Joughin, Gordon --- "Book Review: Rethinking University Teaching: A Framework for the Effective Use of Educational Technology" [1994] LegEdRev 11; (1994) 5(2) Legal Education Review 223
BOOK REVIEW
Diana Laurillard
Rethinking University Teaching: A Framework for
the Effective Use of Educational Technology
Routledge, London, 1993
284 pages. $29.95
Available from The Law Book Company
Diana Laurillard’s Rethinking University Teaching: A Framework for
the Effective Use of Educational Technology is an important book. At a time
when questions of quality are coming to the fore in higher education, this book
directly addresses
how technology can be used to enhance the quality of teaching
and learning. As in most fields of university teaching, legal educators
are
making increasing use of technology not only to overcome logistical problems,
but to actually teach more students better. In
my own country of Australia,
workshops for law teachers now invariably include a component on the use of
technology, and in this
year alone two national legal education conferences have
been held to consider educational technology and computer assisted legal
education. This experience is no doubt echoed worldwide. Since much technology
is applied in a theoretical vacuum, any work which
promises a coherent
educational framework for the use of technology is likely to represent a
valuable contribution.
Rethinking University Teaching consists of
three distinct but tightly integrated parts in which Laurillard first
establishes the underlying elements of student learning
and hence of teaching,
analyses a range of media according to these elements, and then, again on the
basis of these elements, presents
a systematic approach to media design.
Part I: What students need from educational technology creates the
theoretical structure on which the whole work depends. Each chapter in Part I is
a concentrated discussion of a key theme,
from which Laurillard systematically
builds to a thoroughly argued conclusion. This part begins with an acceptance of
the now widely
acknowledged conception of teaching as “making learning
possible”, and proceeds, through an overview and critique of
the notion of
“situated learning”, to a conception of academic learning as having
a “second-order” character.
That is, academic learning is only
partly about a student’s direct experience of the world, and largely about
the student’s
interaction with the reflections of others on their
experience. Thus learning is about “percepts” (direct perception
of
the world) as well as “precepts” (the conclusions drawn by others,
such as teachers and textbook authors, which are
then presented to students).
This is a useful distinction to make in the context of teaching law, though the
terminology is awkward
and the teaching of “precepts” has been
vehemently and articulately rejected by such critics of orthodox education as
Paulo Friere.
Following in the phenomenographic footsteps of Marton,
Säljö, Dahlgren, Ramsden and others, Laurillard sees the essence
of
student learning as coming to an accepted understanding of a subject’s
underlying conceptions. Teaching therefore involves
finding out what
misconceptions are held by students, challenging these, and helping students
develop the required conceptions. This
process is related to both the
student’s stage of intellectual and ethical development (as defined by
Perry), and their conceptions
of learning (which Laurillard terms their
“epistemology”). This view of learning as a change in conceptions
leads to
an understanding of learning based on five interrelated steps or
activities in which students must engage for learning to occur.
To use
Laurillard’s own terminology, these steps require students to:
- “apprehend the structure of the discourse” — this includes relating evidence to argument and structuring content into a coherent whole;
- “integrate the sign with the signified — this involves learning to express underlying meanings in accepted language;
- “act on the world and on descriptions of the world” — applying theory to practice;
- use feedback; and
- reflect on the cycle of goal-action-feedback.
By now it should be possible
to see the richness, value, limitations and even frustrations associated with
this book. The richness
and value arise because, from within a phenomenographic
framework, Laurillard has generated an accurate, appealing, and apparently
practical guide to teaching that can be readily applied to a range of media. The
limitations arise from the fact that the framework
is exclusively
phenomenographic — no attempt is made to acknowledge or include any other
perspectives with which readers may
be familiar, and in fact Laurillard is
unfortunately dismissive of widely respected theorists from the well established
fields of
instructional design and instructional psychology. The frustrations
arise from the complexity of ideas and the plethora of jargon
which the reader
is required to master in order to follow Laurillard’s argument and
appreciate her conclusions. As well as
the terms mentioned above, in Part I the
reader must negotiate “non-dualistic epistemology”, “deep
approach”,
“object-level activities”, and “outcome
spaces” — all terms which are full of meaning but, being left
undefined by Laurillard, are likely to intimidate or even thwart the average law
teacher.
For the reader who successfully negotiates Part I, Part II
Analysing teaching media is an excellent analysis of the uses and
limitations of specific media, helpfully categorised as audio-visual (including
lectures,
print, video); hypermedia (hypertext and non-interactive multi-media);
interactive media (simulations, microworlds, modelling); adaptive
media
(tutorial programs, tutorial simulations, tutoring systems) and discursive media
(audio-, video-, and computer-conferencing).
Laurillard’s analysis of each
medium in terms of a twelve-stage framework (elaborated from the five steps
listed above) allows
the reader to readily see how extremely useful some media
can be and how particular media need to be integrated with other teaching
methods. This framework identifies the following sequence of activities which
Laurillard sees as necessary to complete the learning
process:
- Teacher describes conception
- Student describes conception
- Teacher redescribes in light of student’s conception or action
- Student redescribes in light of teacher’s redescription or student’s action
- Teacher can adapt task goal in light of student’s description or action
- Teacher sets task goal
- Student acts to achieve task goal
- Teacher sets up world to give intrinsic feedback on actions
- Student modifies action in light of feedback on action
- Student adapts actions in light of teacher’s description or student’s redescription
- Student reflects on interaction to modify redescription
- Teacher reflects on student’s action to modify redescription.
It is
particularly reassuring to note that the “adaptive media” of
tutoring systems and tutoring simulations are able
to facilitate all twelve
steps. These particular media, with their ability to “adapt” to the
individual responses of
students, and now increasingly incorporating video,
sound and other effects (ie, becoming truly “interactive
multi-media”),
are coming to dominate new programs in computer-based legal
education. Laurillard’s analysis strongly supports this trend.
Part
III The design methodology uses the twelve-step framework as the basis of a
template for the design of teaching, presents a number of applied examples,
deduces
practical implications for interface design, and provides extensive
advice on creating an optimum teaching and learning environment
in which
students will use and benefit from programs. This part presents a blueprint for
the organisational infrastructure required
to ensure a high quality of teaching
and learning based on technology. This constitutes an extensive and excellent
checklist for
teachers, administrators and policy makers alike and should be
read and used by all three.
Laurillard states her overall purpose as being
“to offer a way of thinking about teaching and the introduction of media
that
is informed by a more elaborated understanding of what students do when
they learn” (8). This is a timely and commendable undertaking,
the
importance of which cannot be overestimated and she has achieved her goal in a
very thorough, coherent and integrated way that
demonstrates the highest
commitment to educational scholarship. However, no review could ignore some of
the significant difficulties
contained in this book. The most serious of these
lies in its conceptual complexity. Laurillard makes no concessions to the reader
unfamiliar with educational literature in general or the literature of
phenomenographic studies in particular. Consequently, the
book not merely defies
superficial reading (which is not a bad thing), but demands a knowledge of terms
and issues which few legal
(or other) academics are likely to have, and a
determination to come to terms with a complex and sustained argument that the
casual,
or even the quite interested, reader may not have. As a result, the
readership of this important work is likely to be limited.
A lesser but
still notable difficultly lies in the use of examples, with which the book is
replete. In a work such as this, examples
are an essential concretisation of
abstract concepts; they can often make clear what would otherwise be only
half-perceived. Laurillard’s
examples are, of necessity,
discipline-specific and therefore concerned with concepts and terminology which
will be foreign to those
outside the disciplines dealt with in each example. As
a result, some important illustrations of principles are quite difficult to
follow. Interestingly for a book on “the effective use of educational
technology”, many of the examples used are not
drawn from technological
applications.
Finally, the book would have benefited from a firmer use of
the editorial pencil. As well as the unexplained jargon noted above, the
book
has several unclear internal references and critical ideas are introduced
without any indication of their importance to the
author’s argument.
These difficulties notwithstanding, Rethinking University Teaching is
an important and undoubtedly successful book which seems likely to remain for
some time an essential point of reference for both
theorists and practitioners
working in the fields of higher education and educational technology. Legal
educators who are currently
making significant use of educational technology, or
those who are planning to do so, would be well advised to read it.
Gordon Joughin
Faculty of Law
Queensland
University of Technology