Structural Coupling as a Foundation for Instructional Design

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Author(s): Jeanette Bopry (National Institute of Education, Nayang Technological University, Singapore)and Donald J. Cunningham (USF St. Petersburg, USA)
Copyright: 2008
Pages: 17
Source title: Social Information Technology: Connecting Society and Cultural Issues
Source Author(s)/Editor(s): Terry T. Kidd (Texas A&M University, USA)and Irene Chen (University of Houston – Downtown, USA)
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-59904-774-4.ch023

Keywords: Information Science Reference / Media & Communications / Social Computing / Social Networking

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Abstract

In this chapter, we describe an alternative to the cognitive and neo-behavioral views of learning that currently dominate the field of instructional design and development. Founded in the work of Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, this view questions the fundamental notions that the environment can actually be “instructive” and that instruction can be prescribed to change learners in predictable ways. Instead we offer a proscriptive model of instructional design, one that embeds the process in the basic foundation that learners are organizationally closed, structurally determined, and coupled with their environment. Instead of threatening the field of instructional design, as some writers have expressed, we argue that this approach actually “sets it free”!

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Structural Coupling as a Foundation for Instructional Design

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