| AUTHOR: | GAVRIEL SALOMON AND TAMAR ALMOG |
| TITLE: | Educational Psychology and Technology: A Matter of Reciprocal Relations |
| SOURCE: | Teachers College Record 100 no2 222-41 Wint '98 |
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ABSTRACT
Technology
and instruction have recently entered an alliance of reciprocal
influences. Technology serves instruction and at the same time opens up
novel opportunities. Concerning the former, a major justification for
the employment of computers is the acceptance of constructivist
conceptions and a growing understanding of learning as a social
process. Technology thus comes to facilitate the realization of the
learning environments that emanate from constructivist conceptions.
Concerning technology's influence on education, ever-newer
technological affordances pull instruction in new and promising
directions. However, many of these lack purpose or rationale. Why, for
example, should students design their own wWeb sites? New questions
arise that need to be answered, such as whether hypermedia programs
offer frail and casual webs of information that lead to the cultivation
of similarly flimsy mental networks (the "Butterfly Defect"), or
whether computer-mediated communication (CMC) might create virtual,
faceless learning environments. It also becomes evident that the new
learning environments rely more heavily than their predecessors on
students' proclivity for self-regulated and mindful learning. Can
technology facilitate the cultivation of these? Educational psychology
and technology are now engaged in an intensive duet that, if seriously
studied, explored, and evaluated, may offer novel and improved
instruction.
Technologies and prevailing
psychological conceptions of learning, thinking, and instruction have
always served and inspired each other in reciprocal ways. On the one
hand, technologies in education have served to facilitate and realize
the kinds of pedagogies that emanated from the changing zeitgeists and
from prevailing psychological conceptions. On the other hand, and
possibly only recently, technologies have been imported into education,
challenging it and requiring novel psychological explanations and
pedagogical justifications. Concerning technology as a means for the
realization of pedagogies, think of the Skinner box, educational
television, and LOGO programming. Each of these was inspired by a
particular psychological conception of learning--conditioning,
knowledge-transmission, and learning-as-problem solving, respectively.
Little wonder that in its early days, the educational applications of
computer technology for drill and practice and programming raised fears
of dehumanization and mechanization as realizations of some kind of
Skinnerian nightmare (e.g., Cuffaro, 1984). Concerning technology as a
challenge, we might think, for example, of students' surfing the
Internet and our need to find proper usages and justifications for that
kind of previously unknown learning activity quickly.
By
now it is commonly understood that although the employment of
technology in education does not lead to dehumanization, it cannot be
justified in and of itself except on the basis of a nontechnological
educational rationale. Such a rationale--psychologically or
philosophically grounded--provides the conceptual underpinnings from
which pedagogical implications and designs are derived. However,
although technology is helpful, sometimes even essential, for the
realization of these (e.g., Salomon & Perkins, 1996), top-down
rationales do not translate unequivocally into particular pedagogical
implications and designs. Thus, much is left undetermined and open for
the novel technological possibilities that may be suggested or afforded
in a more bottom-up fashion.
The pedagogy
that develops around students' opportunity to design their own Internet
Web sites is a case in point. It does not derive from any superordinate
conceptual rationale. In fact, such a technological possibility needs
educational psychology for rationales and persuasive justifications. As
technologies and educational usages develop, and particularly in recent
years when those developments have outpaced developments of our
psychological conceptions, technology comes to challenge educational
psychology. And it challenges educational psychology by both
reawakening old and partly dormant issues (such as transfer of learning
or the roles of intentionality and mindfulness) and by demanding new
conceptions and novel understandings of human behavior, learning, and
instruction.
In this article we wish to
describe this reciprocity of relationships between recent educationally
relevant psychological conceptions and educationally oriented usages of
technologies. On the one hand, we wish to show how technology serves to
realize psychologically guided pedagogical conceptions. On the other
hand, we wish to illustrate the ways in which technology challenges
educational psychology and some of the questions and concerns it
raises. No claim for exhaustion is made; we merely illustrate here the
reciprocal relations between technology and educational psychology.
TECHNOLOGY REALIZES PEDAGOGICAL CONCEPTIONS
The
appearance, often dramatic, of a novel technology on the educational
stage raises high hopes for rapid and profound effects. This was the
case with film, educational television, computer-based instruction,
programming, intelligent tutoring systems, and--most recently--with
hypermedia programs, the Internet, and computer-mediated communication
(CMC). All these were expected to make a difference by their very
introduction into an otherwise unchanged pedagogy. A paradox gradually
became evident: The more a technology, and its usages, fits the
prevailing educational philosophy and its pedagogical application, the
more it is welcome and embraced, but the less of an effect it has. When
some technology can be smoothly assimilated into existing educational
practices without challenging them, its chances of stimulating a
worthwhile change are very small. Domesticated technologies, such as
educational television, do not affect life in the classroom much: The
basic philosophy of one-program-fits-all and the commonly practiced
pedagogy of top-down knowledge transmission remain unchanged; thus, the
addition of this or that means of delivery cannot really "make a
differenc." Much research on media in the classroom supports this
conclusion (e.g., Salomon, 1994). Only so-called subversive
technologies have a chance of stimulating a process of pedagogical
change as they affect the whole classroom culture, practice and
atmosphere. As has been correctly observed by Papert (1987), if the
addition of a technology to instruction is so harmless that it can be
easily assimilated into existing instructional practices without much
changing them, then it will be equally harmless in making an
instructional difference. Indeed, if the same kind of practice sheet is
given via computers instead of in a booklet, why should this affect the
comprehension of mathematics?
Triggering a
change for the sake of change is not a very convincing justification
for imposing a new technology, shiny as it might be on education. The
argument "because it is there and available" (in- and out-of-school) is
often made nowadays to justify the adoption of novel technological
offerings, yet this in itself produces nothing but the above-mentioned
much-ado-about-nothing paradox and disappointment. Why, for example,
should children in school surf the Internet? Why should they engage in
computer-mediated communication with other students overseas? Or why
should they design new data bases? The fact that such activities are
possible is certainly not much of a justification and not much can be
expected to result from them unless they come to serve a purpose beyond
them. The paradox mentioned above can be avoided only when there is a
justification that transcends the technology itself and provides a
rationale for particular kinds of technology employment that strongly
and justifiably deviate from pedagogical routine.
Recent
developments in educationally relevant psychological understandings of
desirable learning, coupled with constructivist philosophies, appear to
offer precisely the kind of rationale needed for intelligent and
effective employment of technology in instruction (e.g., Brown, 1992).
As we shall try to sketch out below, such developments suggest
(although they do not dictate) particular designs for education. The
realization of these designs is greatly helped, however, by the
employment of technology. In fact, the coupling of new psychological
and philosophical conceptions with technological possibilities has led
to a shift in the kinds of scholarship in which many educational
psychologists engage. Attention of many pioneering scholars in the
field has shifted from the analytic study of single variables (e.g.,
anxiety, reading difficulties, intrinsic motivation) under relatively
controlled conditions to the design and study of whole, composite
instructional learning environments (e.g., Brown, 1992; Chinn &
Anderson, 1998; Salomon, 1996). Such "design experiments," as they have
come to be called, are what Herbert Simon once described as "the
science of the artificial" (Simon, 1982). Specifically, this means that
scholars attempt to weave psychological, instructional, curricular,
interpersonal, and organizational considerations into new, workable,
and effective learning environments manifesting a variety of
constructivist approaches. Thus one finds the CSILE environment of
Bereiter and Scardamalia (in press), Ann Brown and Joe Campione's
Community of Learners (e.g., Brown & Campione, 1994), and the
design of similar learning environments in which constructivist
philosophy, new psychological understandings, and technology meet each
other in what appears to be a rather promising new integration.
Looking
specifically at the psychological member of the threesome, there are at
least three important developments that deserve special mention in this
respect: Learning as a constructivist process, learning as (partly, at
least) an interpersonal, often socially distributed, process, and human
ability as (again, partly, at least) context-bound.
LEARNING AS A CONSTRUCTIVIST PROCESS
Inspired
to an important extent by Piaget's work and by philosophical
perspectives, such as that of Von Glasersfeld (1990), there is a
growing agreement among psychologists and educators that learning is
essentially a process whereby learners construct their own knowledge by
applying their existing knowledge and mental skills to novel incoming
information, constructing their own meanings as they go along. The
knowledge that students finally acquire is only the knowledge they have
actively constructed themselves, not the information transmitted to
them ready-made. Learning-as-construction thus contrasts with
conceptions of learning as the relatively passive acquisition or
internalization of ready-formed bodies of handed-down information
(e.g., Phillips, 1995).
One of the important
underlying assumptions of this view of learning is that learning is not
to be seen and assessed as the acquisition of knowledge, and, by
implication, instruction is not to be conceived of as the
well-structured, appealing presentation of information-to-be-acquired.
Rather, learning is to be seen as the activities of constructing
meanings and understanding within a particular context and situation
(Duffy & Cunningham, 1996). What then would trigger these
activities? Underlying the different constructivist approaches is the
conception of discrepancies, conflicts, contradictions, unsolved
problems, or in short Piaget's (1957) "disequilibria" and Bruner's
(1960) "perturbations," which are sensed by learners (not necessarily
the teachers!) and cause them intellectual uncertainty, annoyance,
curiosity, or at least puzzlement.
It
follows from these conceptions, for example, that contrary to common
lore, the acquisition of knowledge and the activities of construction
(e.g., problem solving, designing) are inseparable (Perkins, 1992): One
acquires knowledge while attempting to solve a problem or design
something new, often as a result of experienced uncertainty or of a
routine run aground. Instruction, then, is seen not as the effective
transmission of knowledg,e but rather as setting the stage, providing
some guidance, and offering the raw information for the activities of
problem solving and design to take place.
Related
to the above, although not a necessary corollary, is the idea of
comprehension or meaningfulness as the active construction of a network
of connections between nodes of knowledge. No single bit of information
can be meaningfully understood unless embedded in a rich network of
relations. It is the causal, correlational, part-whole, rule-example,
associational, or sequential links connecting a bit of information to
others that give that bit its meaning. And, the denser, better
organized, and less random the web of connections, the more meaning
each part would have for the person. Following Geertz (1973), we might
call such networks "Webs of Meaning" (Geertz called them "webs of
significance"). Such webs are akin, to some extent, to the older notion
of "cognitive maps," explicated by Neisser (1976) as "orienting
schemata," active information-seeking and organizing structures. But
whereas for many scholars, cognitive maps concern mainly spatial
relations, cognitions, and orientations (e.g., Nadel, 1994), the webs
of meaning alluded to here are far more general, pertaining to the way
all kinds of information units relate to each other. Entwistle (1996)
describes how students report the way they represent knowledge to
themselves as precisely such "webs" of connections between nodes of
knowledge. Given a constructivist view, the emphasis is on one's
activities of constructing one's own weblike structures of knowledge
rather than on the acquisition of a ready-made one. This, then, implies
the necessity of engaging in activities intended to interrelate bits
and pieces of knowledge such that a rich web can emerge. This, in turn,
has strong implications for the social aspects of learning and for the
interdisciplinary nature of the contents to be dealt with. To these we
turn next.
LEARNING AS AN INTERPERSONAL PROCESS
Traditionally,
students have been perceived as isolated entities and their learning as
a solo process. The interpersonal context in which learning takes place
was usually ignored or, at best, seen as mere background, not really
part of the actual learning process (e.g., Cole, 1991). Hence followed
individualized instruction and--even more common--individual testing.
But at least two sources challenged this view. One such source was
Vygotsky's (1989) theory according to which development is, to a large
extent, a matter of interpersonal interactions becoming internalized to
serve as cognitive tools. A second, and clearly not unrelated source,
was the growing conception of learning as situated rather than
decontextualized (Brown, Collins, & Duguid, 1989; Greeno, 1989,
1997). According to this view, one's cognitions are so tightly
connected to the situational context in which they are employed, to the
specifics of the issue at hand, and to the activity one is engaged in
that in-the-head cognitions and in-the-world activity should not be
treated as separate entities (e.g., Lave & Wenger, 1991).
Cognitions
situated in the social context of some activity can be said to be
distributed in the sense that the social processes entail the shared
co-construction of knowledge. Learning is thus a socially distributed
process of meaning appropriation (Newman, Griffin, & Cole, 1989).
Whether it is the individual's solo learning that is facilitated by
interpersonal processes, or whether the learning process and the
resulting knowledge are both distributed, emerging "in between" the
participants (Pea, 1993), much of the learning is due to the
distributed mutual scaffolding afforded by the interpersonal activity.
In
light of these conceptions, learning becomes understood as a process
for which social interaction serves a variety of crucial functions.
These range from the provision of feedback and mirroring to mutual
intellectual stimulation, instruction, and correction, and from mutual
scaffolding of comprehension to the socially shared construction of
meanings. Research on collaborative and cooperative learning generally
tends to support such conceptions, showing that under certain
conditions and with particular learning tasks, team work,
collaboration, reciprocal teaching, and the like are beneficial for the
learners (see, for a recent review, Hertz-Lazarowitz & Miller,
1992; Slavin, 1996).
It might be argued that
constructivist and interpersonal views of learning are somewhat
contradictory: Constructivism assumes the dominance of in-the-head and
transferable cognitions with activity being subservient to thought,
while the interpersonal views of learning assume cognitions to be
situated in particular activities, being socially distributed (Hewitt
& Scardamalia, 1996). But this contradiction may be more apparent
than real. For one thing, solo cognitions and distributed ones are
likely to be interdependent, developing each other in a reciprocal
spiral-like manner (Salomon, 1993; Salomon & Perkins, in press).
For another, the ideas of learning-as-active-construction-of-knowledge
and as a social process do not rule out each other. As a matter of
fact, the newly designed "constructivist" learning environments, to be
described below, that realize the new psychological conceptions succeed
in effectively integrating the two views.
HUMAN ABILITY AS CONTEXT-BOUND
Old
conceptions according to which there is a clear distinction between
content knowledge ("knowledge that") and abilities and skills
("knowledge how") have come under growing criticism. Although views and
the findings on which they are based leave much room for disagreement,
it has become increasingly common to view skills and abilities as less
decontextualized than traditionally assumed. In the competition between
a well-mastered abstract skill (say, a general problem-solving ability)
and rich knowledge of a particular field (e.g., knowledge of soccer
rules), the latter comes out the winner: it is better to know something
than to be ignorant but equipped with a general, decontextualized skill
(Glaser, 1990; Weinert & Helmke, 1995).
For
some researchers, general, decontextualized skills are of no interest.
Thus, for example, Lave (1988) disagrees with the conventional views of
abstract skill acquisition and transfer, arguing that
"knowledge-in-practice, constituted in the settings of practice, is the
locus of the most powerful knowledgeability of people in the lived-in
world" (p. 14). Such views are supported by the relatively poor yield
of research into transfer of training. If abilities are
decontextualized, why does their deliberate training fail to transfer
to new situations, contents, and contexts? Other support comes from
research on the highly intelligent performance on the job of otherwise
poorly educated individuals (e.g., Lave & Wenger, 1991).
However,
for other researchers, giving more credit to the long tradition of
psychometric research into the nature of human intelligence and other
relatively general abilities, the question is not an all-or-none one.
Rather, the questions they ask concern the interplay between general
skills and specific knowledge and the opportunities when either one of
the two assumes dominance. For example, could it be that general
abilities come into play only when specific knowledge is lacking? Or
could it be that abilities serve as general levers for, say, problem
solving, analogous to one's arms, whereas specific knowledge serves as
the particular adaptations of such levers to the specifics of a
situation, analogous to one's fingers (Perkins & Salomon, 1989)?
Despite
such difference of opinion, specific knowledge and activity within
particular contexts have recently gained a more central role in the
understanding of human learning and intellectual activity. Skills and
abilities are to be cultivated within a variety of particular contexts,
and if transfer is desired, it itself needs to be cultivated within
particular situations. The generality of skills is not a given, and
their cultivation cannot be a decontextualized educational activity.
One major implication that follows is that learning is to take place
within rich and complex real-world contexts, rather than with
decontextualized skill-building materials. It also follows that
learning is to take place through learners' active and personally
consequential interactions with peers and within particular,
content-rich contexts, rather than through the training of abstract
subskills (Greeno, 1997).
PEDAGOGICAL IMPLICATIONS
There
is an impressive congruence among the three psychological perspectives
discussed above: Good learning is a process of socially based, active
co-construction of contextualized knowledge and webs of relations among
its nodes. The translation of these underlying psychological
conceptions and their pedagogical implications into classroom practices
concerns the design of whole learning environments that integrate these
implications. Indeed, a variety of novel, constructivist learning
environments, although differing from each other in detail, entail a
number of common elements and practices that manifest these
psychological perspectives. These are team-based collaborations
(communities of learners according to Brown & Campione, 1994;
knowledge-building communities according to Scardamalia & Bereiter,
1994), whereby students tackle real life-like rich and often
interdisciplinary problems, while engaging for a significant amount of
time in intensive search for pertinent information, exchange of data,
and the design of hypermedia and other knowledge products that can be
co-constructed and shared, with the teachers serving as guides and
consultants (see, also, Almog & Hertz-Lazarowitz, in press;
Cognition and Technology Group at Vanderbilt, 1992; Salomon &
Perkins, 1996). In these environments, teachers often work in teams,
and learning becomes an interpersonal process whereby knowledge is
jointly constructed, thus integrating the psychological conceptions
discussed above.
The actual practice of the
new learning environments requires a number of major shifts--a
conceptual and cultural shift from teacher-led instruction to an
interactive community of active learners; from a highly structured
curriculum to an emerging, often improvised one; from knowledge as the
accumulation of discrete units to the tackling of whole issues; and
from the acquisition of handed-down knowledge to the handling of
information to be sought and processed (e.g., Brown, 1992).
What
roles does technology play in all this? The shifts just mentioned could
not practically be carried out in real classrooms without technology
that serves a number of functions. One would need tools that enable the
gathering, processing, and construction of information, some of it
imported from afar; one would need design tools; and one would need
tools that facilitate these activities as social ones. Thus, the
designs and usages that serve these functions are numerous and varied.
In some cases, technology provides the forum in which the
knowledge-oriented interaction and the explicit co-construction of that
knowledge take place; in other cases, technology offers a series of
tools with which information can be sought, sifted through, processed,
and designed (Hewitt & Scardamalia, 1996). In the case of the
Israeli project SELA, much of the learning process consists of teams of
students jointly designing hypermedia products (in this case--planning
the city of the future, avoiding current urban plights). The
hypermedia, serves as the stage on which carefully selected and
formulated information becomes woven into a gradually unfolding plot.
In yet other cases, technology is the means of accessing worldwide
information, distance communication with peers and experts, lab
experimentation, and the like.
In all, the
proper harnessing of technology makes possible the practical
realization of those learning environments that are based on the
relatively novel psychological understandings of learning. Technology
is thus subservient to pedagogy, with a conceptually-based pedagogy
providing the rationale, and technology, the means. This division of
labor is not coincidental. The development of psychological and
pedagogical thinking, often associated with the "cognitive revolution,"
was inspired by developments in computer technology, while the
directions taken by the latter were clearly inspired by developments of
our understanding of (and debates about) learning and thinking.
TECHNOLOGY CHALLENGES PSYCHOLOGY
Whereas,
it is easy to see how technology manifests and realizes prevailing
views of learning and teaching, the reciprocal--namely, the way
technology in education inspires and challenges educationally related
psychology--is less obvious. Technology, throughout history and in many
fields, tended to become developed quite independently of economic,
managerial, psychological, or educational considerations or, for that
matter, independently of any top-down planning. Education, perhaps
unlike some other fields, is an extreme case in point; it adopts
existing technological innovations and adapts them to its prevailing
conceptions, philosophies, and practices.
However,
as the development of information technologies is becoming increasingly
rapid, outpacing developments of pedagogical thinking, and as these
technological innovations engulf the lives of children and adults,
psychological and pedagogical thinking cannot but attempt to catch up.
Indeed, what psychological wisdom do we have to deal with children's
surfing of the Internet, wandering through virtual MOO "rooms," or
entering night-long chats with strangers?
Let
us consider three prototypical examples in which recent technological
innovations, gradually penetrating education, afford new kinds of
learning experiences, thus possibly challenging prevailing
psychological conceptionss and common understandings: intellectual
partnerships between technology and learners, the exploration and
design of hypermedia, and computer-mediated communication. These cases
illustrate how a new educational reality gradually becomes possible and
takes shape, leading to relatively novel pedagogical practices and
roles. Existing psychological constructs, theories, and understandings
turn out to fall short of what is scientifically desired and
practically needed. New technological affordances open up novel
pedagogical possibilities that need fresh psychological explanations
and justifications.
INTELLECTUAL PARTNERSHIP: EFFECTS "WITH" AND "OF" NEW TECHNOLOGY
Intellectual
partnerships with technology are manifested, for example, in writing
partners that provide metacognitive-like guidance in computer-based
laboratories, in interactive visualizations of difficult-to-imagine
physical processes, in collaborative construction of novel knowledge by
means of a specially designed interactive tool (e.g., Lajoie &
Derry, 1993), and so forth. Typical of such tools is the distribution
of cognitive activities between users and tools. On the one hand,
nothing takes place without the active participation and intentional
guidance provided by the users. On the other hand, the technology
offers semi-intelligent help, affords the offloading of irrelevant
menial cognitive tasks, provides intelligent feedback, or affords
rational organization and clever ways of interrelating participants'
input. Research and evaluation of such tools for partnership clearly
show that the learning students experience, the kinds of activities
they engage in, and the effects of these activities are diverse and
profound (e.g., Jonassen, 1996). Such effects may range from greater
team interdependence to more intensive metacognitive activity, and from
increased motivation to higher levels of thinking.
But
not all effects are created equal, and thus the daily meaning of the
term effect has come to mean two things: the effects attained during
partnership with a semi-intelligent tool as contrasted with those that
develop as a consequence of that partnership and appear later on as a
changed capability. A new distinction had to be introduced, a
distinction between effects with a technology and the more lasting
effects of it (Salomon, Perkins, & Globerson, 1991). Whereas the
former pertains to the immediate changes that take place while students
engage in an intellectual partnership with a helpful tool (e.g., better
essay writing when a tool provides metacognitive-like help), the latter
pertains to the more lasting changes that this partnership may lead to
(e.g., improved tendency for self-regulation, independent of that help;
better essay-writing ability). This distinction raises a number of new
questions. One of these is whether effects with a tool are a necessary
condition for the attainment of effects of it. A second question
concerns the role of mindful or intentional engagement in the
intellectual partnership: Could lasting cognitive effects be attained
while one is less than mindfully engaged in an intellectual partnership
with a tool? A third question revisits an old dispute in education and
psychology--the issue of how general (hence transferable) versus
context-specific one's cognitive skills are (e.g., Anderson, Reder,
& Simon, 1996; Greeno, 1997; Perkins & Salomon, 1989). The very
mention of effects of technology, in the form of some decontextual
cognitive residue that transcends the tool and the situation in which
it was first attained, assumes some generalized transfer of learning to
new situations and tasks. How does such logic square with the growing
acceptance of knowledge and skill as being situated and contextualized?
As pointed out earlier, it might well be the case (and there is
evidence to support it) that skill acquired during activities with a
tool can become generalized under conditions of varied and repeated
experience, and become detached from the original situation or tool
that facilitated its cultivation (e.g., Salomon, Globerson, &
Guterman, 1989).
The distinction between
effects with and of is clearly relevant and useful to other educational
interventions, such as new curricula or collaborative learning. In
studying most educational interventions and innovations, effects
attained during an intervention should not be confused with the
intervention's long-range cognitive residues, although such a confusion
is often the case. Why, then, was this distinction made only in the
context of studying technology's educational effects? It seems that
what has stimulated the making of the distinction is the gap between
the observable novelty of students' activities during intellectual
partnership with computers, on the one hand, and the paucity of lasting
cognitive effects that were expected to emerge, on the other, but did
not (see, e.g., Oppenheimer, 1997). Could it be that when it comes to
the study and measurement of common achievements resulting from
computer-related activities, the results are less impressive than the
learning activities students are observed to egage in?
Herein
lies the challenge: If students engage in genuinely novel activities
during intellectual partnership with technology, capitalizing on the
novel technological affordances, what kinds of learning outcomes ought
to be expected and measured? Are the desired learning outcomes (effects
"of") to be identical to the ones aimed at before the new affordances
were available? Or, to put it differently, should all those
technological novelties (with the new communication and
information-access possibilities they afford) come to serve no more
than traditional educational goals crystallized in a much earlier era?
Such questions echo to an extent the debate between the "cognitive"
approach, espousing more traditional skill training (Anderson, Reder,
& Simon, 1996) and the "situative" approach, espousing more
social-participatory goals (Greeno, 1997). Although that debate is not
directly linked to technology, it nevertheless reflects the challenges
that novel technologies pose. What educational achievements should we
try to attain and measure in the age of constructivist, socially
shared, situative, technology-intensive learning environments?
HYPERMEDIA: THE CONSTRUCTION OF FRAIL KNOWLEDGE NETWORKS
There
is a potentially interesting affinity between cognitive networking that
underlies comprehension and the network-like structure of hypertext and
multimedia. As pointed out earlier, comprehension, to an important
extent, is likely to be a matter of cognitive networking; that is, the
construction of a network of relations between nodes of knowledge
(Entwistle, 1996; Salomon & Perkins, 1996). Hypermedia and related
genres appear to afford exactly that kind of web in the sense that they
are constructed as networks of interrelated information items allowing
free movement from one item to another, not necessarily adjacent, one.
Thus, it appears that hypermedia programs reflect a mode of knowledge
organization that could be isomorphous with, or correspond to the
cognitive webs of meaning described earlier. The hypermedia students
work with, even if only exploring an existing program, possibly serves
as mirrors of their own minds--the network they explore, or, better
yet, the one they design may well resemble the one they simultaneously
construct in their own minds. Technology and mind work together; one
may be mirroring and scaffolding the other.
The
distinction between effects with and of technology, described earlier
in the context of intellectual partnership, is relevant in the present
case as well. Mindful engagement in the design of a hypermedia product
may afford the opportunity of higher-order thinking about the logical
ways in which the particular information components of a body of
knowledge relate to each other. Clearly, the effect attained with a
hypermedia program, while working with it, might well be the
construction of a better-organized and more meaningful domain-specific
cognitive knowledge network (e.g., Lehrer, Erickson, & Connell,
1994). A more lasting cognitive effect of the active construction of
hypermedia knowledge maps may well be an improved, relatively general
ability, or greater disposition, for the construction of logical
cognitive webs of meaning. In other words, students may become better
able to construct for themselves interrelated networks of knowledge and
acquire the disposition to think of ways to logically link bits of
knowledge to each other.
The requirement to
define relations among components of a hypermedia network explicitly
would be expected to be internalized, thus making hypermedia "cognitive
tools" (e.g., Lehrer, 1993). Is this a viable possibility? Can
interactive technological devices designed to handle information become
internalized, to serve as cognitive tools the way, say, media's symbol
systems (Salomon, 1994) or statistical tools (Gigerenzer, 1991) are
claimed to serve? Research is badly needed to address such questions.
THE BUTTERFLY DEFECT
However,
not all of the potential effects with and of learning by means of
multimedia and hypermedia are likely to be positive. There might also
be a downside to hypermedia. One of the outstanding attributes of
typical hypermedia programs, as well, as the Internet, is their
nonlinear, association-based structure. One item just leads to another,
and one is invited to wander from one item to another, lured by the
visual appeal of the presentation. In fact, surfing the Internet or
hypermedia programs is a good example of a shallow exploratory
behavior, as distinguished from deeper search. The distinction between
exploration and search was formulated by Wright and Vliestra (1975) to
describe a developmental sequence. Whereas exploration is greatly
influenced by visual appeal, a bottom-up unsystematic hopping around,
search is focused, goal-directed, and metacognitively guided. Thus,
developmentally, exploration precedes search and is replaced by it.
Surfing the Internet and exploring hypermedia are activities that seem
to faithfully manifest the exploratory behavior as conceived by Wright
and Vliestra: a butterfly-like hovering from item to item without
really touching them.
One may need to
entertain the hypothesis that based on the affinity between the
network-like structure of comprehension and that of hypermedia
products, intensive interaction with the latter might facilitate the
construction of rather shallow associationist cognitive networks. Such
networks would consist of trivial, frail connections, having no
intellectual merit. One piece of information leads to another by virtue
of some fleeting association without much rational justification,
reflecting the aimless, visually-lured wandering though the screens of
a hypermedia program, hence the Butterfly Defect.
How
would the cognitive Butterfly Defect be manifested? Although one should
be careful not to entertain doomsday predictions of profound changes in
the hard-wiring of students' minds, there is still reason to
hypothesize that students' conceptions of what knowledge consists of
might well be affected. Such conceptions are likely to be amenable to
external influences. Thus, students might well come to believe that
knowledge is a hypermedia-like structure, the links of which are not
the kind of logical connections science is designed to construct.
Similarly, students may come to prefer to learn from sources that
present fields of knowledge in a hypermedia structure, thus
sidestepping the acquisition of the logical, hierarchically structured
connections and links that constitute science as we know it. To the
extent that intensive interaction with unstructured, association-based
tapestries of information can affect cognitive preferences or
conceptions of knowledge, one might hypothesize that hypermedia-like
minds are being cultivated by surfing Internet-like webs.
COMPUTER-MEDIATED COMMUNICATION (CMC): INTERNETED, FACELESS LEARNING?
CMC
is yet another technological innovation challenging educational
psychology and pedagogy. Students can now communicate with each other
over immense distances and in real time, consult vast data bases and
libraries, surf the Internet, and gain easy access to an enormous
variety of discussion groups, clubs, and institutions of learning. CMC
and the Internet add interesting new dimensions to regular school
learning: Students work in virtual teams, comparing freshly collected
data and exchanging views on controversial topics; jointly write
papers; and, perhaps most interestingly, conduct continuous
conversations and construct whole projects (e.g., Hiltz, 1994).
Such
technological applications may appear to revolutionize not only
classroom teaching, but also institutions of learning, by challenging
the traditional foundations of schooling as we know it, particularly
the foundations of institutionalized higher education. Suddenly the
idea of a whole society becoming "A Learning Society," in which
everybody has immediate access to whatever source of information one
needs or desires, is not as fantastic as it was only a short while ago
(Harasim, Hiltz, Teles, & Turoff, 1995). Remote participation in
virtual and inexpensive university and high school courses and remote
access to libraries, tutors, consultants, peers, experts, and numerous
other sources becomes the hallmark of the new possibilities. As
information can be accessed all the time and from everywhere, learning
becomes removed from its traditional citadel-like locations of
knowledge, freed from the constraints of place and time (Noam, 1996).
All
this calls for the formulation of new rationales to justify the novel
possibilities: Why should virtual classrooms replace face-to-face ones?
Why should students reach into virtual rather than real libraries or
communicate with distant peers when they hardly ever communicate with
those next door? On the other hand, what psychological constructs can
account for learning via the new forms of CMC, Internet surfing,
electronic communities of learners, and the like?
As
for rationales, recent designs of constructivist learning environments
that emphasized the development of self-guided heavily interactive
communities of learners make increasing use of the newly afforded
communication possibilities. The need for interaction and
communication, as well as the access to sources of information, provide
the desired pedagogical and psychological justifications. As for the
psychological processes that are of particular importance for
CMC-intensive learning, it becomes evident, for example, that in the
absence of a teacher, classroom regulations, and face-to-face contact,
self-regulation may become truly crucial. So do student's disposition
to be mindful learners. Individual differences that are only mildly
implicated in learning in traditional classrooms are likely to become
of central importance when CMC is involved. Indeed, in the absence of
students' ability to monitor their own learning, or in the absence of
sufficient motivation to become engaged in learning mindfully and
intentionally, CMC-based pedagogy may be fun, but not very effective.
A NEW ALLIANCE: COGNITIONS NEED CONATION
As
pointed out earlier, although the introduction of novel information
technology into classrooms was accompanied by high hopes for immediate
breathtaking effects, computer technology was often employed in
unimaginative ways, based on conceptions of learning as a matter of
"spoon-feeding." However, with the development of increasingly
interesting usages of technology for education, the gap between high
hopes and the actual (disappointing) outcomes grew wider, echoing the
realization that opportunities given are not necessarily opportunities
taken (Perkins, 1985). Thus, for example, the opportunity to
internalize a writing partner's metacognitive-like guidance is not
always taken (Zellermayer, Salomon, Globerson, & Givon, 1991), nor
are the opportunities to explore a rich multimedia program taken by all
learners (e.g., Ross, 1996).
Among the
conditions that need to be met for such opportunities to be taken is
mindful engagement in the activity afforded or demanded by the
technology. This, in itself, is not new. The questions of intentional
learning (Bereiter & Scardamalia, 1989) and of mindful engagement
in learning (Langer, 1997) have been raised independently of any
technological considerations, concurrently with a growing interest in
the overlap between cognition and conation (e.g., Snow, Corno, &
Jackson, 1997). Nevertheless, the design of novel, constructivist, and
technology-intensive learning environments of the kind mentioned
earlier highlights the role of self-regulated mindfulness in learning.
In such environments, for their very constructivist nature, much of the
responsibility for learning is shifted over to the learners, either
individually or in teams, while teachers' control is relatively weaker
than in more traditional learning environments. Indeed, one of our
findings in a study comparing traditional classrooms with
"constructivist" ones was that although measures of ability were the
best predictors of learning in the former learning environment,
measures of students' disposition to engage mindfully in learning are
the best predictors in the latter. Volitional, motivated expenditure of
mental effort, mindful engagement, and metacognitive self-monitoring
thus become crucial in the kinds of learning environments that the
novel information technologies require, not because of the technology
in and of itself, but because of its conjunction with a more general
constructivist pedagogy.
The new
constructivist learning environments rely more heavily on students'
independent learning, increasingly carried out in classrooms without
walls or schedules. However, it appears that at least two psychological
forces may constrain the unlimited spread of distance learning in
virtual classrooms. One such force is students' need for face-to-face,
real (rather than virtual) contact. There is only so much distance
learning and impersonal access to information that students are willing
to tolerate. Thus, for example, Rheingold (1993), while describing the
experience of learners in the San Francisco Bay Area electronic
learning network (SFNET), observes that many of them often organize
face-to-face parties to overcome the electronic lack of intimacy.
Similarly, all courses of the Israeli Open University, which allege
celebrating distance learning, had to add periodic, face-to-face class
meetings to alleviate the loneliness of the long-distance learner. The
second limiting factor is the difficulty many learners have with
self-discipline and self-monitoring in the face of routine learning
tasks. Students seem to need the boundary-setting, guidance, and
motivation-sustaining functions that a regular classroom with its peer
group and teacher usually provide. Despite technology's challenge, its
possibilities are likely to be tamed by human frailty.
CONCLUSION
Educational
psychology and technology have reached a fruitful alliance under the
umbrella of wider philosophical conceptions espousing constructivism.
This alliance has a number of manifestations. The most pronounced
manifestation is the design of novel learning environments that follow
the new psychological understandings of what good learning (and hence
instruction) is supposed to be, the realization of which greatly
depends on technological affordances. Indeed, it would be most
difficult to create the kind of team-based, interdisciplinary
problem-solving and information-rich learning environment of the kind
mentioned earlier in the absence of technology-enhanced search for
relevant information, computerized lab simulations, data collection and
analyses, semi-intelligent tools for design and presentation,
communication, and the like.
However,
technology does not serve only as the lever for the realization of
psychologically-based novel learning environments. Psychology and
technology come to play a game of reciprocal influences. This
reciprocity takes place when new technological affordances, resulting
from the amazingly fast development of electronic technology, challenge
education by offering it new tools, new usages, and new questions.
Education must develop rationales and psychology needs to provide
conceptual handles for these new affordances. Some aspects of these
affordances look most promising--think of students communicating with
their peers overseas to compare scientific data. But other aspects
should perhaps worry us--think of the possible cognitive Butterfly
Defect resulting from the ill-structured typical hypertext or of the
poor value attributed to information when it comes without effort,
without selection, and as a flood on the Internet.
It
becomes clear that unlike previous times, educational psychology and
technology are now engaged in an ongoing duet.
ADDED MATERIAL
GAVRIEL SALOMON AND TAMAR ALMOG
The University of Haifa, Israel
GAVRIEL
SALOMON is dean of the faculty of education and professor of
educational psychology, University of Haifa, Israel. He is the author
of Interaction of Media, Cognition and Learning (LEA, 1994).
TAMAR
ALMOG teaches at the faculty of education, University of Haifa, Israel.
She is the co-author, with R. Hertz-Lazarowitz, of "Teachers as Peer
Learners: Professional Development in an Advanced Computer Learning
Environment," in A. M. O'Donnell and A. King, Eds., Cognitive
Perspectives on Peer Learning (Lawrence Erlbaum, in press).
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DIRECTIONS, B, ORAL
I.E.R.
Intelligence Scale C A V D (Completions, Arithmetic, Vocabulary,
Directions) Levels A, B, C, D and E for grades K through 2.
The directions for the above questions are the following: "7. Make two
crosses, like these two. Make one here and one here, pointing to the
spots below the two crosses ...)" (see above). "8. Make the other arm
on this man (pointing to the one-armed man ...)" (see above). "9. Make
the other leg on this man (pointing to the one legged man ...)" (see
above). "10. Make 2 lines, like these two (pointing to the two lines...)" (see above).
The
test to which these questions belong had been created by The Institute
of Educational Research, Teachers College, Columbia University, 1926.
The property of Milbank Library, Special Collections, Teachers College, Columbia University.