Re: instructional design

Linnda R. Caporael (caporl who-is-at rpi.edu)
Thu, 09 Oct 1997 10:06:26 -0400

Remember this, from last August?

Jan Nespor wrote:
>
> > Is there now an organized body of knowledge of how one can
> >re-mediate college instruction in large classes in educationally
> >more productive ways with various on-line elements in the mix?
> >mike cole
>
> Not that I know of, though I am reallya beginner in this area. The push
> for technopedagogy here has come from state officials and university
> administrators who see it as a way to "increase faculty productivity" --
> that is, allow fewer faculty to "teach" more students. In practice, a lot
> of technology infrastructure has been made available to faculty, and
> incentives (e.g., grants) have been put in place to encourage faculty to
> wire-up. Course re-mediations are taking place on an ad hoc basis. The
> "instructional design" I spoke of is an outgrowth or residue of the
> military "instructional systems design" work (linear, modular, lots and
> lots of charts). The designers are very nice people who are trying to
> help faculty who want to go techno but aren't sure how to proceed. Part of
> what I'll be doing is studying the designers, but I'm also trying to engage
> them in discussions about activity theory, ANT, etc.

While trying to get my email under control (it's taking over my hard
drive!), I found the thread above. Jan's description of the ambitions
for technopedagogy could have been written here at RPI, where (probably
like VPI) a lot of the enabling technology is built and positioned. Jan,
can you bring us up to date about how the discussions with the designers
are going?

In a subsequent message, Jay Lemke pointed out that it was important to
find good examples of the education/technology mix. Does anyone know of
such examples? I have an opportunity to do research on distance
education (or if I want, innovations in undergraduate education in
general--there is a lot going on here.) The main interest (from the
administration perspective) is traditional evaluation research to answer
the question: is technopedagogy more effective at teaching the required
material than the traditional lecture/recitation course--with "course"
meaning engineering or natural science. Fortunately, someone else has
this job. My interests are more along the line of 1) how does the
technology get inserted in the social relationships among teachers and
learners, and 2) how does technological design reproduce
culture--especially "old" notions such as the authority of the teacher,
the interchangeability of students, etc. Part of this agenda is to
understand how more humane--culturally and environmentally aware--values
can be incorportated into the design of technopedagogy (see below). This
entire area is fairly new to me. I'd like to know if anyone is doing
research related to technopedagogy at the post high-school level. (Eva's
article was useful, and she also pointed me to Edouard's outline of
distance learning, which was also good.)

Jay also wrote:
>My sense of what is most needed is a cadre of techno-angels to
>bear individual (or small groups of) faculty members up to the
>heavens of cyberspace and support them in their idiosyncratic
>endeavors to do whatever they want to try doing.

I'm not sure that I agree with this because it's happening to me, and
frankly, I feel paralyzed. A cadre of techno-angels have
shown up at my office door, with wings flapping ready to bear me up to
cyberheaven. But my imagination is failing me. Is there something more
than email, chat rooms, and web pages with frames? In engineering,
physics,
and chemistry there are wonderful simulations bouncing balls, electrical
circuits and even of the manufacturing process.
(My "favorite" is like a game, and if you, the student, minimize costs
and
maximize profit, "money man" drops out of the sky...although I do wonder
if
he is dropping out of the ozone hole in the sky.)

How did I get so lucky? Last semester I taught a special topics course,
Culture and Cognition, primarily as a way to read and think about _Mind
in Culture_ (by Brad Shore and _Cognition in the Wild_ (Hutchins).
(There were eight students in the class, and believe me, we all had to
struggle.) The local director of program development liked the course
description so much that he popped it (with my ok) into a grant that
would bring "interactive studio courses" to the humanities and social
sciences. (As far as I can tell, such courses are discussion courses
punctuated by doing things at the computer--a calculation, an animated
simulation, etc.) Now I introduce this part of the story to suggest that
it's possible that the paralysis is not so much technologically induced,
but induced by starting this project in a content area that I'm only
just beginning to learn. Now the problem is not just what am I going to
teach, but what and how do I digitize. (I'm in the middle of Cultural
Psychology, but the ZPD thread is beyond my current ZPD; I'm saving that
thread, too.)
Any suggestions? Ideas?
Linnda

*************************
Dr. Linnda R. Caporael
Department of Science & Technology Studies
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Troy, NY 12180
voice: 518/276-8519 fax: 518/276-2659