Control and Constraint in e-Learning: Choosing when to Choose By Jon Dron Hershey: IDEA Group Publishing 2007 340 pp. hard cover

Professor Jon Dron's Control and Constraint in e-Learning proposes that existent e-learning technologies and shared online spaces may be built to be even more responsive to participants' insights and ideas. These spaces may empower learners to make informed decisions and choices at various junctures of the learning process, so learners may be more self-efficacious.

Dron builds his idea of transactional control based on a variety of learning theories: Moore's theory of transactional distance, Garrison's ideas of control, Candy's ideas on learner self-direction, and others. Clearly, his ideas align well with the concept of affordances, in terms of how designed spaces may affect human perceptions and behaviors.

He views control as an outcome of designed structure and a kind of dialogue, through which learners mediate their environments, and process their thoughts and exercise their decision-making and power. Constraints are a necessary part of an enviornment and may help scaffold learning, but too much may be stultifying, and too little would leave a shapelessness which is not conducive to learning.

He proposed aware technologies that incorporate learner responses and thinking into the evolution of the e-learning system, whether this be in instructor-led spaces or self-discovery environments. Such systems need to have a clear feedback loop to understand user behaviors and needs. Different alternate routes for learning may accommodate a greater range of learners with differing needs.

He suggests the building of "deferred systems" that have "purpose, structure, and use" which emerges after the initial design (Patel, 2003). Such systems then are dynamic and evolving and emergent. The peer-to-peer aspects of this space offer rich human-mediated human-contributed learning value and community. In other words, the dialogue affects the structure.

This author suggests an 8-principle model based on a range of factors: adaptability, stigmergy, evolvability, parcellation, context, constraint, trust and sociability.

This text Control and Constraint in e-Learning is a tough read and rips through a fair amount of educational theory. It does offer some provocative ideas of Web 2.0 and e-learning spaces though and offers plenty to those willing to track with his thinking.

This author serves as a principal lecturer at the University of Brighton in the UK; he teaches in the School of Computing, Mathematical & Information Sciences.

References

Dron, J. (2007). Control and constraint in e-learning: Choosing when to choose. Hershey: IDEA Group Publishing.