Even after reading Marcy's paper, Facilitating Learning-Centered Instructional Design: A Semiotic Perspective, a couple of times, I hesitate to offer a reaction because frankly I don't understand enough about semiotics as an approach to design or inquiry to critique it. However, I would like to pose a question: Can a semiotic approach to instructional design lead to the development of a constructivist learning environment of the kind that Dave Jonassen presented to us in the first ITForum discussion last spring concerning "Learners as Designers?" At the risk of misquoting Dave, he wrote something like this:
[quoting ITForum #1] The people who seem to learn the most from an instructional design effort are the instructional designers themselves in that the process of designing instructional materials enables instructional designers to understand content much more deeply than the students whose thinking will be constrained and controlled by the very materials the designers are developing.
It follows that empowering learners to design and produce their own knowledge representations and educational communications is a powerful learning experience. David argued, persuasively I think, that instead of specialists such as instructional designers using technology to constrain students' learning processes through prescribed communications and interactions, the technologies should be taken away from the specialists and given to learners to use as media for representing and expressing what they know. Learners can function as designers using technologies as tools for analyzing the world, accessing information, interpreting and organizing their personal knowledge, and representing what they know to others.
Although it hasn't been researched extensively, evidence of the power of the "learners as designers" exists. For example, Edit Harel's (1991) book, Children Designers, describes a research study conducted by Harel for her doctoral dissertation in which seventeen fourth grade students used Logo for a semester to create software products that were intended to teach fractions to third grade students. Her study combined quantitative, qualitative, and comparative research methods to investigate the effects of this "learners as designers" approach. The fourth grade students spent an average of seventy hours working on their software design projects. (What a contrast to the 30 minute educational treatments found in so many research studies in our field!!!) Harel compared the differences in Logo skills and fractions knowledge between the seventeen students in the ISDP and thirty-four other students in two classes who were studying Logo and fractions via "a traditional teaching method" (p. 263). No significant differences were found in pretests among the three classes. Harel reports that "In general, the 17 children of the experimental class did better than the other 34 children on all posttests (Fractions and Logo)" (p. 272). Although not all differences were statistically significant, the general trend was quite positive in terms of specific learning outcomes as measured by multiple measures including paper-and-pencil tests, computer exercises, video-taped observations, and interviews.
Getting back to my question (Can a semiotic approach to instructional design lead to the design of a constructivist learning environment?), I interpret the following quote from Marcy's paper as indicating that such an approach to ID would be unlikely to lead to the design of constructivist learning environments of the type Harel researched:
[quoting Driscoll's paper] Instructional goals are defined in terms of standard or desired interpretations of signs, and the learning task depends on the gap between a learner's current interpretations and those that are desired for the goal performance. It is also important for the learning task to provide the learner with extended semiotic interaction with object-sign relations consistent with the desired interpretations. Only through such extended interactions can a long-lasting change in knowledge occur (as opposed to a fleeting semiosis within, for example, a problem solving process).
To me, it sounds as if the semiotic approach to ID will lead to more of those instructivist "prescribed communications and interactions" that David and many constructivists among us find so distasteful (and ineffective) rather than the constructivist learning environments that seem so powerful.
Harel, I. (Ed.). (1991). Children designers: Interdisciplinary constructions for learning and knowing mathematics in a computer-rich school. Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing.>