Choosing a Paradigm for Design and Evaluation
As the power of both personal computers and software authoring tools/environments have developed, answers to questions about the design of educational software can now be tested as well as debated a priori. But because all explanations are "under" descriptions, we are faced with the question of how to accurately, adequately and robustly describe the characteristics of educational software, for the purposes of design and evaluation.
For many years, one source of such descriptions has come from a field called "instructional design" (for a set of interesting links see Martin Ryder's Instructional Design Models page at the School of Education at the University of Colorodo at Denver). While there are a number of approaches to instructional design, one assumption they share is that the design of instructional materials, whether systems or curricula or courses or software, should make use of the most efficient standardized methods for teaching and learning (i.e. they should be based on technique(s)). Three questions:
Today, we'll compare two rather different approaches to describing educational software, one motivated by cognitive theory and the other by semiotics. One question to keep in mind is whether/how adopting different ways of characterizing what software is and does can make a difference in the design and structure of interfaces, interactivity, and the "feel" of the program.
Robert Gray's "Microcomputer Educational Software Design and Development: Lessons Learned from Learning Theory" (1990), and Osvaldo Luiz de Oliveira and Maria Cecelia Calani Baranauskas' "Semiotics as a basis for educational software deisgn" (2000)
We'll discuss these articles, led by Jon and Damien, and see whether or not an approach to the design and evaluation of software that takes both of these approaches into account might be possible.
For next time: Read Sandholtz, Ringstaff and Dwyer 1997 (chapters 1-5 for Monday and chapters 6-11 for Wednesday).