2. William David "Bill" Winn (1945–
2006)
• an American educational
psychologist
• Professor at the University of
Washington College of Education
• Known for his work on how
people learn from diagrams, and
on how cognitive and
constructivist theories of
learning can help instructional
designers.
3. This paper :
reviews research on learning
environments
historical perspective on
educational technology
research
a selective view of the
current state of the
discipline.
5. WHAT HAS RESEARCH
ACCOMPLISHED SO FAR?
▪ The Age of Instructional Design: A Focus
on Content
Instruction could be :
planned, designed, evaluated, and revised
before it was used with students.
Two benefits:
Help students learn
Enabled students to learn on their own.
6. Influential work of Gange et al:
▪ Types of Learning
▪ Task Analysis
▪ The products of task analysis
▪ Events of instruction
▪ Technology – based instruction
7. The Age of Message Design: A
Focus on Format
▪ Mediated instruction
▪ Levie’s work (Levie, 1978)
▪ Two Circumstances:
Development of computer hardware
Body of research (Cronbach and
Snow,1977)
Instruction format (Fleming and
Levie)
8. The Age of Simulation: A Focus
on Interaction
▪ Well-designed instructional strategies
(Clark)
9. Kozma’s Reply:
▪ Significant advances in media technology
▪ Graphics
▪ Sound
▪ Learning in Simulations
▪ Two advantages
Implementation of learner control
Ability of students to do things they could
never do in the real world.
13. Current research on learning in
technology supported learning
environments
▪ Research on Artificial Learning
Environments:
▪ Why learn in an artificial environment
when there is plenty to learn in the
natural world?
▪ Two reasons:
because it is too dangerous
the concepts and principles that govern
the behavior of the natural world are
often hidden.
14. Reification:
▪ allows students to experience in computer-
created virtual learning environments what
they cannot experience in the real world,
which is the most important contribution to
learning.
▪ Reification relies on metaphor
▪ both real and reified objects have equal
status in virtual environments
▪ visiting artificial learning environments,
helps students understand concepts and
processes that the environments represent.
15. Research on Inscriptional
Systems
▪ Learning environments use a variety of realistic
and metaphorical representations of data in
graphic, auditory and haptic modalities.
▪ “inscription” by Pea (1994) as an alternative to
“representation”
▪ The CoVIS project (Gordin et al., 1996)
▪ Two Principles
▪ datasets and models used by scientists to
represent and study the world
let students create their own visualizations
16. Other research
▪ Virtual environments - Barab et al.
▪ Virtual worlds –Winn
▪ The act of designing and creating
environments with concepts and principles
helps students master the topics with depth
and clarity.
▪ One problem - world-building, for younger
students who have not yet learned to reason
abstractly, tends to limit their ability to
transfer
17. Research on Social Aspects of
Learning
▪ Learning takes place through social interaction.
▪ Knowledge Integration Environment (KIE) project:
19. Research on Distributed
Cognition in Learning Communities
▪ Whether Cognition is distributed over entire
communities linked by technology.
▪ important point - is that at any time no one
person or device is in possession of all of the
information necessary
▪ The knowledge required to get the job done is in
the truest sense distributed among a community
of people and devices.
▪ Pask (1975) suggested that learning to solve
problems was like a conversation, whose goal was
to “arrive at an agreement over an
understanding.”
20. Distributed learning:
Learning communities comprised of people with
varying backgrounds and levels of expertise
a technology that supports communication and
productive activity within the community
and engagement in authentic activity.
Case Study:
Malarney’s research – “Classroom at Sea”
▪ Malarney’s study shows that technology alone is
not sufficient to create a successful learning
community.
21. Research on Complete Systems of
Variables in “Real-World” Contexts
Necessity:
▪ The increasing emphasis on learning
environments brings is the complexity of the
interactions that occur while the students
are learning.
▪ “design experiments”
are iterative unlike tradition experiments
22. Implications for Practice
▪ Educational technology research - disconnected from
practice
▪ The research has been conducted in laboratories,
isolated from practical implementation of research
findings
▪ Been hard for practitioners to find and use
information, materials, and programs of activities
that the research has created.
▪ Following the references to projects cited in this
paper, the reader is likely to arrive at a web site that
has useable materials to download or offers free
membership in a learning community.
▪ A lot of the research mentioned in this paper has not
yet produced useable materials and strategies.
23. Reason :
▪ The more complex learning environments
still require more powerful equipment to run
them than is commonly available in schools.
▪ The technology that is available to schools
becomes more powerful, without increases in
cost, any learning environment is useable in a
school.
▪ Practical suggestions for
practitioners:
24. Conclusions for Research:
▪ Educational researchers should, study which
characteristics of these environments help or
hinder learning.
▪ Sharing information encourages useful discourse
about the environment that supports learning.
▪ Technology can be used to support interaction
among students and teachers.
▪ Finally, research methodologies should adjust to
the demands of studying increasingly more
complex interactions between students and their
environments.
▪ Design experiments are a good start.
25. Concerns:
▪ Pushing and pulling schools to change
▪ “push” is the concern that our schools are not
doing as well and so must be reformed.
▪ “pull” is the demonstrated effectiveness of other
ways to educate people, ranging from home
schooling to on-line classes and programs.
