Arshad Omari, Faculty of Science and Technology, Edith Cowan University, Mt Lawley Campus, Western Australia. Phone +61 09 370 6459 Email: a.omari@cowan.edu.au
There are a number of theoretical stances that currently serve as a basis for both critiquing purely cognitivist approaches to instructional design, and for guiding the development of alternative designs. These include theories of situated cognition, cognitive apprenticeship, constructivism and the social development of knowledge. It should be made clear that such theories are not necessarily in conflict with cognitivist views of learning but that they perhaps extend or adapt cognitivist understandings. However, in the cases of both constructivism and conversational views of learning, there are held to be essential and fundamental differences with purely cognitive approaches. It is not appropriate in this paper to advance a detailed consideration of these differences, suffice to state that both constructivism and conversational theories have been used to guide the design of the Web site, Learning with software: Pedagogy and practices.
Designing learning environments on the Web--some issues
The Web in a conversational framework Learning environments designed in line with a conversational framework must include discursive, adaptive, interactive and reflective components (Laurillard, 1993 100). That is, for each of these components, the learner (or reader, as we might call them in the case of a Web site) must not only have access to the major conceptions being explained or advanced but also be able to act on these explanations, to obtain feedback on their own conceptions of the same or different information, and be able to adapt the Web materials as a result of reflection. This is all completed in a framework of dialogue.
Obviously, in the case of providing information for learning on the Web, there can be no synchronous dialogue; yet there does exist the possibility for developing asynchronous dialogue--between the students and the originator of the Web materials, and also between readers. There further exists scope for adapting the information on the Web site by adding to it. Thus, in the sense of creating a conversational framework, particularly as it is interpreted and applied by Laurillard(Laurillard, 1993; Laurillard, 1995), Pask (Pask, 1976), Ramsden (Ramsden, 1992), and particularly by Vygotsky (Vygotsky, 1962), where dialogue is seen as a mediation between the known and the unknown or between the learner (reader) and the object of learning, the Web does provide a workable vehicle, especially in the application of asynchronous forums. However, it is not, perhaps, the ideal vehicle--at best it facilitates parts of the conversational framework described above, or perhaps stimulates some of the elements of instructional dialogue, even if those elements (such as the taking of action on the information) occur in the learner's (reader's) head. Moreover, the provision of intrinsic and meaningful feedback using the Web is especially problematic--in this sense the Web is not truly interactive and has no specific goal outside the goal constructions imposed by the learner.
The Web as a hyper-medium Considered in terms of a hyper-medium, the Web offers no more than the representation of a hypertext information base--it provides a means for representing interconnected segments of information, where the interconnections are usually associative and perhaps part of a complex semantic network. Essentially the links in a hypertext information base are used to imply a relationship between two or more pieces of information, as well as to make explicit a pathway between them (Horney, 1993). Yet unlike a coherent and linearly constructed argument of the type that characterises knowledge represented in a paper-based medium, the associations of information found on a Web site, no matter how complex they are, cannot by themselves represent knowledge simply by implying a relationship between two or more items of information--associating items of information does not equate to the construction of knowledge. For knowledge to be constructed, the reader has to make sense of the information association, by understanding the meaning of the association.
Thus where the Web is used to represent complex knowledge types, such as academic knowledge, it is important to make the associations or links between items or networks of information explicit. Moreover, to embed the use of the Web in a conversational framework, it is necessary to emphasise dialogue between the learner (reader) and the object of learning (the material on the Web), and to provide the facilities for this to occur.
Designing learning environments on the Web--a solution
In light of both conversation frameworks and constructivist theory, learning environments on the Web require certain pedagogical characteristics, including facilities for:
One solution to the provision of all these characteristics is in the use of forum software, software that enables asynchronous dialogue between, learner or reader and other learners; learner and information; and learner and content author. It also facilitates the taking of action on information and, if its use is structured accordingly (that is, if the task goals are described in an appropriate activity), provides a means more generally for the articulation and negotiation of knowledge. Moreover, since it promotes asynchronous dialogue, it infers that learners will be led to reflect on content before offering their own view of the world in the form of a description, or on modifying someone else's (i.e. a fellow learner's, or instructor's) descriptive view of the world. In this sense, the key to the proper use of forums lies with the setting and negotiating of task goals.
Predicting engagement on the Web
Providing multiple access points to information on the Web and providing different ways of navigating information in this medium, is potentially an exciting way of making content material relevant and accessible to a range of readers. However, conceptually this approach presents problems. Not only is it unlikely that the designer of a Web site will be able to represent or provide scope for the navigational preferences of all readers, it is also impossible to predict how a reader will interact with and process information. In educational materials, where the objective is for a reader or learner to process information to construct knowledge, there is little opportunity to ensure whether or how this is likely to occur. In other words, it is not possible to predict how a learner may engage information represented on the Web.
In particular, there is a tendency to see the Web as a convenient, valuable and inexpensive medium over which to conduct professional development. However, as a tool for professional development, the Web probably caters no better than traditional media. Certainly it can provide the means and resources for professionals to think about their own and others' practices, to question their own assumptions in a given domain--but it cannot presuppose that readers will actively process given information in these ways. At best, it can be hoped that readers will reflect on their own experiences or perhaps use the material presented to construct or guide their professional experiences in some way. But effective professional development, as with all learning, has to provide active means of processing and communicating experiential, empirical and theoretical knowledge--and its unclear that the Web can comprehensively provide these means.
Narrative and the Web
Narrative is both a necessary and desirable way of representing some knowledge types, particularly experiential knowledge, which can be best provided for by using a range of conventions deriving from narrative and storytelling as text genres. Furthermore, almost all readers or Web users, can be expected to have a well-developed sense of narrative, since they will have been repeatedly exposed to this genre in both formal and informal learning environments. Indeed, the role of narrative in the representation of knowledge is central to our cognition from earliest childhood (Plowman, 1996, 96).
In this context, the Web is problematic. The key features of narrative are linearity, temporality and causality (Plowman, 1996), whilst the Web is a medium that is non-linear, non-temporal and offers no explicit representations of causality. Thus, in terms of it features as a hypermedium or hypertext information base, the Web is likely to interrupt or disrupt the construction of knowledge on the part of the learner or reader, when the reader is engaging narrative in this medium. Not only can the hyperlinks built into narrative text represented on the Web, disrupt the process of constructing meaning in the text, but also the reader's interaction with the computer (necessary in order to effect a decision or choice) is likely to interfere with the same cognitive process. Moreover, whilst the Web invites or necessitates narrative, or indeed, any text, to be broken down and represented in discrete units, this fact will undoubtedly disrupt the flow of the text in its reading, and thus interfere with the reader's attempts to make meaning.
The solution to this problem is not simplistic, but involves the design of Web sites which support the reader or learner in generating meaning and knowledge from narrative texts on the Web. This can be done by keeping the fracturing of narrative texts to a minimum and ensuring that operational and navigational user-computer interactions are simple. In essence this means that, in narrative texts, designers need to:
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