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  • MOBILE PHONES IN AFRICA: TRANSFORMING SOCIETY AND (MAYBE) EDUCATION
  • Dare We Practice What We Preach?

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Constructivist Theory applied to Instruction: the continuing debate.

Alexander Romiszowski
(Educational Technology 48/1, January-February 2008, pp62-63)

Why bring this topic up again?

I am currently back in Brazil, after a nine month long stay in Africa, where I was working on several projects related to distance education and the use of ICT for Development (ICT4D). Shortly before going to Africa, I was engaged on program planning and implementation for the twenty second ICDE World Conference on Distance Education. During the last month or two, since my return from Africa, I was similarly engaged, assisting the program planning committee of the Brazilian Association for Educational Technology (ABT – Associação Brasileira de Tecnologia Educacional) to organize the program of its annual conference. As I write this column, the ABT conference has just finished. Some aspects of discussions at this conference have stimulated me to focus this month’s column on a topic which we have already addressed in a previous column – the apparent misalignment between theory and practice as regards constructivism and instruction, and the forces that are really shaping instructional change.

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Learning Management in a Historical Perspective.

Alex Romiszowski.
(Educational Technology 47/6, November-December 2007, pp60-61)

Project PLAN – was it an early form of LMS?  

The year was 1967. As a young researcher, working in the UK in the newly emerging field of Educational Technology, I arranged a 3-month study tour of centers of R&D in North America. It was a busy schedule: a couple of days at professor Skinner’s labs in Boston, reviewing the latest research on programmed instruction; a visit to OISE in Toronto where some of the earliest R+D on CAI was underway; a stay at a Job Core Center in Lincoln, Nebraska, where the whole program ran on contingency-management principles; a visit to New Mexico to see how some Zuni Indian villagers were studying by means of a system of learner-directed, on-demand-video (what’s new in ed. tech?).

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Instructional Design, Learning Objects and SCORM revisited

Alexander Romiszowski
(Educational Technology 47/4, July-August 2007, pp61-63)

The ID+SCORM conference.
As I write this column, in April of 2007, the third ID+SCORM Symposium has just taken place at Brigham Young University, in Provo Utah. Shortly before the event, I accessed the conference description and call for papers. I was directed to several URLs, including one to the paper, published in this journal, that summarized the principal issues discussed at the first of these conferences, held in 2002 (Bush, M. D. Connecting Instructional Design to International Standards for Content Reusability, Educational Technology, 42(6), 5-13, November-December 2002). I had read the paper at the time of publication, as I had been following, maybe with some skepticism, the growth of interest in the creation of learning object economies and application of standards that might facilitate their reusability. I was also directed to a critique of some of the points raised in Bush’s paper, which I had not read before, that was published by Stephen Downes in 2003, in his Blog. This was interesting, especially for Downes’ claim that “…design and reusability are incompatible….. design requires specificity, and specificity prohibits reusability…. conversely, reusability requires generality, and generality prohibits design.”

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MOBILE PHONES IN AFRICA:
TRANSFORMING SOCIETY AND (MAYBE) EDUCATION
Alexander Romiszowski
(Educational Technology 47/3, May-June 2007, pp60-61
An African Scenario from 2003

The country is Mozambique. The year is 2003. I was contracted to perform a baseline study and evaluate progress on the planning and implementation of an “Open School” pilot project. This was in the predominantly rural and sparsely populated Province of Nampula, situated in the North of the country. At that time, only about 6% of the secondary school age children of Mozambique were graduating from high school, partly because of limited access to secondary schools, partly due to high rates of drop-out. But that was the national average - the situation in Nampula was much more serious. Only around 3% of secondary school age children were even entering secondary education, and this was because the few existing secondary schools could accommodate no more than 3% of the potential candidates. The primary school system, which had to be almost totally rebuilt from scratch since the end of the civil war a decade or so before, was approaching the UN’s Millennium Development Goals of universal access. But the secondary and high school systems still had a long way to go.

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Dare We Practice What We Preach?

Alexander Romiszowski.
(Educational Technology 47/2, March-April 2007, pp61-64)

WHY DID I MISS WRITING A COLUMN FOR THE PREVIOUS ISSUE?

This column follows four months after the previous one that was published in the September/October 2006 issue of the magazine. I had to skip an issue due to other work on several projects with overlapping timelines. Up to September, I was fully occupied organizing the program for the ICDE World Conference on Distance Education. Then came the conference itself, followed by work on editing the 400-odd papers in preparation for production of the conference proceedings. In parallel, I started to work on three projects, one in the USA, one in Mozambique and the third in Azerbaijan. All three projects are concerned with curriculum and course design/development. This made it difficult to meet my column-writing deadlines. However, it also suggested that the next column could well address some aspects of curriculum and course design that have appeared interesting or critical in one, or maybe all, of these overlapping projects.

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First Principles of Instructional Design:
the recurring issue of knowledge vs. skill.
Alexander J. Romiszowski.
(Educational Technology 46/6, November-December 2006, pp67-71)

Forward into the Breach? Or Back to First Principles?
The first of this series of “Topics for Debate” columns focused on the issues surrounding the promotion and assurance of Quality in Distance, Flexible and ICT-based Education.  This topic was chosen as it was the theme of the then-forthcoming ICDE World Conference on Distance Education. The column raised some questions regarding such issues as whether technological or pedagogical advances were leading the quest for effectiveness, efficiency and quality improvements in the new e-learning forms of distance education. It questioned to what extent the quest for quality was different in the context of these new media, or whether there were some underlying basic principles that are equally valid in both distance and conventional learning contexts. It also questioned the long term sustainability of the trend towards collaborative group learning in online environments unless something is done to limit the extra workload this places on the teachers, the financial misconceptions that institutions tend to make about the real costs of effective e-learning systems, and some of the pedagogical misconceptions that are introduced by such catch-phrase terms as reusable learning objects, SCORM compliance, and blended learning.

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Constructivism Revisited: progress in ever decreasing circles

Alexander Romiszowski
(Educational Technology 46/5, September-October 2006, pp61-63)

Are post-objectivist educators on the wrong track(s)?

About two years ago, this magazine published an animated exchange, instigated by Clifton Chadwick’s somewhat provocative article, entitled “Why I am not a Constructivist”.  I read this article and the series of rebuttals and replies with interest, noting particularly the way that the discussion developed as argument was followed by counter-argument. Chadwick’s original paper, as I recall, rejected the constructivist position as a basis for the design and implementation of instruction on the grounds that such approaches have not been shown to lead to instructional improvements, and then proceeded to an analysis of constructivist philosophies in order demonstrate why such approaches could not be expected to add value to the teaching-learning process. The ensuing rebuttals, however, focused on Chadwick’s interpretation of the philosophies and largely ignored the initial reason for including such an article in a magazine that focuses on the technology of education, where “technology” is understood in the broad sense of applying scientifically proven knowledge to the solution of practical real-world problems.

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This article is the first of a planned series of “topics for debate” that will be a regular column within the pages of Educational Technology. The objective is to focus on issues within the general field covered by the magazine that either are highly topical and already being hotly debated, or else are largely being ignored but maybe should be generating debate. My role, and that of my occasional collaborators (I have one today), will be to “stir it up”, by addressing the issue in as provocative a manner as is deemed “politically correct” (by the magazine’s editors). Your role, as reader, will be to respond to the challenge, adding your insights and comments to the debate.

Quality Assurance in Distance Learning: some micro, macro and mega issues.
Alexander Romiszowski
(Educational Technology 46/4, July-August 2006, pp57-59)
Promoting Quality in Distance, Flexible and ICT-based Education.

This rather lengthy title is the theme of the next ICDE World Conference on Distance Education, to be held September 3-6, 2006 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. It is significant that this theme and its sub-themes, as explained on the conference site (www.icde22.org.br), were generated in debate between representatives of over a dozen distance education institutions from nearly so many countries. Obviously, a large number of practitioners of distance education consider the issue of quality assurance to be worthy of debate.

To start the ball rolling, let’s analyze how the ICDE conference planners view the topic. First of all, it is significant that they felt the need to use a somewhat lengthy title for the main theme – one that highlights the relatively new ideas of flexible learning (anytime, anywhere, etc.) and e-learning (ICT-based) in addition to the basic idea of learning at a distance. This raises the question, in my mind, of the extent that the “new”, ICT-based approaches have changed or raised new quality-related issues, as compared to the “old” methods of distance education, or indeed of education in general. Are we facing new challenges, or the same old ones that we have never adequately addressed? Second, it is interesting to see how the planners have subdivided the overall theme into sub-themes, to reveal the complexity of the topic and its systemic structure. This structure will help us to organize our own thinking and discussion with respect to the many issues involved. In the following sentences, I will follow the example of the ICDE22 website and shorten the full version of the conference theme to the acronym “DFICTE”. 

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