Have we “Reclaimed” Instructional Design?
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Have we “Reclaimed” Instructional Design?
dr.curry @ February 19, 2008
This post has been moved. To read it in its entirety, including comments, please visit the following link:
Have we “Reclaimed” Instructional Design?
dr.curry @ February 19, 2008
****THIS PERSON LEFT NO NAME**** I wonder why? –jhc
That 1996 editorial by Merrill was a bit extremist. He was basically trying to shoot down constructivist approaches “who don’t seem to know where they are going”, like Kirshner, Sweller, & Clark argued for recently as well.
Jonassen published a response the Merrill opinion piece in the same journal, you should check it out.
And if you have to explicitly argue that something is a science, it probably isn’t. That includes instructional design and the learning sciences and cognitive science.
Or if you have to repeatedly assert that something is “verified” by cognitive research and evolutionary theory (like cognitive load theory), then it isn’t. Once they added good (germane) cognitive load and bad cognitive load, it became unfalsifiable and less scientific.
Yes, I am a former student of Merrill’s, but I think all of this is just me trying to make sense of what I learned under him. I’m not trying to go through this and tell everyone how great he is, his work speaks for itself. Rather, I’m trying to see where I stand now as a faculty member in comparison to when I was a graduate student. Do I think the same things? Is what I learned relevant still? What has changed?
jhc
What you are saying does definitely make sense.
As practitioners we need to collaborate actively and dedicate our studies for quality design. We are at a century, in which theories need to be put into practice. We need to be in cooperation in order to enhance our constructivist perspectives. However, while doing this we also need to start developing our knowledge on the theories which we have learned 10 years ago. It is the time of change!
[...] the well established area of ‘Instructional Design’. So I was interested to see this post reflecting on a paper by David Merrill et al. from 1996 entitled ‘Reclaiming instructional [...]
I would have to say that the discussion regarding instructional design as a science has been somewhat muted as discussions have shifted to the technologies available for not only delivering information, but encouraging participation.
But if you listen closely, within those discussions you will still here the debate over how we encode new information into our existing knowledge base.
My thoughts on “Reclaiming Instructional Design” can be found in one of my posts: “Can Instruction be Designed?” http://discursive-learning.blogspot.com/2007/06/can-instruction-be-designed.html