Civilization has experienced a series of radical social and economic shifts, each of which has resulted in a new model for education. As each new paradigm has emerged, education theory has lagged in its development and implementation of strategies to meet learners’ needs in the new context. In the move from the agrarian age to the industrial age, social and economic forces favored a greater emphasis on standardization, centralized control, autocratic decision making, and conformity (Reigeluth 1999). Education followed suit with methods based on behaviorist learning strategies that emphasized repetition and reinforcement of consistent responses to specific stimuli. Then, in the 1950s, when the number of white collar workers in the United States began to exceed the number of blue collar workers (Time 1959), society experienced another paradigm shift: the beginning of the information age.
As the information age emerged, education continued to emphasize behaviorist principles even though behaviorism actually began to decrease in popularity in American psychology (Saettler 1990). Although cognitive psychology became the dominant theory of learning for psychological researchers in the 1950s, it was not until the 1970s that cognitive science began to influence instructional design. But cognitivism’s emphasis on the internal processes of the mind and concern with how these processes could be utilized in promoting effective learning still served the needs of the industrial age's emphasis on standardization and compliance rather than the information age’s need for workers who could build networks and work in teams. Cognitive learning strategies did not easily complement the new staples of the information age workplace: autonomy with accountability, team-based organization, shared decision making, individual initiative, and networking (Reigeluth 1999).
Constructivism and situativity emerged in the 1990s as educational theories better suited to the needs of workers in the information age. Unlike behaviorism and cognitivism, constructivism and situativity did not view knowledge as a stand-alone entity. In constructivism, “there is no such thing as knowledge ‘out there’ independent of the knower, but only knowledge we construct for ourselves as we learn” (Hein 1991, ¶3). Situativity went even further, viewing knowledge as a social construction expressed in the actions of people interacting within communities in a cultural and historical context. The unit of analysis is “neither the individual nor the setting, but instead the relationship between the two” (Dede et al. 2003, 4). Finally, educational theory had caught up with the needs of the information age. Instructional designers had a theoretical basis from which they could help students develop information age skills of networking, holism, diversity, team building, and shared decision making.
Anne Zelenka, a writer for GigaOM, recently blogged about the paradigm shift currently underway, from the Information Age to what she terms the Connected Age: “The Information Age is the age of the knowledge worker. The Connected Age is the age of the Web worker. Knowledge workers create and manage information, massaging it into intangible knowledge goods. Web workers create and manage relationships across knowledge goods, hardware, and people” (Zelenka 2007, ¶3). Predictably, researchers and educators are still searching for a theory to accommodate this next paradigm. SCCS theory provides this accommodation.
Dede, C., B. Nelson, J. Ketelhut, J. Clarke, and C. Bowman. 2003. Design-based research strategies for studying situated learning in a multi-user virtual environment. http://muve.gse.harvard.edu/muvees2003/documents/dedeICLS04.pdf (accessed April 27, 2008). Archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5bV2LoJ2g.
Hein, G. 1991. Constructivist learning theory. Talk presented at The Museum and the Needs of the People CECA (International Committee of Museum Educators) conference, Jerusalem, Israel, October. http://www.exploratorium.edu/ifi/resources/research/constructivistlearning.html (accessed November 3, 2008). Archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5c4a4NRIw.
Reigeluth, C. 1999. What is instructional-design theory and how is it changing? In Instructional design theories and models, vol. 2, ed. C. Reigeluth, 5-29. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Saettler, P. 1990. The evolution of American educational technology. Englewood, CO: Libraries Unlimited.
Time. 1959. The rise of the white-collar worker. Time, January 5. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,810844,00.html (accessed November 15, 2008). Archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5cS43Ssy5.
Zelenka, A. 2007. From the information age to the connected age. [Weblog entry, October 6.] GigaOM, Giga Omni Media. http://gigaom.com/2007/10/06/from-the-information-age-to-the-connected-age/ (accessed November 1, 2008). Archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5f1lCDFUh.