I enjoyed Rod Sims' upbeat report of ED-MEDIA '95 and the Australian conferences. A recent theoretical paper by Edith Ackermann (1994) of the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.) begins on a similarly optimistic note:
"It is now a well accepted idea that direct experience or 'hands-on' activities are essential to learning. An increasing number of software designers, cognitive scientists and educators have come to the view that experience is actively constructed and reconstructed through direct interaction with the world, and that, indeed, knowledge is experience. According to this view, a learner is not an empty vessel to be filled, or a passive listener to be filled-in. Knowledge is not a mere commodity to be transmitted from one person to another. It is not an entity to be emitted at one end, encoded, stored, retrieved, and reapplied at the other. The conduit metaphor is progressively fading away, and is being replaced by the more recent tool-maker paradigm.... Children are perceived as the active builders of their own cognitive tools, comprising both mental capacities and external mediations that prolong those mental capacities. Constructivism is in the air..." (pp. 13-14)
It's great to be a student, educator, and/or instructional designer in a time of such optimism. However, later in her paper, Ackermann issues a caution that "'Hands-on' won't do without 'heads-in'" (p. 15). This is an important point, one which relates to Linda Thede's [13 Jul 95] reminder that using technology as a tool in education is "HARD." David Jonassen (in press) emphasizes that multimedia and other interactive cognitive tools often require learners to think harder about the subject matter domain being studied or the task being undertaken while generating thoughts that would be impossible without the tools. By contrast, most of the commercial multimedia CD-ROM's and integrated learning systems on the market today make unsubstantiated and misleading promises to make teaching and learning "fun and easy."
The enormous challenge of integrating constructivist pedagogy and interactive learning environments should be more widely acknowledged. Educational researchers in particular need to think about this challenge very deeply. As reported by Rod, the ED-MEDIA '95 program included the usual number of media comparison studies indicating no statistically significant differences between treatments (or reporting statistically significant differences on insignificant measures). What will it take to get researchers in our field to adopt methodologies appropriate to the complex social science and art of education? What will it take to get researchers to focus their investigations on higher-order outcomes such as the construction of mental models or the development of problem-solving skills instead of relying upon simplistic knowledge tests or "smilometer" attitude scales? As difficult and complex as it is to design and implement constructivist learning environments, I believe it is even more difficult to conduct relevant research on the effects of these environments.
(By the way, the Lessons from Learning volume in which Edith Ackermann's paper appears includes several other interesting papers including one by Betty Collis on "Collaborative Learning and Computer-Supported Cooperative Work.")
Ackermann, E. (1994). Direct and mediated experience: Their role in learning. In R. Lewis & P. Mendelsohn (Eds.), Lessons from learning. Amsterdam: North-Holland.
Jonassen, D. H. (in press). Mindtools for schools. New York: Macmillan.