ITForum Paper #1 Technology as Cognitive Tools: Learners as Designers

Technologies of instruction have traditionally been used as conveyors of information, communicators of knowledge, or tutors of students. Our field of educational communications is founded on the premise that communicating content to students will result in learning. In educational communications, information or intelligence (in many different forms) is encoded visually or verbally in the symbols systems employed by each technology. During the "instructional " process, learners perceive the messages encoded in the medium and sometime "interact " with the technology. Interaction is normally operationalized in terms of student input to the technology, which triggers some form of answer judging and response from the technology in the form of some previously encoded (canned) message. Technologies as conveyors of information have been used for centuries to "teach " students by presenting prescribed information to them which they are obligated to "learn." Historically, educational communications have been developed and marketed to teachers by teams of educators, including instructional designers, subject matters specialists, media producers, and media managers. The instructional programs are designed using a variety of systematic instructional design models (Gagne, Briggs, & Wager, 1987; Dick & Carey, 1990) which have bee