The Practice of Instructional Technology

Most of us take for granted the phrase "instructional technology," without much thought about the implications of labelling a field a "technology." It becomes a question, however, when some fields designate themselves a "science" (computer science, materials science, etc.). And it becomes a pressing question when doctoral students want feedback on their research proposals. What kinds of study are appropriate? What are the appropriate subjects of study? How are questions asked? And how can one know when they are answered? These issues and others led me to study in more detail what it meant to practice instructional technology. I recorded my conclusions in a paper titled, "The Practice of Instructional Technology". It was published electronically as an occasional paper by the Association for Educational Communications and Technology on their Web page (under "Publications" at http://www.aect.org). A portion of it was also published in Educational Technology under the same title (Gibbons, A. S. (2003). The Practice of Instructional Technology: Science and Technology. Educational Technology, 43(5), 11-16). A summary of the paper's conclusions: The goal of science is explanation, and the method of science is analysis The goal of technology is design and artifice, and the method of technology is synthesis Scientists are in search of descriptive knowledge; technologists are in search of generative knowledge Despite a symbiotic relationship between science and technology, there is benefit to distinguishing technology as a knowledge-producing activity, with its unique process, culture, and knowledge criteria As individuals and collectively we alternate between scientific and technological modes of thinking as the problem demands The nature of knowledge produced by technological activity should be examined in order to provide guidelines and standards for certifying knowledge claims The paper is in two parts. The first is occupied with establishing technology as a knowledge-producing activity. Also in this part I characterize technology as a structure-creation process and draw on Herbert Simon's Sciences of the Artificial to show the enormous size and complexity of the body of knowedge required to support this activity. The second part uses Walter Vincenti's What Engineers Know and How They Know It (Johns Hopkins U Press, 1990) as an example of technological epistemology. Vincenti suggests several broad categories of essential technological knowledge. I apply these categories to the work of the instructional technologist, attempting to show major areas of appropriate research and development. I feel that being able to better describe what technologists do and the types of knowledge they produce will contribute to a public discussion that will help technology mature and discipline its inquiries in the same way science has. Accepting technological research as a knowledge-producing endeavor suggests other forms of knowledge-production as well. Vic Bunderson and I, in an article titled "Explore, Explain, Design" (In K. Kempf (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Social Measurement, 2005, New York: Elsevier), proposed that science, technology, and natural history, as three ways of coming to know, stimulate questions in each other as they answer their own questions. One additional insight from seeing technological research independently came from asking how that influenced the systematic generation of research questions. Vincenti's analysis of the domains of technological knowledge (Vincenti, W. (1990). What Engineers Know and How They Know It, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press) suggested several priority categories of research, which I described in "Instructional Design and Technology Models: Their Impact on Research and Teaching in Instructional Design and Technology" (Bichelmeyer, B., Boling, E., & Gibbons, A. (2006). In M. Orey, V. McClendon, and R. Branch, Educational Media and Technology Yearbook, 2006, Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited).

Contact me at:   andy_gibbons@byu.edu