[quoting McCoy, 2 Mar 97] This does not reflect "cluelessness" on the part of educators (actually education bureaucrats in this instance). It reflects a rational distrust of an underdeveloped field. There have been several references in this conversation to novice versus expert ID developers. There have also been quite a number of references to "maturity" of the field. My experience in my former life as an education bureaucrat has convinced me that the field of instruction technology is far from mature.
Let's be sure we're condemning the same thing, Jan. I would agree that the education/training software market is immature, and one of the indicators is that we keep seeing vendors making impossible claims for their software, and another indicator is that we keep seeing purchasers making purchase decisions on TBT software based on factors which I believe the ID field would recognize as irrelevant to instructional effectiveness. I think there are three causes:
(1) Many consumers don't know how to ask for (or identify) instructionally effective TBT.
(2) ID, as a field, has influenced only a small percentage of what's on the market.
(3) ID, as a field, has not given consumers of its services an easy way to identify TBT which is (or will be, in the case of contract development) done according to accepted high standards of professional practice. I have addressed in a previous posting a number of possible ways in which this could be done.
So, I would agree that the TBT market is immature. And, I would agree that ID, as a field of professional practice, also is immature, but for a different set of reasons.
Additionally, I note that the good examples are skills development. Is it possible that is the area where instructional technology has some promise and that we cannot expect it to apply well to other areas such as analysis of historical developments or literary works? Perhaps Carmen teaches us trivial facts because that is all that a computer can accomplish relative to history.
In a previous posting I argued that the education and training community--far beyond the boundaries of ID--has focused almost exclusively on intellectual (cognitive) learning, thereby literally dehumanizing their curricula. This isn't an ID problem, it's a problem with education/training in general, and even more generally with the tradition of European scholarship since the Enlightenment (though the roots of the tradition go back to the ancient Greeks).
More specifically dealing with the social studies, I would argue that the software example I gave is simultaneously bad ID and bad Social Studies.
Perhaps we simply are asking too much of a computer. Or is instructional technology just among the "not ready for prime time players?
It certainly is not true that computers can teach nothing but facts. There is much good research, and many good examples of TBT software, which teach all kinds of declarative knowledge, and most types of procedural knowledge, in a wide variety of usage and instructional contexts.
However, I would certainly agree that there are many examples of TBT software which act as if it were true that computers can teach nothing but facts, because of the limited understanding of ID by the designer. Of course, the same thing can be said about classroom teachers and corporate trainers.
And, as I said in my paper, I do think that the general failure of TBT software to apply what is known about how to design effective TBT does create the real possibility that the field's clients will conclude that TBT can't be used for more than inconsequential purposes. If that happens, then the potential of TBT to transform the structure of education and training will not be realized--not because it failed, but because it was never really tried. There's no particular reason to believe that high-quality TBT software will win the playing field on its own merits. If anything, the trend right now is the other way.