Instructional Design and Development Tools

The implications of a layered view of designs formed the basis of a chapter (co-authored with Kimberly Lawless, Joel Duffin, and Thor Anderson) on the instructional uses of the Web entitled "The Web and Model-Centered Instruction". We described a "convergence zone" where design language structures (designer terms) meet tool structures (tool terms). It is there that the limitations of Web design structures place heavy constraints on the range of conceptual designs designers might want to create. In many cases under-developed tools, which are themselves created to lighten the development burden, are incapable of expressing a design, forcing the designer to resort to more difficult and costly programming. Peter Fairweather and I described this problem in an article titled "Distributed Learning: Two Steps Forward, One Back? One Forward, Two Back?" (IEEE Concurrency, Vol. 8 No. 2, April-June, 2000, p.8). In this article, we tried to show how the limited media logic structures offered by the Web represent a fall-back from the richer set of structures that matured over years in desktop computer-based development tools. We did not describe those earlier structures as an ideal set, but we lamented the loss of more advanced capabilities that took place with the Web's advent - a loss of interactivity that has yet to be made up.

Contact me at:   andy_gibbons@byu.edu