. Anglin (Ed.), Instructional Technology, Past, present, and future, 117-132.

    Streibel discusses the work of Lucy Suchman, who distinguishes between plans (hierarchical subprocedures of how to accomplish tasks) and situated actions (the actual sense that specific users make out of specific situations). Her main question is this: Do human beings, such as teachers and learners, follow plans (no matter how tentative or incomplete those plans might be) when they solve real-world problems, or do human beings develop embodied skills that are only prospectively or retrospectively represented by plans? She argues for the latter.

    First, what's a plan? Cognitive scientists see the mind as full or cognitive structures (symbolic representations of declarative knowledge that have some sort of "reality" like schema, word lists, and images) and cognitive operations (symbol manipulations according to plans - these can be represented by AI). Thus, they say that the mind mediates environmental stimuli and transform mental representations into other cognitive structures called plans, which, in turn, produce behavioral responses.

    To a computer, a plan is a rule-based system. To people, a plan is a strategy. You decide consciously if and when it applies.

    How do instructional design theories use this idea of a plan? Some instructional plan can generate these (observable) environmental stimuli and let the mind do the rest of the work. This instructional plan can also record, monitor, and evaluate the observable behavioral responses that result. The nonobservable part is how the instructional plan, through some sort of instructional interaction (or intervention) can create new symbolic structures and operations within the mind (which are nonobservable).

    What's missing here? Context. Suchman questions whether this cognitivist paradigm provides an adequate conceptualization of human teaching and learning when these activities are fundamentally context-bound, situational activities, and not context-free, plan-based activities. Essentially, a plan says that what we think determine what we do. In reality, you mix what people know, with the context, to create what they do.

    A generic instructional plan cannot control the "life-world" of situated learning which is phenomenological (events may not be rational), contextual (situated), experiential (cannot be reduced to rules), and which involves interpretations that determine the meanings of actions (prior experiences and knowledge in the user's mind). This sounds very much like Horton's "representation + context + mind triggers this idea or action" concept of how people communicate.

    What's the problem? The lived experiences of two persons are not made up of identical experiences. Thus, shared knowledge structures are only shared externally, not internally. What's internal depends on how people represent typical actions and situations symbolically. Communication can only take place if people share the same symbol structures. However, we have no way to know whether two different people share identical cognitive representations of the same event.

    Like Horton, we now have to move from a prescriptive, plan-based, cognitive learning paradigm to a retrospective, situated learning paradigm. Here, plans involve imaginative projections of action or rational reconstruction of action, which is at the heart of reasoning about action and communication about action, with a weak link to intention.

    What are the implications for ID? Basically, the coherence of the learner's experience in a given situation is not tied directly to the instructional designer's intent, nor to the rule-based plan built into the instructional system. It IS tied to the sense that the learner constructs out of the actual situation - of which the instructional plan is just a part. Hence, the sense that THIS learner at THIS time in THIS situation will make out of a learning situation cannot be predicted, or even assumed to be understood, by an instructional designer who is not part of the actual situation. The best he/she can do is to create an instructional environment where the learner's processes of situational sense-making are enhanced.

    Suchman is in favor of face-to-face communication by each group of users - we don't see mediated communication mentioned here at all. Every course of action depends in essential ways upon its material and social circumstances. Face-to-face communication and collaborative action are essential for sense-making in any situation. And, our knowledge of the physical and social worlds is inter-subjectively constructed by us (like Crook).

    As for instructional plans, they should be used for communicating about situated actions with other human beings (socially constructed knowledge like Vygotsky) or reflecting on and reconceptualizing situational actions (restructuring knowledge like Brown). Plans are not controlling procedures; they should orient the learner toward the material and resources presented. Plans and representations are social and rational reconstructions of problematized situated actions - i.e., discourse, negotiation, and reflective actions are not rule-based. It's the group who make sense out of a situation, and share their experiences using a common language or symbol system. The significance of an event always exceeds the meaning of what actually gets said - this is the limitation of any language and symbol system. Thus, interpreting the significance of action is essentially a collaborative achievement.

    Jonassen, Grabinger, & Harris: ID Tactics
    Jonassen. D.H., Grabinger, R.S., & Harris, N.D.C. (1991). Analyzing and selecting instructional strategies and tactics. Performance Improvement Quarterly, 4(2), 77-97.

    After we do a front end process to design an instructional system, we arrive at a set of alternate strategies, modes, and media that have to be worked into the design process. This paper details a hierarchical process by which a designer transforms a set of strategies into instructional tactics. These tactics are the instructional activities whch are then pilot-tested and evaluated, revised, and summatively evaluated. They have a rather unique model of the ISD process with

    1. divergence (alternate methods for meeting the stated needs),
    2. transformation (transforms the most desirable instructional strategies into a limited set of alternatives),
    3. convergence (works these alternatives into a detailed design), and
    4. use.

    Formative and summative evaluation leads to further transformation and further convergence of the final system. This process of divergence, transformation, and convergence is the essence of their paper. First, some definitions:

    Here's their hierarchical structure.

    1. They have a very large table with 5 classes of strategies (i.e., contextualizing instruction, presenting and cueing lesson content, activating learner processing of instruction, assessing learning, and sequencing instructional events.)
    2. Within each of these classes, there are individual strategies (e.g. under contextualizing instruction you have gaining attention, relating goals to learners' needs, stating the outcomes of instruction, presenting advance organizers, etc.).
    3. Then, within each of these strategies, there are several tactics you can use to implement them (e.g., under presenting and cueing lesson content, you have a strategy called provide examples; under that you have six tactics: prototypical examples, matched example/nonexample pairs, divergent examples, close-in nonexamples, vary the number of examples, and model appropriate behavior).

    How does the designer use this table? First, he's got to analyze the instructional situation, make a series of decisions about learning outcome, instructional event, symbol system, and the purpose and scope of instruction.

    1. Under "scope" there's macro and micro level (units or lessons).
    2. Under "instructional event" there are instructional interventions that result in learning outcomes (these are Gagne's nine events).
    3. Under "learning outcomes" you need to state the anticipated outcome of the instruction (like objectives); the type of learning outcomes determine the information processing to attain them (like verbal recall, comprehension or application, analysis or synthesis: Bloom's Taxonomy, which is done by others in slightly different ways.)
    4. The "symbol system" can be digital (text, numbers) or iconic (pictures, diagrams, films, musical melodies).
    5. Under "presentation strategies" you have information on how to study, informing the learner about the requirements or objectives of the learning ask, information that helps the learner to organize and interrelate the information, etc.
    6. Under "assessment" you have tests of prerequisite skills, practice, post-test, and ranking.

    So the designer has to determine the instructional situation to determine the scope of instruction, instructional event, learning outcome, symbol system, and presentation or cognitive strategy that most appropriately supports the specified learning objectives. Then he follow the decision tree that the authors have devised in figure 2, which starts with scope (micro or macro), and goes through a set of fixed branches - just like an ordinary tree. The leaves are the possible tactics to implement the lesson. Having chosen the strategy, the tactics follow automatically; choosing the right strategy is the "art" of good decision making.

    Postmodernism
    Wilson, B.G. (in press). The Postmodern Paradigm. To appear in C.Dills and A. Romiszowski (Ed.), Instructional Design: The State of the ARt Vol. 3. Englewood Cliffs NJ: Ed Tech Publications.

    This Postmodern Paradigm paper appeared in IT6710; it has been ubiquitous since then. I used ideas from it in my PMN needs assessment.

    First, some definitions from ERIC digest (Hylinka & Yeaman) - then the paper. Postmodernism is a contemporary philosophic approach concerned with the multiple and contradictory ways of knowing in this historically postmodern time. Postmodernism is "post" to the modernity of the industrial age. The defining characteristics of modernity are a faith in science, a belief in the positive benefits of technology, and a belief that progress is inevitable and good.

    Postmodernism, then, is an incredulity towards metanarratives (any myth-like or social justifications, usually aimed at scientific or technological activities.) Its defining characteristics are pluralism (plurality of perspectives, meanings, methods, values), ironic double-coding (appreciate double meanings and alternative interpretations), critique of metanarratives (big stories meant to explain everything, including grand unified schemes of science), and recognition that if there are multiple ways of knowing then there must be multiple truths.

    It questions the positivist, scientific paradigm of linear progress. Are we realy better off with nationalism, totalitarianism, technocracy, consumerism, modern warfare, and all the gadgets in our lives? It says that all textual meanings are open to interpretation, that binary oppositions (good/bad) are not necessarily true. Postmodernists believe in pluralism, on criticism rather than evaluation, and a focus on rethinking and deconstructing our beliefs, tools, and technology. Truth is dynamic, bounded by time, space, and perspective, so don't look for a changeless ideal.

    Now Brent's paper. He starts with the "real" idealized view of the Greeks, the truth "out there". Then the modern world view, where man, rather than God, is the standard for judging the truth of things. But, with limited sensory perception, how can man transcend his limitations and get to the truth? Then the postmodern view: truth is relative, there is no one truth - just lots of little truths, or truth is what people agree upon (socially constructed consensus).

    Postmodernists like to deconstruct things. For instance, Brent deconstructs the Conditions Of Learning (CoL) paradigm, which posits that specific conditions enhance specific learning outcomes, and also that we can work up a skill hierarchy from simple to complex (task analysis). Conditions of learning says "here's some stuff that works, so do it this way" - it's prescriptive. Or, "we've shown that it works empirically; there's a principle behind it".

    A postmodernist would ask, "OK, how can you make sense out of a CoL model when you encounter a messy real learning situation - how does this model actually relate to a pratical situation??? Theory is rule-based, "technical rationality", but it overlooks context, cognition, and everyday decision-making - where and when and how to apply a given procedure. Clancey says that since their design team was removed from the context of medical practice, Guidon never achieved day to day use by medical practitioners, no matter how well designed it was! They failed to achieve praxis - the interaction between theory and practice.

    For example, ISD process separates the designer from the SME. But in practice, a math teacher who doesn't know math very well is going to be a lousy teacher. Following "technical rationality" schemes (see Jonassen & Grabinger) locks the designer into a set way of thinking, with a finite set of strategies, that blinds him to other possible ways of viewing learning outcomes or strategies. CoL neglects motivational variables, social cognition, and cultural variables (it says it doesn't account for these.) Maybe CoL results in decent learning, just like Simon's AI program can do decent art, but there will never be excellence or genius coming out of it!

    Next, how to reconcile postmodernism with constructivism and not confuse the two, since both are opposed to "technical rationality"?

    1. Start with technical rationality, individual perspective, and objectivism - "knowledge is an entity to pass on to someone who can then demonstrate their understanding of it" - reality is "out there".
    2. Postmodernism is an underlying philosophy that emphasizes contextual construction of meaning and the validity of multiple perspectives. Truth is grounded in everyday life and social relations; facts and values ae inseparable; science and all other human activities are value-laden.
    3. Constructivism also emphasizes multiple perspectives, collaboration, personally meaningful constructed knowledge, negotiation of meaning, the inseparatility of thinking and perception, and problem-solving as being central to cognition.

    Not all constructivists are postmodernists. You can still be a constructivist and have a traditional, modern view of science, method and technology. Some tips for ID practitioners to include postmodern views sensibly into their design are given:

    Next, Brent goes through all the ISD cycle from needs assessment to learning assessment and gives some tips and guidelines. For example, take a consensus and use what's accessible rather than trying to push a particular viewpoint across. Don't forget bilingual audiences. Use cases, stories, and patterns in addition to rules, principles and procedures (again, context, situation). Support learners in pursuing their own goals, not just pushing instructional goals on them. Allow for the "teaching moment", when the student is ready to learn a significant new insight. Remember, instruction is teacher-mediated, it's an interaction, and experience, not a product or presentation to be delivered to an audience. Mostly, test any ideas and theories against your own real-world practice and usability.

    Diane Ravitch: Technology & Curriculum
    Ravitch, D. (1987). Technology and the Curriculum. In M.A. White (Ed.), What Curriculum for the Information Age? Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

    Diane Ravitch is an essentialist historian who espouses high standards and a solid knowledge base: "A rich and balanced curriculum that includes a well-developed, sequential program in history, literature, science, mathematics, and the arts" (p. 27). She, like many experienced teachers who are being introduced to the new technology, seems a bit overawed by it, by its jargon, and the powerful forces which it has unleashed in society today. "If the arrival of the electronic classroom is just beyond the horizon--and history should caution us not to be too sure in our assumptions--the schools will enjoy certain benefits, but must also be aware of implicit dangers" (p. 28).

    She admits the success of computerized drill-and-practice and self-paced instruction, of word processing and of computer-based simulations. The prime areas for new technologies are science and mathematics, mainly through the use of visual demonstrations of abstract concepts and the ability of students to solve problems interactively. Music and arts also benefit by videocassettes of performances and CD-ROM images of museum collections. She is not as enthusiastic concerning literature and history--the humanistic subjects--but admits that video libraries of great plays and films are of value, as well as video encyclopedias of important recent or current events.

    On the down side, she feels that there is a danger that reliance on exciting visuals may distort the curriculum by focusing on the entertaining and provocative features of events rather than encouraging thoughtful analysis of their underlying economic or social forces. The "past" may reach back only as far as visual resources permit, thereby limiting the historical periods that could be studied through film or video. Moreover, the greater emphasis and appeal of the new technology may tend to devalue printed materials, thereby creating an elite class of "print literates". Children weaned on Sesame Street may never experience the joy of reading great novels, both classic and contemporary. (Note: my kid is an exception. Raised on Sesame Street, he reads Paradise Lost and the Peleponnesian Wars for recreation!) Good teachers must always be able to read great literature.

    The use of technology exacerbates the present economic differences between school districts. Plus, with the widespread use of computers comes the widespread use of standardized testing, multiple-choice tests, and the like. Student activities can degenerate into "filling in blanks and circling words, activities that prepare them for the next round of test-taking" (p. 33).

    Her main concern can be summed up in the following question: Will technology eliminate routine tasks and free the mind for higher understanding of why we live and what makes our lives worthwhile, or will the glamour and gimmickry of educational technology erode the humanistic side of the curriculum and eventually dehumanize education? And her main contention is that, for all its hype, technology will eventually prove irrelevant in our quest for humanistic education and understanding of the human condition.

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    Lorraine Sherry
    lsherry@carbon.cudenver.edu