I can lurk no longer. As a doctoral student of instructional technology, it would be irresponsible for me to dismiss the Reclamation Statement as conventional wisdom.
I agree completely with Michael Spector's [20 Feb 96] comments that the tone of David Merrill's statement is more troublesome than the content. It seems to me to be a strict and exclusive statement.
In any case, I do find it odd that David Merrill would use a phrasing such as:
[quoting ID2 paper] ...learners are persons who construct their own meaning from their experiences...
which uses a vernacular straight out of a postmodernist framework, and yet he asserts so adamantly that truth is empirical. I can appreciate the dangers of relativistic thinking. Having been trained as a cultural anthropologist, I know that relativism is a two-edged sword. Yet I am also aware of the infinite variations of the human subject and if we are to accept that learners (and students) construct their own meaning, then it might be helpful to recognize that meaning is negotiated. Sometimes intersubjectively, sometimes in collaboration.
But my major concern regarding the Reclamation Statement isn't whether one claims to be an empiricist or a constructivist (or whatever) and advocate the attendant cannons. My question is how does this Reclamation Statement contend with the social aspects of learning and how does instructional design account for the social? The Reclamation Statement is not clear on this. As instructional designers, we are dealing with human relationships and we do live in a social world--how can one discount that context? Learning may take place within (or upon) the individual, but the individual goes out and uses new knowledge in a social context.
While instruction takes place in a larger organizational context, the discipline of instructional design is concerned only with the development of learning experiences and environments, not with the broader concerns of systemic change, organizational behavior, performance support, and other human resource problems.
The accumulation of many people learning will result in broader change, human resource problems do effect learning conditions, successful (or rather, effective) instructional design is a function of performance support and organizational behavior. For example, instructional may not be effective within an institution if institutional behavior and roles are not understood. And if an instructional designer is not talking to the right folks, he or she will end up with some very useless data. Instructional design may not be revolutionary, but it is certainly evolutionary.
And groups do learn. It's called Culture.
As Charles Padgett [21 Feb 96.b] suggests, why not recognize the ambiguities and the unknowns as opportunities for the advancement of instructional design efforts and actually build upon the knowledge that students/learners have gained previous to our contact with them?
I would be interested in knowing whether anyone else considers the instructional design effort to be one which takes place within a social context, and what that suggests about how we can best implement instructional design principles and assumptions. Are we trying to maximize individual behavior via prescriptive strategies or individual knowledge via strategies which are relevant and meaningful for the learner/student? Or put another way (if I may extend the metaphor offered by David Merrill), are we simply concerned with making something fly? Generally speaking, a bird, a glider, and a Harrier jet are able to fly on the basis of a few common laws of aerodynamics. Otherwise, they are very different.