This is interesting, Andrew. As I said to Steve, whether or not you are in the minority or the majority may be relative to many things. But still, your thoughts on behaviorism are interesting and challenging.
[quoting Doherty, 7 Dec 98] I would like to make one further point myself. I believe that the majority of computer games are simply about developing a level of skill at doing something that the game player did not possess already. Through repeated practice game players attempt to improve their performance (e.g., to complete the game). They are punished for incorrect behavior (e.g., they lose a life). They are rewarded for correct behavior (e.g., bonus points, extra lives etc.). In other words, they undergo small increments of behavioral modification in learning how to beat the game.
Actually, I like this description a lot. It is a dandy description of games, but it also describes fairly well how a lot of people learn things. Certainly there are learning environments and instructional environments, and you may be describing instruction rather than learning, but still it works on a number on levels. I do work with training environments often, and it is surely true that one of our goals is for learners to develop a level of skill at doing something that the learner did not already know how to do. Develop enough skills in a particular task and you can put them together in to larger schemas or representations. Isn't this learning? Going back to SimCity: aren't you learning there?
This being the case, surely Jones is not advocating a return to behaviorism in computer based learning environments? Surely this would be a step back rather than a step forward in the construction of learning environments?
I think Clark provides good commentary on this. I would add that it would depend, I imagine, on where you come down on the notion of behaviorism. Personally, I think stimulus and response gets a bad rap. Before you start the flame wars, I think that direct participation is a good thing. I think that in learning environments people should be doing things. Jim Okey, my mentor at UGA used to joke: "We have advanced in the field of computer-based learning. No longer do we 'Press the space bar to continue.' Now we click on the right arrow to continue."
His point was that interactivity requires activity. Activity at a number of different levels, both intellectually and kinesthetically, but activity. In a CBLE, I think the user should be doing things. They should be clicking and dragging. I think they should be entering data and seeing how it impacts the environment at hand. I think people should be constructing their representations of what happens within that environment. In order to do this, you have to do something and get a response to it. What they do will depend on the content. In the program on color in the paper (figure 4) learners, albeit young ones, interact with the data in the program. They do something and the system responds. Based on the response, they learn something. Given enough responses, they can begin to develop larger more complicated representations of the phenomenon at hand. In Investigating Lake Iluca, there are tools that let you sample, measure, and calculate. You can do things right, and you can do things wrong, but you are still doing things, and you can learn from both.
I think this is learning. I also think that stimulus and response plays A role in this. And it works here. I think stimulus and response is a fairly large part of learning in a lot of fields. Chemistry comes to mind. If you are studying chemical reactions, then you may try to see how one chemical reacts with another. This is important stuff, and it is stimulus and response. No, it is not the only thing we want people to be doing, but there are times when it works very nicely.
I don't know if there is anything mystical or mythical about all of this. It is really about choosing the best tools for the job at hand. What I am doing is looking at games to see how they use their tools. Not to reproduce them, but to determine, at a deeper level, how they work so that we can build tools that are appropriate to the learning environment.