1Teaching With TechnologyExpanding Models of Instruction

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Lewin probably did not imagine that the glitz of

technologywrapped in the hyperbole of the approaching millenniumwould make his words as prophetic today as they were when heuttered them in 1951. Our contemporaries who are heavily in-volved in computing education, however, are coming to similarconclusions. As Maddux, Johnson, and Willis (1997) note, "Theuse of conscious theory to guide practice would help us avoid acommon, and debilitating, aspect of educational practicefads"(p. 11). Maddux et al. felt compelled to reissue the call to reasonbecause of what they perceive as the need to counteract "lavishclaims" for computing applications. Such claims, unsubstantiatedby research and theory, consist of grandiose propositions aboutthe educational power of technology that ignore differencesamong learners and variations in objectives. Technology enthusi-asts offer magic bullets, whereas most people don't like, don'town, and can't use technological armaments.
Simply stated, there is no one best way to use technology toeducate either teachers or children. People are too different fromone another, and the objectives of teaching and learning too di-verse to permit the application of an all-purpose, general-effectsmodel of teaching with technology. The so-called killer application,
Teaching With Technology
or killer app, that renders all learners knowledgeable, satisfied,and eager to buy more, is not out there and not likely to be. Educa-tors need to concentrate instead on learning how to use technol-ogy in context, or matching combinations of hardware and soft-ware to the needs and abilities of learners and to the objectives ofinstruction.
Bruce Joyce and Marsha Weil (1972) made this claim yearsago for teaching writ large. They argued that the challenge for stu-dents of teaching was not to model the master, but to master themodel. With a few finely tuned strategies under his or her belt,Joyce and Weil contended, a teacher could venture forth andmatch these strategies to objectives and to learners. They as-sumed, as any reasonable person might, that a teacher could notsimply "develop his or her own style" (a folkway with amazingstaying power) and expect to succeed. Instead, a teacher has todemonstrate a repertoire of well-defined teaching models and beable to apply them when and where appropriate. Joyce and Weil(1996) continue to advance these eminently sensible ideas today.
Different models are meant for different purposes. Socialmodels of teaching emphasize the relationship of the person tosociety or the person's direct relationships with other people. Per-sonal models stress how the individual constructs and organizesreality, often in terms of emotions, self-concept, self-image, andpersonal expression. Behavioral models try to create efficient sys-tems for sequencing learning activities and shaping behavior bymanipulating reinforcement. Information-processing models helppeople handle stimuli from the environment, organize data, per-ceive problems, generate concepts and solutions to problems, anduse verbal and nonverbal symbols.
What Joyce and Weil and others came to realize was thatthis way of thinking need not be bound by anyone's particular defi-nition of what constitutes a model of teaching, or by any particularset of objectives, or even by any particular definition of students.Indeed, the relationships could be stated more generally: Behavior(B) is a function of the person (P) who serves as learner, the envi-ronment (E) that the teacher creates for the learner, and the tasks(T) in which the learner engages, or B = P, E, T (Hunt & Sullivan,1974; Lewin, 1935; McNergney & Carrier, 1981).
This theory, or theory of theories, does not prescribeexactly how the terms should be defined. Instead, it suggests only

WILL TECHNOLOGY REALLY CHANGE EDUCATION?
that they must be accounted for in some fashion to represent aneducational system. The factors do not change simply because webegin to define any of them in part with technology. Behaviors,persons, environments, and tasks depend on each other; they con-stitute a "context" in which an influence on one can affect another.The implications of this way of thinking and behaving with regardto teachers and students have always been numerous, but techno-logical innovations may enhance them dramatically.
One of the more important implications of this multivariateview of the world is that as learners vary in needs and abilities, andas the tasks they address vary, so too must educational environ-ments differ to fit personal and task demands. No single environ-ment can be expected to work with all people for all purposes. Noone approach to teaching or teacher educationbe it technologi-cally driven or otherwisewill yield the same outcomes or behav-iors in all situations. Teaching and objectives and learners andmeasures of success, then, must be considered together. Althoughteacher educators may know all of this on one level, or think theydo, they all too rarely behave as though informed by these tenets.
Interestingly, however, emerging technologies may be cre-ating the conditions that enable both teachers and teacher educa-tors to attend to such complexities. As Figure 4.1 suggests, technol-ogy can be used to help redefine and enrich existing models ofteaching by altering critical attributes of such models and by cre-ating entirely new approaches to teaching and learning. More spe-cifically, technology can be used to influence tasks or objectivesthat a model is meant to address, the sequence of activities inwhich teacher and learners engage, teachers' reactions to stu-dents, the social system in which teaching and learning occur, andeven the assessment of learning. Below, we suggest how these at-tributes might appear in technologically rich environments.
These days, it is almost impossible to find elementary andsecondary schools and institutions of higher education where theacquisition and use of technical skills are not a primary or second-ary objective of instruction. These skills might range from simplekeyboarding to complex interactions with people and sources ofinformation in cyberspace. The avowed intent of many training ef-forts is ultimately to help learners integrate such skills into theirrepertoire of problem-solving abilities. The acquisition of skills andtheir application, then, offer new possibilities for teaching.
Teaching about and with technology follows identifiable se-quences of activities. For instance, teaching people how to partici-pate in an on-line videoconference involving multiple parties re-quires that each party agree on the topic of the conference,prepare to air their own thinking on the issues by discussing thetopic among themselves, and write several questions to ask theother parties involved. Once these preconference activities arecompleted, participants must identify the appropriate computeraddress for the on-line session. This is followed by loading andopening the videoconferencing program, adjusting camera andsound levels, and participating in turn as designated by a modera-tor. The success of an on-line videoconference depends heavily onteachers' and learners' capabilities to implement the appropriatesequence of activities.
Technologically speaking, there are increasing numbers ofways for teachers to react to students in on-line models of instruc-tion. Internet- and Web-based technologies present possibilitiesfor synchronous and asynchronous discussions, journals, video-conferences, and more. These mechanisms can be used to en-courage, acknowledge, and restrict student participation. It is as ifthe familiar television commercial slogan for long-distance calling,"Reach out and touch someone," has finally come to teaching, buthas done so in ways never before possible. What is communicatedby that touch, however, is still up to the teacher.
If the social system defines the hierarchy or authority levelsin a model of teaching, then a teacher has an entirely new set oftechnological tools to shape that hierarchy. One way to think aboutthe social system is in terms of how technology can vary commu-nication and privacy options to control dialogue (Bronack, 1997).At the most basic level, two or more people communicate on-lineprivately and selectively using e-mail and journals. A slightly moresophisticated level is represented by communication between anindividual and a more intimate discussion group, where a persontalks with peers who share a common interest. Yet another level ofcommunication involves representation or advocacyan instruc-tor group discussion on a distance education course where theinstructor represents his or her constituency to a larger groupmight exemplify this level. Finally, dialogue that allows little or noknowledge of the impact of one's communicationsuch as broad-cast communications or the creation and use of a Web pageopens on-line communication among people in a fashion neverbefore available to the average person.
Support systems are central to the implementation of anyinstructional model that uses technology. The hardware and soft-ware demands dictate what can and cannot be done. The capac-ity, flexibility, and interconnectedness of machines, programs, andpeople can combine to yield an array of options. The human sup-port needed to make the hardware and software functional maybe less obvious, but it is certainly no less central to teaching aboutand with technology. So what do these factors mean to teachersand teacher educators? If the support is not present, the options ofusing various models are constrained.
Educators often select and create models of teaching byconcentrating on outcomes or the possible effects of instruction.
How a teacher chooses to measure his or her teaching success canbe influenced by an array of technological devices. The use of elec-tronic logs and journals, discussion groups, chat groups, and soforth yields a range of options for judging student participation andlearningoptions by which a model can be driven and assessed.
The point is that teachers and teacher educators, regardlessof their age and technological expertise, are not ignorant of whatworks in teaching. They are most likely to survive and prosper inthis technological age when they listen to a set of values deeplyrooted in the professional knowledge of teaching, of learning, andof the content to be mastered.

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