ClappingTree’s Web 2.0

“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” — Romeo to Juliet, in reply to her complaint that his name is all that keeps him from her (a play by William Shakespeare)

WHILE BROWSING IN THE LIBRARY two weeks ago, i happened to pick up a book published in 2002 by Diana Laurillard entitled, “Rethinking University Teaching — a framework for the effective use of learning technologies”. Was quite excited when i learnt about Laurillard’s five media forms for supporting active learning. They overlap almost neatly with Nichani’s four Interactive Visual Explainers (2003).

‘NARRATIVE’ is the same in both, ‘Interactive’ is equivalent to ‘Explorative’ and ‘Adaptive’ to ‘Simulative’. Laurillard’s ‘Communicative’ and ‘Productive’ are not in Nichani’s classification, but they coincide with the ‘Collaborative’ and ‘Constructive’ in my extrapolation last year (see ‘Industry’ vs. ‘Academia’ III).

Just now, during a lunchtime talk, when the manager of the eLearning Competency Centre mentioned Dr Ruth Clark’s Four Learning Architectures, my curiosity was piqued. Other than the different names, ‘Receptive’, ‘Directive’, ‘Explorative’ and ‘Guided Discovery’ seem to be identical to Nichani’s ‘Narrative’, ‘Instructive’, ‘Explorative’ and ‘Simulative’!

Just whose classification came first? Did one know about the other’s work? Or is this a case of great minds think alike?

i began to search for information on Clark and her work. Found a number of interesting things, among them: Clark’s learning architectures have been adopted by Cisco in its learning objects model. Clark also has a book entitled E-Learning and the Science of Instruction: Proven guidelines for consumers and designers of multimedia learning. Must borrow this book soon.

These days, as i continued working on the InfoGraphics Design projects for my part-time studies, different theories are beginning to fall into place as in a jigsaw puzzle. Gagne’s Nine Instructional Events (1985), Keller’s ARCS model (1987), Lave & Wenger’s situated learning (1991), Clark’s architectures (2000), Nichani’s explainers (2003), Laurillard’s media forms (2002), Miller’s Cognitve Load theory (1956), Merrill’s Component Display Theory (1983), Reigeluth’s Elaboration Theory (1983), Horton’s layering tactics (2000) and Wurman’s chunking tactics (2001).

After so many wild goose chases, the trail is finally getting hot!