I really like Billie Hughes' comments, as much for the tone of exploring ideas in a positive, constructive, integrative way, as for the substance of those ideas. Billie, you have provided an excellent example of thoughtful conversation that has inspired me to try to do a better job of emulating, and to encourage others to do the same. I am very happy you overcame your reluctance to post a message, "given how quickly people are to confront rather than explore ideas." I hope contributors to this list will refrain from kinds of comments that inhibit others from participating.
I have put headings in the rest of this message to help you skip to topics of interest. They are:
I think Billie's [referring to Hughes, 5 Dec 96] comment of not seeing either the teacher or learner as "king" is right on target. I like the notion of "teacher directed versus mutually beneficial learning exchanges." Similarly, I like Clark's [Quinn, 6 Dec 96] "didactic versus dialectic process" distinction better than the "teacher as 'king' versus learner (customer) as 'king'." I too dislike the use of "customer" in education and feel it doesn't transfer well (e.g., the learner is more a worker than a buyer). But the basic notion of "the customer is king" in the economic sector conveys a kind of empowerment and respect that I believe is sorely needed in education. And I like your distinction between focus on recitation and focus on transfer, though I would add /understanding to transfer. Your idea of "focus on encouraging 'self-learning'" is the educational version of initiative and responsibility as a general key marker of the information age.
Billie mentioned, "I might use competitive in place of adversarial though in many ways adversarial may be more accurate." I purposely avoided the traditional distinction between cooperation and competition because I don't think it holds up. The vast majority of cases of competition, from sports to business and many areas in between, entail competition among teams, where cooperation is paramount. I don't think the information age will be marked by a lack of competition. Indications are that in the economic sector, it is intensifying. Look at what's been happening throughout the communist world over the past five years or so! Competition is not inherently bad, in fact it can be a very positive force as long as appropriate "rules of the game" are established and enforced. This means we need to be careful about what deregulating we do. It is adversarial relationships, that were so prevalent in the industrial age, that have had very negative effects, and they fortunately seem to be giving way to cooperative relationships. So I think Billie's comment about adversarial being more accurate is very true.
Billie also raised the issue of interrelationships among the key markers. At first glance, the key markers may seem compartmentalized. I like to think in terms of the nature of the industrial age and information age as being very complex, where you can't accurately characterize each with a single word or concept. We really need many concepts to capture the multifaceted nature of each. But most of those concepts do have strong interrelationships. How can we capture that? I would love your ideas!
[quoting Hart, 6 Dec 96] When you compare the respect which teachers enjoy in Asian societies to the harassment they experience in American and (sad to say) Australian schools it is not surprising why the ideals which Charles puts forward are not being universally embraced.
I would like to clarify that what I put forward are not "ideals." They are key markers--features that appear to broadly characterize the predominant modes of behavior and thinking of the era. And, they are not specifically characterizations of education--they apply more broadly to a range of societal systems. Secondly, those key markers are not being universally embraced in U.S. schools--far from it. But more important, I don't understand why respect for teachers in Asian societies would cause those societies to shun learner-focused education, shared decision-making, or any of the other key markers as they apply to education.
I think this is drawing a long bow, not to mention a North American designed one. The mass production methods developed by Henry Ford and others have not yet reached many parts of the world, which have been dragged in recent times from cottage culture directly into the information age.
As Toffler communicates so eloquently in The Third Wave, the waves of societal change (e.g., the agricultural, industrial, and information revolutions) reach different places in the world at different times, and some places can certainly enter directly into the information age without going through anything like the industrial revolution that other places went through. When I talk about industrial-age key markers giving way to information-age key markers (such as standardization giving way to customization), I am (I thought obviously) only talking about those places in the world that have been submerged in the industrial wave. I wonder if Ian REALLY thinks those key markers only apply to North America.
[quoting Quinn, 6 Dec 96] I'm not sure that we can expect teachers to provide instruction on character education, values, and attitudes. Teachers can (and should) embody the shared society values, but shouldn't the instruction come from parents and spiritual leaders?
I personally believe the instruction should come from parents and spiritual leaders, but also from virtually all sectors of society, including the movies, television, literature, the workplace, and, yes, schools. The problem is that in many North American families (and increasingly families in some other parts of the world) there is no character education, and whatever emotional learning is occurring is negative rather than positive, with disastrous effects on the individual and the community. And, many children (especially those from the families I just mentioned) don't have any spiritual leaders in their lives. And, the movies and television tend to have a more negative than positive effect on character (in North America at least--as I'm sure Ian would resoundingly testify).
But let me also clarify that I'm not talking about teaching values in any kind of doctrinaire way. Nor am I talking about "values clarification" in a relativistic sense. I am talking about fostering the kind of emotional and social development that Goleman talks about in his book (Emotional Intelligence), which has probably influenced me more than any other book I've read in the past ten years. If you read it, you will probably be more inclined to ask, "Can we (in North America) afford for teachers not to address the emotional, social, and character development needs of children? Now, I believe that any such programs should be developed and implemented in close partnership with the student's parents (and spiritual leaders), but I believe parents should be actively involved in all aspects of their children's education. This is why I am including instructional theories for this kind of learning and human development in the Green Book II (Instructional Design Theories and Models, volume 2).
[quoting Hughes, 5 Dec 96] I would see instructional theory shifting from focus on the individual to a focus on the affordances of a community designed to support learning.
I strongly believe this is one of the key features of the new paradigm of instructional theory. But this is not to say that individual learning should disappear. I think some learners may prefer it at times. Please note that I use the terms "personalized" and "customized" instead of "individualized," for the important reason that instruction can be personalized without the learner having to learn alone.
However, I think we need to be careful not to go to extremes with socially negotiated learning and socially determined goals or values about learning. I'm glad to see that Billie included the qualifier "at least partially" in talking about this. Learning alone is common and valuable, from Einstein's thought experiments, to Newton's experiences with an apple, to a yogi's insights during transcendental meditation, to a child curling up with a good book or shooting hoops alone. Sometimes "the transferal of an idea from one person or object to another" is a good way to go.
I am interested in how we create communities of learners that (1) engage students in "participation frameworks" (brainstorming for example) that provide them with tools they need to delve into problems, (2) how we help learners select goals and persist until attaining a high standard, and (3) how we create value for learning the skills and attitudes learners need to participate in our society. I have not grappled with whether or not these skills and attitudes are locally, nationally, or globally determined. I am not yet at that state.
Billie, if you develop some guidance on these issues, I would love to have a chapter from you for the next volume of the Green Book. And I think your focus on "tools for setting goals, exploring those goals, engaging in meaningful conversation about concepts, and a variety of tools for representing individual and group understanding of ideas" is a very productive direction to explore. I do like your twist!
I agree with Clark Quinn that motivation and reflection ought to be universals in education, and therefore would be "basic methods," as I have defined them. But ,how each is done probably needs to vary a lot from one situation to another. So, the specifics are variable methods. This points out how relative the "basic/variable methods" distinction is, as Billie pointed out by saying "I don t think the categories are mutually exclusive. Of course, you did not say they were." But I'm not sure yet how useful that distinction will be.
Perhaps something that Clark and I disagree on is reflected by his statement:
[quoting Quinn, 6 Dec 96] I think that we can dispense arguing about "when and how" if we instead
- make engaging tasks that motivate the problem-solving,
- structure the tasks so that the important concepts are required, and
- facilitate the discussion to help discovery of relevant materials and method.
In addition to empowering learners, it seems to me that a major purpose of education should be to make learning easier, as well as more enjoyable. This makes the "how" important. Demonstrations and opportunities for divergent practice with feedback are very helpful to learn skills. Simulations can be very powerful for helping learners to build causal (mental) models. Discussion serves a valuable role, but it is not enough. (I'm sure Clark didn't mean to imply that it is.) I just want to emphasize that I believe the "how" is still very important. I think one of the most important areas for instructional theory to advance is guidance for decisions about how much support to provide for learners. Where should you be on the continuum from highly structured learning environments (which doesn't mean they aren't constructivistic--just look at Montessori methods) to environments with virtually no structure or support? And, for situations in which some structure is desirable, what kinds of structure would be best (which of course will vary tremendously from one situation to another)?
[quoting Hughes, 5 Dec 96] If one is learning to learn, and that is the intended outcome, do they have to choose what an expert would dub a "sound" approach?
Like most decisions in instruction (indeed, in life), there are tradeoffs that have to be weighed. As educators, I believe we should indeed usually help the learner to learn how to learn. In some cases that might require letting the learner experience an unsound method, in spite of the obvious costs involved. In other cases, we might only need to discuss the alternatives to achieve the goal. And, in some very specific training contexts, learning how to learn may not be a goal at all. Instructional theory needs to help educators decide when unsound approaches should not be an option.
Several of you raised the issue of technology (e.g., intelligent tutoring systems) not being advanced enough to work well for what I have in mind, and shouldn't we rely more on humans. While I think there is merit to those concerns for THIS point in time, we should keep in mind that things will change. It has been said, "If we want things to stay the same, something's going to have to change." We can count on technology advancing (both soft and hard), making it more powerful and less expensive. We can also count on humans becoming more expensive. This is why the cost of education has increased far more rapidly than the rate of inflation over the past 40 years. I noticed that Billie carefully talked about people "with time on their hands." I think we can, should, and will involve retirees more actively in education, but everyone else seems to have less and less time on their hands. Technology can help make learning more affordable and more accessible. Technology cannot now do everything that kids need in education. It probably never will be able to. But it can already do a lot that people now do. And it will surely be able to do even more. But advances in instructional theory will be essential for that to happen.
Finally, several of you have talked about construction of a learning environment rather than instruction. Based on what I assume your definition of the term "instruction" to be, I agree. The dictionary offers a variety of definitions, ranging from "education" on the broad level to "furnishing with knowledge" on the narrow level. I use the term instruction in the broader sense to refer to anything done to facilitate learning AND human development. So to me, the construction of learning environments is one form of instruction. And, in fact I think it is the broadening of the definition of instruction that constitutes the major part of the new paradigm of instructional theory. Regardless of what term you use to characterize the more learner-centered orientation, we certainly need guidance for how to do it: how to help people learn and develop. That's what the new paradigm is all about.