Chapter 13
Tribute to David Jonassen, Curators’ Distinguished Professor of Education, University of Missouri Tonia A. Dousay
David H. Jonassen (1947–2012) began his distinguished career in instructional technology as a cameraman for educational television at the University of Delaware in the late 1960s. Jonassen was known for saying, “I’ve made many mistakes in my life, but choice of career wasn’t one of them.” A pioneer in the field, Dr. Jonassen is perhaps most well known as a constructivist who promoted cognitive tools and later focused on problem solving and problem-based learning (PBL). Thus, nearly anyone who has ever taken a class in instructional technology has found himself or herself reading one of Jonassen’s 37 books, 182 journal articles, or 67 book chapters at some point in their academic career. In 2012, shortly before his passing, Dr. Jonassen was named the first recipient of the Association for Educational Communications and Technology (AECT) David H. Jonassen Award for Excellence in Research, which was established in his honor. The legacy that Jonassen leaves behind includes pushing the field of instructional technology to embrace constructivism and look at the broader implications of technological influence in the classroom.
T.A. Dousay (*) Department of Professional Studies, University of Wyoming, Laramie, WY, USA e-mail:
[email protected] M. Orey et al. (eds.), Educational Media and Technology Yearbook, Educational Media and Technology Yearbook 38, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-06314-0_13, © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014
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Changing the Culture of Learning Dr. David Jonassen had a very distinct sense of personal responsibility. His independence and self-reliant attitude came naturally from his upbringing in southern Indiana. The personal drive and energy he exuded likely derived from his desire to be physically active and his passion for mountain climbing. Jonassen once said, “There’s something spiritual about going up a mountain.” This sentiment was certainly evident in the personal and professional life that he lived and the legacy he leaves behind. Jonassen’s interest in the field of instructional technology was an accidental journey. He graduated from the University of Delaware in 1970 with a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration/Finance and worked a variety of jobs including shelving library books and assisting fellow students in the registration office. When Jonassen responded to an ad for a television cameraman, he found himself filming and directing educational television programming. It was this experience combined with the mentoring of a colleague who was pursuing a Master’s degree in educational media that Jonassen realized he had found his career. However, his undergraduate degree would not help him in this journey. Thus, Jonassen continued his studies, graduating in 1972 with a Master of Education in Elementary Education and taught reading and language arts to elementary and middle school students. Throughout his studies, Jonassen began to research psychology on his own and eventually enrolled in the educational media doctoral program at Temple University in Philadelphia. His intrinsic drive to pursue psychology is what prompted his change of majors to educational psychology, and he later completed a postdoc at the University of North Carolina in computer science, statistics, and philosophy. Jonassen began his academic career in higher education teaching educational media techniques and design at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro in the Library Science and Educational Technology Department. He spent 10 years designing and developing courses in instructional media and a self-instruction laboratory. During this time, the field was focused on the effectiveness of media as a conveyer of information or what we call message design. Jonassen was ahead of his peers, though, leading the transition to learning strategies over instructional strategies. He was focused on discovering what learners could accomplish irrespective of what was being taught. It was this sense of intrinsic motivation that drove Jonassen to write, and specifically to edit the Handbook of Research on Educational Communications and Technology. He truly enjoyed producing handbooks that could help the field expand and teach the next generation of researchers where to begin. In his interview with the AECT History Maker’s project, Jonassen noted that he was a born empiricist and implicational thinker, always looking at the implications of current research and seeking to identify the needs of the field. Thus, in the late 1980s, while at the University of Colorado Denver, he began to examine computers and their influence, designing curriculum on how to use microcomputers. While many in the field focused their efforts on computers as a teaching medium, Jonassen
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was thinking about better uses for computers. This was perhaps what led to his significant transition into constructivism. Jonassen was always interested in what people do with media rather than from media. Rather than looking at methods and media, he felt the field should be looking at all of the different technologies students use to construct their knowledge of the world. Jonassen believed that computers should be used to engage students in critical thinking by functioning as knowledge representation. The passion he felt for this line of inquiry opened up the field to the concept of mindtools to create mental models and foster critical thinking. Perhaps a personal precursor to this shift was Jonassen’s work in cognitive modeling and task analysis. He had followed David Merrill’s work in instructional design, finding it to be one of the more coherent theories of the time. Within instructional design, Jonassen focused specifically on task analysis, calling it the heart and soul of any design that was often overlooked. When it came to task analysis, Jonassen was known for telling his students, “If you aren’t able to articulate how your learners are supposed to think, you have no business designing instruction for them.” The introduction of the Internet shifted Jonassen’s focus again during the mid 1990s. Instructional design was an underlying theme in much of his work, and he noticed that problem solving was absent in the literature. Jonassen began by asking, “What is problem solving?” From there, he branched out into looking at different kinds of problems and eventually seeking to answer how we support, engage, and assess different kinds of problem solving. The groundwork he laid with mindtools and cognitive modeling would make way to helping learners create a representation of a problem as they attempted to solve it. He noted that the trend towards investigating simulations, games, and immersive environments was based in problem solving. As interest in the field transmogrified from problem-solving research into PBL, Jonassen recognized that students are accustomed to traditional schooling, and problem solving violates their schemas of learning. He believed that schools and universities do a poor job of engaging students in problem solving, and engaging in PBL continues to be a challenge for learners. Of all of his contributions to the field, Jonassen thought that his work on problem solving and problem-based learning would be his legacy. He truly thought that PBL is the most significant pedagogical innovation in the history of education and his work continues to shape research and practice. When looking to the future, Jonassen knew that the questions are changing, particularly with the influence of social networking and communication. The social psychology of identity and responsibility in social networking environments might have been his next area of inquiry. However, PBL was never far from his thoughts. He felt that we are still an integration or two away from effectively implementing and investigating the potential of virtual realities, but that the possibilities were endless. Jonassen knew that there is so much that we do not yet know about problem solving and so many unanswered questions. If there was one bit of advice we could all take away from Jonassen, it was the message that dualistic thinking is destructive to our field. We need the ability to accommodate multiple beliefs and perspectives. There is no unified theory of learning and survival of our field is key to accepting this. Jonassen did not advocate for
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one specific methodology, but recognized that we all had preferences. Dr. David Jonassen’s long and distinguished career took him to the top of many mountains around the world, and he never stopped moving forward. Defiantly active despite developing lung cancer, Jonassen was truly a pioneer with vision, passion, and persistence that will undoubtedly inspire current and future generations in the field of instructional technology to change the culture of learning for the better.
