Book Reviews
Retrospection and Prediction: Handbook of Distance Education
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The 872 pages of the Handbook of Distance Education, edited by Michael G. Moore
and William Anderson, are impressive testimonies to a passion for testing theory
based on knowledge.
The Handbook brings together some 50 respected authorities in the field
for the enlightenment of “students, researchers, practitioners, and policymakers”
who need to know “what is known before they begin to search for new knowledge
or begin to design and deliver new programs” (xi).
Each contributor to the volume surveys the research and attends to common
questions:
What is the current state of your special research area in contemporary
distance education in America?
What knowledge about this is based on empirical research evidence?
What further research is needed in light of the changes that are occurring?
(xiii)
As editor of the American Journal of Distance Education, advisor to doctoral
students, and consultant to a wide range of institutions, governments, and
international agencies over several decades, Moore emphasizes that although
technology may be new, distance education has a rich history of organization,
philosophies, and issues that is not technologically specific. Thus, to
begin programs without first understanding distance education results “in
a chaos of misdirected, naïve, costly, and wasteful initiatives-a fair summary
of the state of the art at many institutions today” (xi).
The seven sections of the book are:
Part I. Historical and Conceptual Foundations
Part II. Learning and Learners
Part III. Design and Instruction
Part IV. Policies, Administration, and Management
Part V. Different Audiences in Distance Education
Part VI. The Economics of Distance Education
Part VII. International Perspectives
Opening with “Distance Education Theory, Methodology, and Epistemology:
A Pragmatic Paradigm,” Farhad Saba's overview begins: “America's approach
to distance education has been pragmatic and atheoretical” (3). Using systems
dynamics to describe distance education as an emerging paradigm, Faba views
distance as an industrial social construct subsumed by a postindustrial context. Because
online learning can trace data for each individual learner, including prior
knowledge and the learner's process of constructing new knowledge, the new
learning paradigm should explain the moment of teaching as a process which
produces both expected and unexpected results, anticipated but not determined.
Likewise, in a “Theory of Distance Education Based on Empathy,” Börje Holmberg
theorizes that while “hundreds of distance education courses all over the
world are more like handbooks than conversational presentation of instructional
content,” distance learning online affords greater opportunities for spontaneous,
interactive, empathic, constructive learning-teaching conversations. Thus,
he theorizes conversational style is more conducive to learning than lecture,
a theory both explanatory and predictive.
The style of the Handbook is conversational, making its insights easily
accessible to readers seeking grounded solutions and glimpses of the future. For
example, Terry Anderson adds another dimension to the important concept of
interaction. Not only do learners and teachers interact with each other
and with content and technology, content can interact with content via intelligent
agents that are “long-lived, semi-autonomous, proactive, and adaptive” [MIT,
2000] (139). User agents can negotiate with each other for help with course-related
topics. In attending to the majority of distance learners whose experience
with learning does not align with academic traditions of challenge and debate,
Cheris Karamae advocates for better understanding and explicit honoring of
cross cultural communications in educational design and technology.
The Handbook is particularly strong in describing assessment, evaluation,
research design and agendas, benchmarks and frameworks, consistently emphasizing
that quality improves in environments devoted to measuring progress towards
goals. But too often, these values are only an afterthought, rather than
the foremost consideration for building the world UNESCO cited in 1948 in
its Universal Declaration of Human Rights:
Everyone has a right to education. Education shall be free . . . (796).
In his discussion of global issues, Y.L. Visser notes that the advance to
meaningful learning focuses on “the discovery of persistence as a strategy
to manage life's challenges” (798). As a compendium of persistent desires
to erase learning barriers, the Handbook is a worthwhile effort towards reducing
“the social technical, economic, and geographic distances” (141) that separate
teachers and learners.
Author: Michael
G. Moore, William G. Anderson
Format: Cloth
Publication Date: March 2003
ISBN: 0805839240
Available from: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. https://www.erlbaum.com/shop/tek9.asp?pg=products&specific=0-8058-3924-0
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