Editorial, Constructivists: Don't Blame the Tools!

In a recent meeting I witnessed a professor lambaste the representatives of a distance education delivery system, who, he said, promoted the use of communications technology that results inevitably in an industrial form of teaching that emphasizes packaged information and authoritarian teacher ownership of knowledge. This is incompatible with postmodern learning theory. It makes it impossible for people like him who—in the classroom—practice a more progressive, constructivist teaching approach. As the instructional designersprotested theirdisinterestas towhat teachingphilosophyanyinstructor wished to follow, I recalled a previous discussion that in one respect reflected a view that was consistent with the professor’s. Where the professor blamed the communications tools for what I perceive as his inability to work out how to use them to provide the kind of learning experience he wants, on that earlier occasion it was the designers who went overboard in the other direction. They have spent a lot of time, money, and creativity in exchanging one Internet delivery platform for a different one, and to hear them speak it would seem that most of the challenges and problems of teaching at a distance will now recede into memory, so wonderful are the accoutrements of the new system, once this new system was broken in. Needless to say “breaking in” actually meant dealing with a lot of breakdowns—and so much confusion for students and faculty as we unlearned one system and learned the new, that we would have greedily snatched back our old tools if we had the chance; but also, needless to say, just as we had no choice about adopting the new system, there was no question of reverting to the old. The two anecdotes lead to the same question, however. Why is it that both protagonists and antagonists put so much store on the tools? Of course they are important and necessary, but surely they can’t determine the quality of performance, in either direction. As I think about this, I have to admit that more than once I have bought a set of new golf clubs in hope that just one more change of equipment will reduce my handicap, and looking at it that way, I can understand the view of the technically minded enthusiast. And being a fairly incompetent golfer, I can see how easy it is to blame the tools when things don’t go too well. Even so, being rational—while knowing there is likely to be some real effect when moving from a very primitive tool to a really sophisticated one—we know that when we upgrade only marginally, the effects of changing the tool are likely to be far less than ei-