Clark [Quinn 2 May 96] questions whether the conversational model is about the student acquiring the teacher's conception--"one truth." Yes it is exactly that, but not quite in the way he phrases it. The student is acquiring the "truth" that "what we are describing here is the latest and the best and there are these legitimate ways of critiquing it and progressing this field of knowledge." There is indeed a truth in there somewhere, but of a relativistic kind--towards the latter end of Perry's scale of Intellectual and Ethical Development (Perry, 1970). Further up his scale is "personal involvement and commitment to a conception," which the student should be capable of developing through an academic education, but which is not examined, or taught as such, but is certainly modeled, by the best academic environments. This is as far as we get, I think, in "removing the scaffolding" in HE. We do have to explicitly teach the skill of "relating activity to description"--this is what I see as fundamental to an academic education.
The same point is made by Tom [Reeves, 1 May 96], in differentiating academic tasks from authentic tasks. He argues that the lecturer's role is to identify the authentic tasks which serve as a focus for higher-order learning, and support the student in making the link between these tasks and the theoretical description of them. I would also add: and providing feedback at both levels--when they carry out the practice of forest ecology, and then when they describe that practice in theoretical, generalizable terms.
And I don't accept the "equal partners" view of the teaching-learning process precisely because the academy does not accept that the learner may hold some strange view of their own--at least not until they have graduated, i.e., shown they can articulate the received view. Isn't that the reality of how education works? And should work? And I am, after all, assuming that the received view is something quite complex.
The importance of all this for our use of technology is that the idea of "resource-based learning," where the learner can use "information resources" in "learner-oriented" mode, browsing and selecting, is driven entirely by the needs of the commercial/technical industries, for whom this idea is a god-send. But it is pedagogically unsound because the novice needs guidance, support, scaffolding, feedback, goal-setting, dialogue--all those inconveniently labor-intensive modes of work, many of which cannot be served by the technology. The technology has to be used in other much more imaginative ways to serve the pedagogy.
One final point to make to Richard [Swerdlin, 2 May 96]--I would argue that IT in Ed is more like aspirin than snake-oil. It's not mere hocus-pocus, but neither is it necessarily always the right answer. It requires a clear-headed understanding of the patients and their needs to be used properly.