The coming collision between automated instruction and social constructivism

Abstract: There are currently two groups of individuals in instructional technology research which are pursuing a research agenda aimed at making education scale to very large numbers of students and improve in effectiveness. These two groups are walking down diverging paths, the first toward driving humans out of the instructional loop, and the second toward adding more humans to the instructional loop. This chapter explores these research paths in more depth and proposes a manner in which they may be reconciled.