On Meaning, Context, and Reusability
In David’s third lecture, he glosses over the issue of meaning, context, reusability, and instructional effectiveness. As one who came into instructional design via language acquisition, I think I may have something to add.
While David is partially correct that meaning is a function of context, we should not ignore how arbitrariness figures into the equation. Cognitive Distance Theory(1) states that the effort a message-recipient must employ to derive meaning from a symbol may be modeled as:
E = (A/X) – C, where…
E = Effort to obtain the intended meaning
A = Arbitrariness of the symbol (vis-à-vis its meaning)
X = The recipient’s eXposure to the symbol-meaning relationship
C = Context apparent in the message
A recipient can easily ascertain the meaning of messages encoded into less-arbitrary symbols, such as onemonepia, regardless of the symbol’s context or their past exposure to the symbol-meaning relationship. And even completely arbitrary symbols can deliver meaning if the recipient has had enough exposure to it. The word “cat” doesn’t sound like a cat, nor do the letters c-a-t form a symbol that looks like a cat, yet most young children make a perfect association of the symbol with its meaning. Finally, as shown in the Clockwork Orange study, context can clue recipients to a symbol’s meaning even when the symbol is completely arbitrary and the recipient has no explicit exposure to the symbol’s denotation.
I won’t try to analogize these issues into the reusability debate, but I will say that limiting the definition of context to spatial and temporal proximity is very constricting. There is also an issue of the recipient’s mental construction and affective state that may affect how context operates. For example, when I watch the Pixar short film Lifted, I find meaning not because of what immediately preceded it (a trailer for an unrelated movie), nor from what came after (Ratatouille), but the mental baggage I bring with me contributes to the meaning I discover.
Similarly, the baggage that our learners carry interacts with the apparent context of each learning object.
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Now, let’s consider the relationship between reusability and instructional effectiveness of learning objects. I know David has thought about this a lot more than what he showed in his 30-minute presentation, but, for those who haven’t…
David used a graph similar to this to demonstrate that a learning object’s instructional effectiveness decreases as the possibility to reuse it increases.
I don’t know why he chose a curvilinear relationship (perhaps he has some data to backup that model), but I’m going to simplify it down to a linear relationship.
In the lecture, David implied that this relationship was mediated through the learning object’s context. That is, high context is positively correlated with instructional effectiveness, and negatively correlated with reusability. If we deconstruct that model and plot reusability and instructional effectiveness separately, we get something like this:
Of course, the units on both axes are arbitrary and the intersection of the two lines depends on one’s subjective view of “acceptable” reusability and instructional effectiveness. These two graphs are equally valid, depending on your point of view:
However, the danger, as has been pointed out by others, is that if our minimum context-level for instructional effectiveness is higher than our maximum context-threshold for reusability, learning object will either be reusable or instructionally effective, but never both.
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(1) FYI, Cognitive Distance Theory was something I developed in courses with Dillon Inouye and Vic Bunderson. I never published anything on it. There is a concept of “cognitive distance” in Organizational Behavior, but it is entirely unrelated.