As a lurker with, apparently, experience in very different literature, I find it difficult to treat the call for a "new paradigm" with any of the respect or seriousness of previous respondents. I respect the intelligence and literature they summon to this discussion, but I find the initial call and most of the discussion resulting from that call simply remarkable. It seems that no one has any experience in SCANS, Carnegie Reports, the National Commission on Teacher Education and America's Future, among recent writings, nor with Reich, Tapscott, Kelly, or Bruner, over the past ten years, nor with Foucault, Piaget, or Levi-Strauss, nor McLuhan, Dewey, or even Montessori. Long before these writers, the "paradigm" was teacher-centered and exclusively content based. Since all of them describe strategies and methods, models and conceptual frameworks in which information (as opposed to data) is generated through interaction with students, rather than as some third party object, it seems the markers have been in place for almost a century. It frightens me to find Dan Bell's observation in the early '70's still a surprise to contemporary scholars in the 1990's. In first, second, and even third worlds, information has been displacing industrial production for almost four decades. When Bell cited the End of Ideology and the Information Age two decades ago, this change was already history.
Presuming, therefore, that instructional design responds to real world problems of learners, and facilitates their access, integration, and application of new knowledge, the paradigm for their learning has already been framed and realized in many different settings for many years. Instructional design will vary somewhat with the resources available to support instruction and from culture to culture, as different groups perceive those resources. It may therefore be a worthy pursuit to discover and describe how that paradigm actually works, but it is at best naive to presume to invent one. It is also too late.
I am most impressed at the responses from Billie Hughes and Jason Ravitz: both seem to be pursuing actual model development rather than the swampy rhetoric of paradigmatic nuance. (The last, and in my experience the only, insights regarding paradigms are still those in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and none of the lists which pop up in any of these notes come near describing a real paradigm. A paradigm has got lots more than a bunch of ideas which define the world view associated with the concepts associated in such mega-structures. The language of this thread lacks the clarity of structural analogs: a model is often a component of a conceptual scheme which, itself, contributes to, but is a non-exclusive component of, a paradigm.)
Hughes [5 Dec 96] seems intrigued at the isomorphic quality of learner centered designs and learner-supportive communities. This is something to digest. Too many "learning community" advocates see a need to sacrifice community decision-making in their rush to establish communities which precisely reflect their arrogant and insolent misunderstanding of the decision making processes which are the very definition of community. If we are to renew Horace Mann's Common School, we must attend to the learning activities which are common to community members. And learning communities are little different from Horace Mann's vision.
I disagree with Hughes regarding Reigeluth's dismissal of past instructional theory as too secular: limited to cognitive, collaborative, metacognitive, character, etc., kinds of learning. It depends on how far back you want to go. Instructional theory were pretty holistic--and pretty technological--for Montessori and Dewey. And their goals were remarkably collaborative, community-based, and cross-generational. Along with other early progressives, their focus on life-long learning was, if anything, anti-industrial and vaguely agrarian or, in Montessori's case, theosophan. The view common to the progressives nearly a century ago was toward creating communities of learners engaged in learning how to learn, primarily in social settings where students interact across age and across discipline. The advent of technology can enhance that same conceptualization without substantially changing the models developed a century ago. They were surely not industrial, incidentally.
As Hughes says, "there is also a shift away from thinking of learning as being the transferal of an idea FROM one person or object to another TO a social exchange that results in mutual learning." The social definition of knowledge, ala Foucault and the Structuralists, is a workable foundation for instruction. I, personally, would go further and base my model on Merleau-Ponty (The Phenomenology of Perception), but, before dropping out, I was seduced (ala McLuhan), by the modern philosophies. Setting aside my personal prejudice for a very formal theory of knowledge, any reasonable psychology of education accommodates the individualization of the learner's perception. Just as Hughes "can't quite separate the initiative from the customization," in almost every discipline affecting change in human behavior (from marketing to communications theory) customization and the idiosyncrasies of the individual are critical to transforming any data into any kind of action by any individual. One-size-fits-all only in the broadest and least targeted of marketing methodologies (usually mass media), and was very, very, very old hat in curriculum design as long ago as the Hawthorne models.
One of the more egregious neologisms of the Reigeluth "paradigm" is its presumption that a new paradigm is mutually exclusive to a previous paradigm: that the old is actually opposed to the new. On its face this two-valued logic (with due respect to Korzybski and the Non-Aristotelians like Postman and Hayakawa) is, simply, wrong. The new relies on the old to identify what is new. In any conceptual model (after Marx), new evolves from old and always owes most of its characteristics to the past in order to distinguish some characteristics as distinctive. Hughes observes that learning strategies are usually non-exclusive, and I would argue that they are usually cumulative: we learn how to learn by learning and, in this wholly solipsistic way, we are bound by our senses in a perpetual struggle to extend our perception beyond our immediate experience. The more we know, the more we know we how little we know.
Hughes also questions Reigeluth's assumption that "sound" instruction strategies are subject to expert decisions. Ironically, I find myself questioning both Hughes and Reigeluth assumptions: Designed learning activities presume an expert somewhere in the system--a teacher, a designer, a writer, a creative director--who is not identical to the learner. Curriculum and instructional design are always processes whereby learners are seduced into thinking what they have not thought before, and, with a good designer, that new thought has been anticipated by the designer, teacher, or whoever is running the show. A real learner centered system is as fictional as an exclusively teacher dominated classroom: anomie in a space. As soon as there is a teacher there is someone setting some standard to measure the "soundness" of alternative approaches. I would hope we could hold those approaches to standards of humanity while we measure also their effectiveness in terms of real gains by real learners.
Hughes wryly observes that networks of learners might provide a more "enfranchised" model than omniscient instructional designers engaged in "constant dialogue" with patient learners. She's right, except that most of the network access is, at least in schools, designed by those designers: part of the problem is to break the close-ended design sequences, which are the heritage of programmed instruction and mainframe mentality, and move to a more distributed model of curriculum. If there is a paradigm from which escape is most desirable, it is from ourselves--which, of course, is why we are in education (smile). It is also impossible.
Reigeluth suggests that instructional designers acknowledge teachers as their clients. Hughes suggests that partner may be a better frame for teacher and designer. Yet instructional designers have a number of different clients, the most significant of whom pays them. If they are in a commercial environment, they'd better respect school committees or state boards at least as much as teachers. If they are teachers (the most common instructional designers, by the way), they ought to respect children as their first clients, and parents and the community (who'll get 'em if they don't) as those who pay the bills. Ultimately we all ought to be accountable to improve student performance, and that means that our ultimate client is the next generation. Less than that ultimate, the other clients are all stakeholders of varying significance, all of which must have our attention.
Regarding Ravitz [7 Dec 96], I would advise a quick reading of McLuhan and Foucault. Your AECT paper describes parts of a model, but lacks a mission statement. Without a mission (or philosophy, or goal, or purpose, or motivation), a model is just a list of components and some hypothetic networking suggesting how data may move from one component to another. With a mission or purpose, there will be direction among the components and the system can be seen as a model of some real life activity.
I would infer from your paper that you do, in fact, have a philosophy and, either because of academic anemia or personal hesitation, you have yet to reveal it. The philosophy can be as simple as learners incorporating information for their own survival, or as elaborate as William James or Marshall McLuhan. But, unless learners actually have some motivation to do something, your model lacks direction, purpose, and, ultimately, meaning. Implied in your scheme is a learner-centered motivation, which, I would infer, would be enough to support the evaluation of the program based on change in learner knowledge (e.g., by test or portfolio). But, without the motive, there's no act and without the act there is no model.
Both Hughes and Ravitz seem much too kind to the profession of instructional design. In concluding his call for a new paradigm, Reigeluth put it precisely...
[quoting Reigeluth's paper] Why do we continue to make complete instructional products for a clientele that doesn't want them nor will use them the way we, as instructional designers, intend for them to be used? Have we been out of touch with the real needs of our clients? We propose that in fact we, as a field, have not fully recognized the need to support trainers, and particularly teachers, in designing their own instruction. And this should expand to include learners. Thus, our responsibility as a field is to conceive of and develop a whole new type of instructional design theory--one which assists trainers, teachers, and learners in meeting their own instructional needs.
Rather than re-conceive a theory of knowledge, it is infinitely easier and more valid to re-position the skills involved in instructional design in the broader context of education. Rather than a script for an automated teacher, instructional design is more analogous to a librarian or multimedia bibliographer, who enhances the instructional moments designed by teachers, students, parents, and others. There is surely a need for expertise in learning theory, but there is no need for a new theory itself. There is surely need for expert systems which support user choice and enhance user effectiveness, but there is no need to re-conceive of the whole educational system. Use what works in building what might work better. Look at it, tinker with it, and improve it.
Finally, I would advise any reader of this long posting to look at Turkle, S. (1994). Paradoxical reactions and powerful ideas: Educational computing in a department of physics. In E. Barrett (Ed.), Sociomedia: Multimedia, hypermedia, and the social construction of knowledge (pp. 547-578). Cambridge, MA: MIT.
Her analysis of the Athena Project at MIT puts to rest most of this rhetoric about paradigms, models, and instructional design. She conceived of "a bricoleur"--a tinkerer--who tested technology to see if it could solve real world problems before designing a model. That's paradigm enough for me.