Learning & Teaching on the World Wide Web, by C. R. Wolfe, (San Francisco: Academic Press, 2001, 278pp., $64.95)
This volume presents a much-needed overview of the social and psychological factors that influence learning on the Web in which most chapters read like a review of research for the chapter topic. Wolfe edits a collection of articles guaranteed to give the novice Web educator a jump-start on recent psychological research investigating individual traits and their relationship to Web instructional factors. Web educators who want to apply psychology research results to Web instructional design or research would do well to read this tome and add it to their collections. The novice and more experienced Web educator will find the twelve chapters written by educational, organizational, and cognitive psychologists are edited into a relatively comprehensive analysis of the interplay among learner traits, Web instructional factors, and affective and cognitive learning outcomes. Every library supporting a graduate program in instructional design or educational technology should own this book; those investigating social and psychological factors affecting learning on the Web will find considerable relevant theory and research in one volume.
The book broadens scope as it progresses from the individual learner in the first four chapters to the group in chapters five through eight and to research in chapters ten and eleven. Chapters one through four discuss individual learner traits and skills that have influenced Web learning outcomes. Chapters five through eight discuss group learning in Web instruction and chapters ten and eleven suggest research approaches. Chapter 12 contrasts Web versus classroom and textbook learning environments.
Wolfe introduces his edited volume with an overview, context, and framework for the remaining eleven chapters, of which all have a different author, including one by Wolfe himself. He suggests four current themes in research as the framework:
the Web places greater demands on students than do traditional modes of instruction;
Web learning is likely to be most successful when applying a broad interdisciplinary framework;
several factors influence learning on the Web; and,
there is a need for much more valid and reliable research about learning on the Web.
He and the other authors present research in the context one or more of three defining characteristics of Web instruction:
large quantities of heterogeneous information;
its visual presentation and navigation, which imposes cognitive demands upon the reader; and,
the Web’s inherent anonymity and isolation that favors certain learner attitudes and traits at the same time enabling certain behaviors.
The editor’s distinct approach shows the reader what the world of Web research looks like through a well-reasoned psychological lens.
In Chapter Two, Reyna et al. suggest four Web research objectives:
to distinguish different effects of learning technologies for individuals, for groups, and for disciplines;
to determine the effects of the amount of information heterogeneity on learning processes and outcomes;
to advance the knowledge of mechanisms to improve learning processes and outcomes through technology; and,
to develop and refine the technologies to produce Web learning effects.
Reyna et al. describe how these objectives are driven by human-computer mismatches that modulate the effects of learning technologies. Reyna et al. argue that human learning and memory, individual differences, perceptions, and socialization processes are at odds with the way in which computers and the Web store, present, and support learning in individuals and groups. Their human-computer mismatch argument centers around four human-computer differences:
humans store gist memories and computers store verbatim information;
human learning is influenced by individual differences;
human perception influences what is seen whether or not it is displayed; and,
human social predisposition affect learning.
The real strength of the chapter is the authors’ report and analysis of their study investigating two different visual displays to teach hemodynamics to nursing students. The results indicate that each display yielded a very different kind of learning, with full analysis in the discussion section that has important implications for Web educators and researchers.
Chapter three, “Individual Characteristics and Web-Based Courses,” exemplifies the insightful focus of a psychological lens and introduces research relevant to Web instruction. In the chapter, Anderson concisely summarizes important psychological research on several learner traits that affect learning outcomes (field dependence/independence, active/passive learners, locus of control, learning style, self regulation, metacognition, ambi guity tolerance, anxiety, self efficacy and motivation). She proposes a graphically illustrated “interactive model of learner characteristics and Web-based courses” (p. 66) that uses the aforementioned learner traits, predisposed attitudes and prior knowledge as inputs to Web course elements. One of the three elements, task analysis, determines the strategies and activities which structures the other two factors, learner control and feedback, which leads to cognitive and affective outcomes.
In chapter four, Britt and Gabrys define Web literacy skills as the ability to integrate, validate (called sourcing by the authors), and corroborate information accessed on the Web. After positing these three skills as essential expert reader skills, the authors identify the cognitive processes associated with each. Whereas many faculty decry the abundance of questionable information on the Web that their students often accept as unquestionably true, these authors have embraced the problem. They have cleverly incorporated one of the more troubling aspects of Web information, vast quantities of heterogeneous and sometimes inaccurate information, into a fundamental and necessary component of their Web literacy skill tutorial on sourcing and corroborating. The objective of sourcing is to note and evaluate a document one is reading, usually to assess its credibility. Corroborating is the process of finding other documents with information consistent with the document one is sourcing. Students completing the Web tutorial described in chapter four investigate different perspectives on a controversial issue by reviewing different Web source documents represented by virtual volumes on a screen bookshelf and then writing an essay about controversy.
Wolfe defines and explains the important features of informal Web learning environments in chapter five. His Dragonfly Web Pages represent one possible informal learning environment that includes expository text, interactive experiences, sidebars, links to related resources, off-line investigations, assessment, and evaluation. The pages are designed for “informal learning_voluntary educational activities outside of traditional contexts” (p. 92). He proclaims that the Web could potentially stimulate a renaissance in self-directed lifelong learning with alternative social organizations for learning and teaching. He also maintains that just as informal Web learning environments must be learner-centered, they cannot be based upon behavioral principles. In agreement with many others, Wolfe emphatically restates the Web mantra: interactivity. He iterates three interactivities that characterize the Web: facilitating communication; connecting people one-to-one and one-to-many; and simulating experiences. His own Dragonfly Web Pages offer children, the target population, brief interactive encounters that combine play and problem solving with text. He describes interactive decision-making games with enough detail that one may not need to visit the Dragonfly Web Pages, for which he gives the URL.
The author articulates important problems and issues associated with evaluating informal Web learning environments. He explains the problem of defining and sampling informal learning participant populations by demographics; since one often cannot identify the population by demographics, he suggests defining them as the users of the Web pages of interest. He suggests assessment measures such as page hits, responses to a feedback form, and solicited email comments. Wolf implies that his Web pages contribute to the interactive learner’s gist memories; he measures their positive affect and presents supporting volunteer self-report data.
Chapter six is in a class by itself. Other chapters with detailed concrete examples of instructional applications of the theories discussed contrast with this chapter that chronicles the political decisions surrounding development of multi-user, communications software and the influence of Kurt Lewin’s theory on cooperative learning theory.
“From Real to Virtual Communities” is the aptly titled chapter seven that leads the reader from the traditional model of communications to recent theory in networked knowledge. Riva’s rationale is that because the definition of communication has changed, the psychosocial system of those participating in the new communication has changed. His discussion of interbrainframe reads easily even for those less familiar with the theories of “networking the interconnecting of a multiplicity of cognitive frames which are all simultaneously present and active in communicative interaction” (p. 135). The medium shapes the culture of those who use the network; it influences its inhabitants’ psycho-social systems.
Riva builds the case that the new computer-mediated communication (CMC) enables a distributed intelligence in which each participant becomes a generator of knowledge and that each participant is a node on the Web of the distributed intelligence. On the other hand, he reminds the reader that CMC lacks the “metacommunicative features” such as facial expression or body language so much a part of face-to-face communication and the immediate processing of socially co-constructed meaning. He discusses how this lack and other concepts such as social presence and collective intelligence influence Web-earning environments such as email, chat, MUDs and MOOs.
Riva further describes and lists URLs for the most sophisticated of the new, shared hypermedia tools (SHYs). The author divides his medium of interest, computer-mediated communication (CMC), into two fundamental categories, asynchronous and synchronous, and carefully describes the social cognitive processes associated with each. He concludes with “three nearly parallel theoretical tracks of use to creators and users of Web-based learning tools” (p. 148): CMC cognition is a coordinated intersubjective activity; interactive communication follows a nonlinear, interlocutory model; and, it demands active participation in the communication tool that shapes the identity of its users.
The editor includes examples of discipline studies in later chapters. Hammond and Trapp draw upon at least three learning theories, cognitivism, constructivism, and situated cognition, to describe Web-based learning. The theories contribute to an adaptation of a model of Web learning that cycles through three phases: reception, dialogue, construction. The theories and model grounds the authors’ analysis of 11 United Kingdom psychology department Web courses. The analysis yields a taxonomy of instructional uses of the Web to teach psychology.
Chapters nine and ten addresses the social psychology of the Web surrounding two factors, gender and Web abuse. The chapter by Jazwinski raises issues associated with gender and the Web. The discussion may be more useful to social psychologists and counselors than those who seek guidance in planning for Web courses. She concludes that the research on virtual gender and gender communication differences is in its infancy and that features that make it so powerful also impede its study. Web educators may be less interested in the phenomenon of Internet abuse than will be counselors and psychologists, although both chapters note methodological problems with research on this phenomenon.
The research reviewed in chapter eleven indicates that peoples’ Web and face-to-face psychological processes can be measured with comparable instruments. The authors present evidence that, in at least some Web environments, people are more self-revealing and less inhibited than in face-to-face interactions. Since their conclusions cite research not limited to instructional or intentional learning environments, they may be less valid for formal instruction in which learning may be greatly influenced by formal course structure with definite goals and objectives and required activities. Some readers who are familiar with the terms formative and summative evaluation from the field of instructional design may be confused by the terms formative and summative assessment. Here the authors seem to refer to tests to give students feedback on their learning and tests for grading purposes. The authors’ claim that there is real promise in individualizing Web instruction for individual learning styles ignores two realities: learning style measurement reliability and labor intensiveness of developing individualized instruction. Many educators heard the same promise for individualization for computer-based instruction only to face the problem that someone has to design and develop all that individualized instruction.
Wiley and Schooler finish the book with a chapter recapping the salient features of the Web identified in the book in earlier research and review two studies on reading comprehension on the Web. This brings me to what the book is not about. The book does not address any of the instructional management issues that faculty and administrators are negotiating and for which they are seeking best practices such as design models. Some chapters touch upon instructional issues although the psychologist authors usually do not cite relevant instructional design theory or research. Web educators who are not familiar with the latest relevant psychology research should value the book because it will enable them to make the kind of cross-discipline connections that Wolfe encourages in research and teaching.
