Kudos to Rod Sims for his thought-provoking effort to stimulate discussion concerning "interactivity" within multimedia and other forms of computer-based instruction. As they say in your part of the world, Rod, "Good on ya, mate."
Interestingly, the term "interactivity" does not appear in my dictionary (The American Heritage College Dictionary, 3rd Edition, 1993, Boston: Houghton Mifflin). Is this dictionary out-of-date? Perhaps not. After all, the third definition given for the term "interactive" in my dictionary is "Of, related to, or being a form of television entertainment in which the viewer participates directly."
Nor is the word "interactivity" included in the spell-checking dictionary for Microsoft Word 6.0.1 (Mac version). The suggested alternative spelling is "interactively." Why is this word not included in such common resources? Does anyone other than people in our field use this term? Who coined this word? And, why does it evoke such controversy within our field?
Ultimately, any discussion of interactivity in and of itself, without placing it in context or referencing it to specific goals is of limited value--akin to a discussion of modes of transportation without considering where and why a person wants to travel. While it may be of academic interest to discuss planes, trains, buses, or cars as alternative modes of travel in the abstract, such a discussion really becomes useful when I want to get from Atlanta to Chicago (or Sydney to Perth), and I know how much time I have, how much money I can afford to spend, my personal preferences and capabilities, etc.
Rod has described an interesting hierarchy of interactivity, but I find that this hierarchy makes most sense in the context of approaches to teaching and learning where the primary goal is to "instruct" the learner. Long-time ITForum members will recall that in the very first ITForum paper called Learners as Designers, Dave Jonassen clarified the distinction between "instructivist" and "constructivist" approaches to teaching and learning. Instructivists emphasize the transmission of standardized interpretations of the world by teachers and the educational communications they employ as well as standardized assessments to test the degree to which students' understandings match accepted interpretations. The tutoring approach that Rod and Spector (1995) among others hold up as the "Holy Grail" of our field is clearly within the "instructivist" camp.
By contrast, constructivists are more interested in creating learning environments wherein learners use cognitive tools (not necessarily limited to computer-based cognitive tools) to help themselves construct their own knowledge representations or solve problems that are personally relevant. Cognitive tools and the goals, tasks, culture, resources, and human collaboration integral to their use enable learners to engage in active, mindful, and purposeful interpretation and reflection (Jonassen, 1996). Whereas in traditional instructivist approaches, "active" refers to stimulus, response, feedback, and reinforcement conditions that help students mirror accepted views of reality, in constructivist learning environments, "active" learners participate and interact with the surrounding environment to create their own interpretations of reality.
Rod repeatedly makes the point that the design and development of interactions that require the computer to respond to the learner in a natural, human-like manner demands more effort on the part of instructional designers. I agree. I also wonder if we aren't kidding ourselves about our ability to mimic the "mutual-elaboration" level Rod and other instructivists seek. Even advocates of intelligent tutoring systems (ITS) who perhaps most strongly represent the computer as "tutor" perspective have begun to acknowledge the lack of impact they have had on mainstream education and training (cf. Lajoie & Derry, 1993). At least part of their failure stems from the overly restrictive perspective of students as perceivers or recipients of educational communications that characterizes the instructivist perspective. The essence of this perspective is captured by Rod when he writes that "interactivity can be viewed as a function of input required by the learner while responding to the computer, the analysis of those responses by the computer, and the nature of the action by the computer." In my opinion, this definition of interactivity greatly underestimates the technical difficulties inherent in building student models and facilitating human-like communications with computers.
We all find it relatively easy to attack the linear and hierarchical interactivity that is pervasive in contemporary interactive multimedia. But let's not forget that reaching the levels of interactivity inherent in some of Rod's "higher" levels is not simply a matter of better instructional design or more creativity--there are enormous theoretical and cybernetic gaps yet to be bridged.
Meanwhile, I believe there is much to be gained if multimedia that is inherently less "interactive" is utilized within constructivist learning environments. There are hopeful signs of change within our community, as evidenced in a recent paper by Ackermann (1994) in which she wrote:
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)
In the final analysis, deeper, richer levels of learning and human development may be better attained via fundamental changes in our pedagogical philosophy rather than by the tinkering of instructional designers with levels of "interactivity."
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. (1996). Mindtools for schools. New York: Macmillan.
Lajoie, S.P., & Derry, S.J. (Eds.). (1993). Computers as cognitive tools. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Spector, M.J. (1995). Integrating and humanizing the process of automating instructional design. In R. D. Tennyson & A. E. Barron (Eds.), Automating instructional design: Computer-based development and delivery tools. Berlin: Springer-Verlag.