Yesterday, Mike Spector accused me of writing "a polarizing polemic that serves no scientific purpose" in my first reaction to Rod Sims' "interactivity" paper. I enjoyed the stab at alliteration, but I had to wonder if perhaps Mike had slipped on a fjord and bumped his head up there in Norway, or as one lurker suggested to me off-line, had his brains addled by the midnight sun. In any case, Dr. Spector is normally such a gentleman that I must take his comments seriously.
Mike seemed particularly disturbed by what he labeled inflammatory language like "Holy Grail." I did not intend to flame anyone, but I was reacting to the position that Rod, Mike, and others (including myself in the past) seem to espouse, viz., the "human tutoring situation" is the ultimate goal to which our field should aspire in the creation of "automated learning environments." For a host of theoretical, cybernetic, and most of all, philosophical reasons, I no longer aspire to that goal. Instead, I have been converted to a position that in many (not all) contexts, learners themselves can better function as designers or co-designers of their own learning environments, using technologies as tools for analyzing the world, accessing information, solving problems, interpreting and organizing their personal knowledge, and representing what they know to others. The research foundation for this conversion is summarized in a chapter I recently wrote with Dave Jonassen (Jonassen & Reeves, in press).
As with any convert, I may sometimes be overly enthusiastic about my newfound faith, but I certainly don't advocate crucifying the unconverted--not yet anyway. ;-) For a much more articulate attempt to bridge the gap between the ISD and the Learning Environment communities, I recommend reading Instructional Design and Development of Learning Communities: An Invitation to a Dialogue (Lin, Bransford, Hmelo, Kantor, Hickey, Secules, Petrosino, Goldman, and The Cognition and Technology Group at Vanderbilt, 1996).
Ironically, I cut my interactive teeth in the early 80's building computer-based tutors and simulations for the U.S. Army. For example, I directed a large-scale project aimed at training soldiers to operate a target Reference Screen Generation Facility (RSGF) for the Pershing II missile. The challenge of that project was that there was only one of these RSGF systems in the USA available for training--all the others were in Europe on the "front lines" of the Cold War. These targeting systems were located in small mobile shelters into which no more than two or three people could fit, so hands-on tutoring with a qualified instructor and trainees was physically impossible. Hence, we build an instructional simulation (using an interactive videodisc touch-screen system) which allowed trainees to move about the shelter to practice and learn all the complex sequences of steps involved in generating targets.
In terms of Rod's interactivity classification, we included:
It would have been very useful to have a paper like Rod's available to our development team when we were creating the RSGF simulation replete with examples of the different types of interactivity. As it was, we "imagineered" these different interactions and refined them through rigorous formative evaluation. An external effectiveness evaluation later revealed that the soldiers who used the simulation reported that when they first entered the actual shelters in Europe, "they felt like they had been there before." (Thank god, there was never a true impact evaluation.)
Needless to say, I would not now advocate that we should have set up a constructivist learning environment for the missile trainees in which they would have "discovered" the procedures for establishing their targets. The trainees might have constructed a mental model of their role akin to that of the mad General Jack D. Ripper in Stanley Kubrick's classic film, Dr. Strangelove. No, an instructivist approach was absolutely necessary. At the same time, when I consider the enormous needs in education and training today, especially the demand for lifelong learning and knowledge workers, I see a great deal of merit in contrasting instructivist and constructivist views of the world. Further, considering the small payoffs resulting from the millions of dollars that have been and are being spent on efforts to automate ISD or build intelligent tutoring systems, I don't think any of us can afford to be neutral.
In the end, what Mike saw as a "polarizing polemic" has served a purpose. I have found Rod's reactions and the comments of Martyn Wild and others to be quite worthwhile, and I would dare say this discussion has advanced my (our?) understanding of Rod's "interactivity" scheme. I hope that the comments above are read as another contribution to that dialogue rather than as anything negative. As I wrote in my original note, I regard Rod's paper as "an important piece of scholarship." I also view ITForum as a form of scholarship, one to which I hope I can contribute in a positive spirit.
Jonassen, D.H., & Reeves, T.C. (in press). Learning with Technology: Using Computers as cognitive tools. In D.H. Jonassen, (Ed.), Handbook of research on educational communications and technology. New York: Macmillan.
Lin, X., Bransford, J.D., Hmelo, C.E., Kantor, R.J., Hickey, D.T., Secules, T., Petrosino, A.J., Goldman, S.R., and The Cognition and Technology Group at Vanderbilt. (1996). Instructional design and development of learning communities: An invitation to a dialogue. In B. Wilson, (Ed.). Constructivist learning environments (pp. 203-220). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Educational Technology.