Daily Bookmarks 10/21/2007

Constructivism & ID  Annotated

  • The article is 10 years old, but it has some interesting perspectives on the interplay of constructivism and instructional design theory. Discusses the nature of knowledge and expertise, cooperative learning, assessment, and instructional strategies.
     – post by christyinsdesign

The expert/novice literature within cognitive psychology reaches similar conclusions about the nature of expertise. Researchers have found that expertise is

–largely intuitive and inaccessible to direct reflection (e.g., Bloom, 1986)

–more pattern-matching than rule-following (Suchman, 1987, Bereiter, 1991)

–more qualitative than quantitative (White & Frederiksen, 1986)

–highly context- and domain-dependent (Brandt, 1988-89).

Such a view of expertise seems also to fit the field of ID.


The role I am advocating for analysis is fairly modest. Analysis provides an overall framework for instruction, and provides extra
help on some tricky parts, such as identifying likely misconceptions or previous knowledge that may undercut students’ efforts to understand the content. The role of the designer is then to design a series of experiences-interactions or environments or products-intended to help students learn effectively. Neither the instruction nor the assessment of learning can be as confidently dictated as thought to be possible in the past. But the important point to keep in mind is that the design role is not lost in such a revised system; the design still happens, only it’s less analytical, more holistic, more reliant on the cooperation of teachers and materials and learners to generously fill in the gaps left gaping by the limitations of our analytical tools. Instruction thus construed becomes much more integrally connected to the context and the surrounding culture. ID thus becomes more truly systemic in the the sense that it is highly sensitive to the conditions of use.

Elearning examples — infographics, simulations, and online courses » Making Change

  • Collection of e-learning examples. Some are simple, some are more advanced. Several simulations are included too.
     – post by christyinsdesign

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