Technologist by day,technologist by night

Conclusion The great ethical responsibility for professional technologies may be in the technologies of education and training being the most effictive and the most humane ways of keeping a population in order and productive, The greatest on-the-job challenge is to avoid exaggerating the contribution of technology, particularly information and communication technologies (ICT). Learning, at root, does not require technology. Learners, in turn, do not absolutely need teachers, technologies, and technology, either by day or by night. What students and trainees deserve are the best available instructional experiences.     

Teacher and technologist beliefs about educational technology

This study investigated perceptions of teachers and educational technologists about the following areas: instructional design, cooperative learning, learner control, school reform, computers and media, and implementation of a key practice in each area in their teaching. Subjects were 477 individuals representing four respondent groups: educational technology faculty, educational technology graduate students, K-8 teachers, and 9–12 teachers. Data were collected using a 30-item, five-choice Likert-type questionnaire containing five items per topic area. Significant differences between groups were found on 16 items, with an overall total of 32 significant between-group differences. Nineteen of the 32 differences were between K-8 teachers and either the educational technology faculty or the graduate students. K-8 teachers had significantly more positive perceptions than one or both of the educational technology groups on all five of the cooperative learning items and on three of the five learner control items. The results suggest approaches that educational technologists can use in teaching instructional design courses and in designing instructional programs for the schools. Deborah L. Lowther is Program Evaluator for the Phoenix Urban Systemic Initiative which is sponsored by the National Science Foundation and Maricopa Community Colleges. The authors wish to acknowledge the contributions of the following people to this study: Gayle Davidson, Thomas Duffy, Nick Eastmond, Donald Ely, Michael Hannafin, Simon Hooper, James Klein, Kyle Peck, Robert Reiser, Lloyd Rieber, and Steven Ross.     

The backyard human performance technologist: Applying the development research methodology to develop and validate a new instructional design framework

Development research methodology (DRM) has been recommended as a viable research approach to expand the practice‐to‐theory/theory‐to‐practice literature that human performance technology (HPT) practitioners can integrate into the day‐to‐day work flow they already use to develop instructional products. However, little has been written about how it can be applied in a workplace setting to allow HPT practitioners to consider this research approach for adoption into their own activities. This article provides a real‐world application of the DRM to help close this literature gap. After providing background information to establish the case context, the article presents an overview of how this research approach was applied to an effort to develop and validate a new instructional design framework for potentially training National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) astronauts for deep space exploration missions. The result of this case indicates that this research methodology provides a viable approach that HPT practitioners can integrate into their current practices to provide a practice‐based research baseline to contribute to the practice‐to‐theory/theory‐to‐practice literature.