I wanted to begin this tribute just by reading the
obituary. It'll maybe providing context for what will follow
. This was published in the Chattanooga Times Free Press
, and it was written by Ellen Gagne. I've
been told by Marcy Robert Bills Gagne, 85 Signal
Mountain died Sunday, April 28th, 2000 and two
. He was the leader in the fields of educational
psychology and instructional design. He was born in 1916
and north and over Massachusetts. After receiving his bachelor
of arts degree from Yale University in 1937 he went
on to Brown University to earn a doctorate in experimental
psychology. In 1940. He spent much of his
50 year career in academic positions at Connecticut College for
Women Princeton University, University of California, Berkeley and
Florida State University. From 1962 to 66 he was
director of research at the American Institutes for Research in
Pittsburgh. Mr. Gagne also spent a good portion
of his career working on military training problems. During
World War two, Mr Gagne served as an aviation
psychologist, developing tests for classification of aircrew. From
1950 to 1958. He was technical director for two
different Air Force laboratories at Lackland and Lowry Air Force
bases, where he conducted numerous studies of human learning
and performance. At the end of his career,
in 1990 1991 he worked on instructional design models for
military training at Armstrong Air Force Base in San Antonio
, Texas. During his career, Mr Gagne never
wavered from the idealistic vision of psychology that he expressed
in his 1932 valedictory speech at Johnson High School in
North and Over, in which he said the science
of psychology should be used to relieve the burdens of
human life. His research and writing focus on how
principles of human learning established to scientific research could be
applied in education and training. He wrote five editions
of a similar book entitled The Conditions of Learning,
and he also wrote numerous other books on principles of
learning and instructional design. Mr. Gandhi was a
member of Phi Beta Kappa Sigma K and was a
fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science
and the National Academy of Education and recognition of his
contributions. Mr Gandhi received many honors, including to
find out the Capital award for distinguished Educational research from
a ER A and the Distinguished Scientific Award for applications
of psychology from the American Psychological Association. Mr.
Gandhi is survived by his wife, Harriet Pat.
Two Children, Sam and Ellen. And two grandchildren
. And then it ends with a note about the
memorial service. So that's the context why we're here
today. I just came from the DND lunch and
where we recognized, uh, and really celebrating the
contributions of different people in our field. And we
really want to continue that today. So were the
point of this session is to recognize the contributions to
celebrate the fact that he contributed so much to remember
who he was. Think, Marcie, you're going
to explain how we organize this as Mike and I
were talking about what we'd like to do, Um
, we kind of wondered, Well, maybe a
way to bring the personal side of January also as
well as the professional side, would be to involve
people who worked with him over his career. And
so, in a sense, this is almost chronological
. Uh, we'll ask Bob Morgan to speak.
Who was the person who is responsible for bringing Bob
Jr to Florida State? Um Stuart Weinstein, who
was a student at Florida State. Well, Daniel
was there and who worked with him on projects and
and Daniel served on Stewart's dissertation committee. Um,
I had the fortunate opportunity not only to write with
Bob, which is true of many of his colleagues
at Florida State, but also to teach with him
. And so, uh, in some respects,
I have some stories to share that are probably somewhat
unique. Uh, then Michael say a few words
. He worked with Bob after Bob retired from Florida
State at the Army Research Institute, and then Dave
Merrill will around us out by talked by talking about
some of the work that he and Bob did.
Um, they've had some of, you may know
, debates that have been published in Educational Technology magazine
. I think, actually, some video types of
some of those of those things as well. So
we think, Well, we've got a well rounded
A memory of Bob Grenier. So without any additional
work at this time, I'd like to introduce Bob
Morgan. Uh, Bob is the director emeritus of
the Learning Systems Institute. He is the person who
established the department that I now chair at Florida State
, and he was really responsible for bringing a lot
of folks in Florida State to build that program.
And, of course, the one that we remembered
remembered today. Bob Gang, Yang Morgan. Thanks
, Marcy. The I'd like to start out like
Michael did and read a little bit. I was
asked by Bob to write the forward to one of
his last books about 50 years of his own research
, which was remarkable that anybody could put together a
book with his own articles over a half century period
. And if you haven't seen that book, it's
available from that s U uh, and it's really
quite quite nice, he writes connecting narrative from his
first research article, in which started in 1939 Book
was published in 89 this is a coherent building sequence
of, uh, of research that has made an
enormous contribution. In any case, he asked me
to write forward, and I was a bit intimidated
by that, but also somewhat are odd, and
I'll just read parts of it to you as quickly
as I can. I'm honored to have been asked
by Professor Daniel to write the forward to this,
his latest book, Having known Bob for roughly half
of his 50 years professional work. It is tempting
to use these few paragraphs to tell Daniel stories of
which there are many. I'll get to a couple
of later. Yeah, I will attempt to resist
this here. However, given the deep respect,
admiration and affections that all who know Bob, can
you feel for him, it would be easy to
make this note of testimonial. When Bob Daniel joined
the Department of Energy at Florida State University in 1969
the department was small, reasonably good, but not
well known. National. With his arrival, the
last condition changed. The program became instantly visible,
if for no other reason than his presence. In
the ensuing years, the department has grown in size
and recognized quality. It has developed one of the
nation's strongest graduate training programs in the field of its
structural systems and technology, and has become a leader
in applied learning research. The intellectual leadership for this
development has been provided by Bob Lang, Yet he
has served as an inspiration and model for all of
us. On the faculty is senior, both in
professional standing and an age, and his scholarly production
set a high standard for both faculty and students.
He has been a giant among us, but with
his gentle humility and courtesy, he never made any
of us feel less worthy. On the contrary,
he made us believe that as individuals, we were
important and capable of significant intellectual contributions as a department
faculty made us feel that we were destined for greatness
, which was perhaps not realistic. But it did
cause us to do our best. 1980. Bob
was named the Robert Old Lot, distinguished professor at
the Universities Highest Award for academic achievement, a symbolic
acknowledgement by the university's indebtedness. To him, this
book is a selected combination of a half centuries.
Work is a capstone to a truly remarkable career.
During the past 50 years, Bob's worked unswervingly on
the problems of human learning. His studies have ranged
from basic to apply and have examined virtually all the
variables associated with the learning process. It is rare
scholarship that retains its relevance, relevance and time in
this over so many years. It is an extraordinary
researcher whose lifetime of work is so coherent, coherent
and logically sequenced with each new inquiry building upon and
extending his previous research finding many of the pioneers in
the field of instructional systems hold doctorates and experimental psychology
and are thoroughly grounded in the fundamentals of learning research
with the other many other things on the I S
D training agenda, the basics of behavioral science have
often been moved to the back burner. However desirable
, it is not practical to replicate with new I
S d students the breadth and depth of understanding of
learning theory and research experienced by those scholars whose foundations
were built in psychology. With this new book,
Kanye has provided a convenient and manageable remedy for this
deficiency. I first became aware of Dr Gagne when
I was a baby assistant professor at the University of
New Mexico in 1959. Teaching half of the department
, uh, graduate courses. Uh, that book
was Psychology and Human Performance Co written with Fleischman.
I don't know if any of you've ever seen that
book or not, but it's an absolute delight to
read. It's crystal clear. It's unambiguous. Elegantly
written prose is superb, and I thought it was
an exemplar of the way that psychologists ought to write
, and the nature that are disciplined ought to have
, uh, in 1965 he came out with the
conditions of learning, another book that I eagerly read
and was much influenced by. And as Mike has
said, it's through five or six editions at the
present time and published in over 20 languages. I
am married, but I felt like I knew it
. And in 1966 I was able to meet him
for the first time. He was a member of
the National Curriculum Advisory Committee when I was in the
U. S. Office of Education and I was
serving as a staff support for that committee, and
I met him for the first time at that session
, and I look forward to it with all having
no idea what kind of a person he was as
an individual. And by then I had known a
few of the biggies in our field and found that
most of them were relatively insensitive to the awe and
admiration in which they were held by juniors like me
and and and, as a matter of fact,
many of them quite arrogant. Bob was the excellent
opposite of that. He was humble. He was
kind and he was gentle. He was slow to
anger, I might note parenthetically here. But when
he was enraged, it was an awesome psychic.
I only saw that two or three times in the
many years that I knew him. One was at
the Curriculum Advisory Council when a very learned professor from
Columbia University was holding forth about the evils of trying
to objectify learning outcomes, uh, with statements of
behavioral objectives or or learning objectives. And Bob sat
and I was right next to him and I could
see him began to squirm. And finally he leaked
up from his chair, pounded the tables and said
, I'll listen to no more of this nonsense from
a man who knows nothing about what he's speaking.
Fortunately, that was almost lunchtime and deadly. Silence
and the chair adjourned. The meeting in the land
, I thought this man merits my admiration. Uh
, I might tell you a little bit how we
attracted him from Berkeley to Florida State University. Uh
, in 1969 we don't hire an awful lot of
people from Harvard or Berkeley at Florida State University.
At least not in those days, and I had
just been hired there from the Office of Education to
serve as the chair of the Department of Educational Research
. And it was the dean at that time had
the ambitions of developing the first instructional systems and technology
program in the United States and brought me in to
assist with that endeavor. And after we had negotiated
the appointment and I had accepted it, he said
, uh, let me say to you that I'd
like to back up my commitment on this by giving
you four new full professor positions to fill. That
had not happened before then. I suspect it has
not happened since I was absolutely delighted. He said
, If you have four, uh, eminent people
that you can hire, who would you hire?
Who will you try to heart? And I said
, Well, the first, uh, person would
be, uh, Leslie Bricks. Who at that
time was director of the American Institutes of Research in
Palo Alto. I said then door Wall Espenson,
the deputy superintendent of schools in Duluth who was a
pioneer in individualized instruction, and Bob Branson, who
was then with Litton Industries. Uh, and certainly
one of the pioneers and educational system development. And
I said, finally, Robert Grenier at the University
of California in Berkeley, the dean pause the moment
he said, You really know Kanye, you know
? Yeah, I bragged about it and he said
, Well, go to it. What? Turns
out that, uh, Briggs quickly accepted the offer
as good Bob Branson, door wall of Espenson.
And I didn't know about Daniel because he was pretty
happily and securely and, uh, situated here at
Berkeley. So when I got back to the Office
of Education in Washington, I called him and I
said, Bob, shortly, I'm calling you to
alert you to something. I said shortly, you're
gonna be hearing rumors that you're going to be moving
to Florida State University. He laughed, And,
uh, I said, I I don't want to
really talk with you about today, but that's are
you. I'm calling you so you won't buy any
more property in California because, in fact, you
will be moving to Florida State. Yeah, at
Anne Roared and said, uh, I'm too old
to move. I like it. At Berkeley,
we own, uh, Riverside property on the Russian
River in California. but thanks for thinking about me
. In any case, I said, as I
said, I don't want to talk with you about
today, but I would like to meet with you
at an upcoming eight e. R. A meeting
. This was probably in late July, early August
that I talked to him and, uh, the
A r a was meeting, I believe in in
the fall of that year. And, uh,
he said, Sure be glad to get what So
Bob Branson and I lock ourselves away in a hotel
room with him and uhh We told him about the
ambitions we have for this new program. That kind
of research we were going to mount and the doctoral
training program that we intended to develop and about the
other people who had already agreed to come. And
he had a close colleague and friend of Leslie Break
. So I knew that there was a great deal
of mutual respect there, and he was resisting our
persuasion and blandishments, and I might say I'm pretty
persuasive. Uh, but I didn't feel I was
getting anywhere, And, uh, we talked.
Salary wasn't an issue. Uh, we talked quite
a long time and I was about to give up
. And finally it was Bob Branson had said,
Bob at Berkeley. When you're talking about your applied
learning research and you're beginning working systems, who are
your close colleagues? Who do you talk to?
Do you share your thoughts with you? Get to
criticize your ideas? And there was this long pause
, and you realize that there really wasn't anybody at
Berkeley with him. Bob had that kind of a
collegial relationship. He closed the meeting by saying,
Well, I'll talk to pat about it and we'll
think about it and I'll let you know next week
I got a call from him and he said,
Does the offer still open? Uh, yes.
Uh, he said, uh, maybe we ought
to talk about salary. So we did for a
little bit. Uh, some people thought we bought
Bob from Berkeley, but we didn't, uh we
gave him the standard increase over what people got on
their existing salaries, and he agreed to come.
And he did, uh, after he arrived at
FSU, he said, You know, one thing
I got to tell you, Morgan, he said
, uh, he said, I'm going to slow
down, he said. I I have been very
productive his past 25 years, but I can't keep
up that pace, he said. I'm 50 some
years old, he said. I'm gonna have to
slow the pace down. Not at all Christ mhm
. You know, I've hired a genuine biggie,
and now he's going to come to Florida and retire
the sunshine. Well, it turns out that wasn't
the case when we had his retirement dinner a few
years ago at Florida State, just before he left
Tallahassee for Signal Mountain, Tennessee. I remembered that
statement and I thought, My God, it's slowed
down at all I don't think, but I'll check
it. It's an empirical, uh, data issued
and I went back, and I actually counted his
publications from that 1940 publication. Up until 1969 he
came death issue and then from 69 built his retirement
in the early nineties, and his per year production
was actually hired during the years he was at fs
you that it was in the procedures and he published
with almost everybody on the faculty except me never invited
me to co published, which felt you are a
skewed and wise personally, was he, uh he
was certainly the bore. The foundation, uh,
personally and intellectually of our program at FS You.
There's no replacing Bob Jr or Lesley Griggs. Uh
, but we still try and, uh, let
me close by saying that he was my old one
of my oldest and closest friends, and we miss
him every day. Thank you, Bob, for
the student perspective, I'd like to turn to Stuart
Weinstein, who is now a senior associate at Booz
Allen Hamilton, um, and is working with the
Project Management office of President Bush's E Learning R E
government initiative. Yeah, you're ready. First,
I wanted to tell you that I'm very honored to
be representing all of the graduate students who have worked
with Dr Gagne, pat him as a professor on
a committee or work with him as a student.
Many of those folks have gone into commercial military all
that and academia, so he's inspired a lot of
people, and it's interesting you say about Do you
really know Gagne? I think that happens to me
a lot and probably a lot of my colleagues.
A lot of students who have known him have said
You really know Gagne. I mean, he spoke
with you, and I said he did indeed,
speak with me. Actually, he was a very
fine scholar and mentor, but he's very, very
approachable. Uh, I received my PhD from Florida
State 23 years ago, and fortunately, there's still
a lot of people who are using Doctor Daniels books
so that that keeps that alive. Um, he
was one of my committee members. He was my
boss. And I'm going to tell you some Gagne
stories to, uh, about working with him.
Uh, most of these are not really curriculum oriented
. They're not how how he did his teaching,
but basically how he related to a lot of folks
that he that he worked with. I worked with
him, first of all, on a very major
project, which was with WGBH in Boston Nova Science
Series programs that it was, which is on public
television, and another graduate student of mine, David
Owens, was who also has a background in television
production, as I did, uh, and Dr
Ernest Berkman, who has who was my major professor
and also had a strong background in science education,
uh, were part of the team. One of
the of the three programs dealt with the overfishing of
high fish population areas off the coast of Peru.
Another program dealt with the misuse of pesticides and how
it gets into groundwater. And the third one,
I dealt with the history of the oral contraceptive.
I see some people are laughing a good start,
Um, and it was dealing with the history of
oral contraceptives. So the whole idea of all three
of the programs were to look at basic research.
What is basic research about? Why does the government
spend that kind of money? A basic research that
maybe doesn't make sense to the average voter and help
them to understand why that money is being spent.
We did the program. We used Red Barber,
who is the, uh, was the voice of
the New York Yankees. I'm sorry, New York
Yankees for several years, and he was our host
, uh, the on air talent he lived in
in Tallahassee, and he was also the same age
as the population trying to reach. So we thought
we had that type of connection. We videotaped everything
. It went very, very well. Uh,
and then What we have to do is we have
to decide whether, uh, you know how we
were going to field test this with that population.
Find out how much they learn from what we did
on the T V programs. So keep in mind
, we've got overfishing of high fish population area.
We have misuse of pesticides, and we also have
the history of oral contraceptives. So what order would
you want to put those in? Well, David
Owens, David Owens and I, um, decided
since we were graduate students are gonna be real theoretical
. So we talked about Maslow's hierarchy of needs shelter
, that type of thing. Dr. Berkman,
being a scientist, that we need to teach them
a scientific inquiry. And Dr Gagne wouldn't cut right
to the chase. And he said people would rather
have sex than fish. He actually didn't say it
that way. He said it for those of you
know, he said it differently, But anyway,
yes, well, we lost it. Let me
tell you, we really lost it because here's my
idol and he's talking about sex and the senior citizen
. I never thought, um, we have we
had some other one. I had another wonderful story
, and this is one of those kind of real
personal to me. My parents had a car that
had a push button transmission was a Dodge Dart and
it had a little push button. Transmission is made
for several years. Dr Gandhi had one as well
. He had a limit value. And my dad
, when I was a kid, had a Dodge
Dart, and I saw this out in the parking
lot. Doctor Gagne is getting into the into the
car and I just walked up and I said,
You know, my dad used to have a car
just like this with the push button transmission, and
he said, Get in. I said what he
says, get in. So I get in.
He drives me around campus to come back about 10
minutes later. And I said, What was that
all about? He went relive a memory. It
was great. I just, um uh here.
Here's one on the theoretical side. This is really
gonna This is gonna defuse everything, you know?
But I asked him one time in class were having
He was basically a, uh I guess a seminar
. Just a discussion in one of his classes And
I raised my hand. I said, Are your
theories actually is empirically proven invalid? Because, you
know, I really don't know that this was very
early on, by the way, because when I
was there, they were just finishing up the I
S D model and he leaned over. He said
, Heavens, no. That's why we have graduate
students. So that anyway, that's how that was
empirically prudent. Um, tell you what. What
happened to me also in another personal thing on my
doctoral, And I'm sure a lot of students have
gone through this on my defense. Uh, he
asked me a question. I was very nervous.
I had a very powerful committee and, uh,
he asked me a question and I didn't know the
answer to it. I really did. But I
just couldn't bring bring it to say it. So
Dr Berkman, my major professors answered the question and
said, Uh, Stewart knows the answer to this
and then proceeds to tell him the answer to my
question just to prove that I knew the answer.
So Dr Ghani looks at me and he asked me
the next question, and I stared at him and
he stared at me and he went well and I
said, Dr Bergman. And he said, Good
answer even around. Dr Berman came to me afterward
says, Hey, you defused them. I taught
you well, you know. So anyway, there's
I got just actually a couple more. I've got
one more that Dr Bergman, And this is another
one that also involved him. His nickname was Buck
. I mean, the faculty and informal meetings used
to call him Buck, and I was privileged to
be on a committee. That was, I forgot
who shared the committee. But it was a curriculum
redesign committee for the for Florida State, uh,
in the program. And what we wanted to do
is to get they want to get student input,
as well as faculty input on what we can do
to improve the program. So as one of the
graduate students and I think David Owens was another,
there was a third one he wanted to. They
all wanted to know what we could do to improve
the curriculum. So we suggested that they should really
get talk about other theorists and other, uh,
important people in the instructional design field. other than
those who teach at Florida State University like Dr Merrill
, for instance, you know to really give a
balanced program. And, uh, we also said
, because we wanted to get and go and get
Dr Ghani going a little bit. We said,
So we're really talking about, you know, Dr
Merrill Romanowski, everybody and also P J and Carl
Rogers. And if you know him, I know
somebody. You're laughing and you find that he really
would not be favoring you and Carl Rogers. So
he got very, very animated. And he said
I would rather have P A J than Rogers and
Burkman said Bob, I think he meant Buck Rogers
. What's up, anyway? That's I'm sure there's
a lot of faculty and students because they can tell
you a lot more stories. In fact, we
were talking at lunchtime at the luncheon about some other
stories. I hope you'll tell them when you told
that. OK, maybe you won't. But anyway
, they had their time, and I want to
just echo the fact that because Dr Gagne made his
mark on our field, we've been very, very
successful for it. Thank you. Well, I'm
also going to continue in some of the storytelling tradition
, Um, and and start with my first meeting
with Bob Daniel. I was when I interviewed at
Florida State a little more than 20 years ago.
And, of course, I already knew much of
his work because the conditions of learning had been required
reading for me as an undergraduate. And I worked
for a time as an instructional designer and had his
little essentials of learning book, which was a real
handy book to give my staff. And we were
doing instructional development kinds of activities. So I came
to Tallahassee from the Northeast. So this I flew
in and sort of wondered where the town was.
Um, and Walter Dick was the chair of the
search committee and he met me at the airport and
the one of the very first things he said to
me Now, this is the first time I had
met Walt. Um, and we're chatting about it
, and he's kind of going through what my my
day is going to be to pick me up about
nine o'clock in the evening and I would interview all
the next day and he said, Well, you
understand that if we hire you, you're going to
be to replace can. Yet I'm like, Oh
, my God, the pressure. You know,
I of course, as mortgage said, he really
, truly is irreplaceable. Well, I met Bob
the next morning and we actually went to lunch together
with Baltic. Now you have to kind of picture
this and we're actually pictures. I want to draw
your attention to here, Up against the podium.
These are archived photos from Florida State's lab and you
have those of you have never seen a name is
a very big man, Okay? I mean,
you kind of much bigger than me and manned.
And Walter Dick at that time was driving a basic
blue Toyota Corolla. That was a single door thing
that wasn't double door. And so we went to
lunch. Kanye insisted on sitting in the back seat
. And so you can imagine him kind of wedging
himself into the vaccine. He finally gets situation.
He's got one hand on Walt seat and one hand
on my seat in his face between, and we're
and we're talking along its going to lunch and and
all of a sudden Bob says to me he says
. What do you think people learn from television documentaries
? But, oh, no trick question. I
really, truly didn't have a clue. I had
no idea where this question came from or what he
really expected me to say, but it was my
first introduction to Daniel's incredible curiosity. He really was
interested in what I had to say in what how
I respond to it. Well, it turns out
it might have been David Owens dissertation. I'm not
sure he had a student doing a dissertation and he
said, Well, I'll tell you, they learned
about 50%. It's not, Yeah, mhm,
but one of the things that that I came away
with that with this real sense of his incredible curiosity
and respect, I think for his colleagues, where
he was from time to time, come in the
office and ask a question that was sort of almost
off the wall. But in fact was he was
just interested in various things and and so we come
in and ask these kinds of questions. Well,
he, um, invited me to be a co
author on his essentials of learning essentials of learning for
instruction book, and it's one of those things.
He indicated to me that he wanted the teacher's perspective
. I was working with some pre service teachers at
the time, and he felt I had something to
contribute. Like Morgan indicated earlier, though, I
mean, I certainly felt that same trepidation and just
, ah, that I've been asked by Young yet
to work with him, and it just I thought
, My goodness, his prose is so elegant in
his writing is so clear, I didn't think there
would be anything that I could bring that would contribute
any in any measurable way. And yet I was
terribly flattered that he had asked me to do this
. Um, and when we started to work together
, it was an amazing experience because he wrote amazingly
fast. Um, I write fast. I tend
to draft quite rapidly, but he worked much,
much faster than than I did. And we exchanged
um, chapters. We divvy them up, and
he wrote half I wrote half and then we would
exchange our dress, and I remember thinking that how
could I improve on what what he wrote? And
yet every suggestion that I made for revision he immediately
took, he said, Oh, that's a good
idea. And most of the suggestions that he made
it for my writing. I mean, I thought
were sort of brilliant. And yet it was this
very humble sort of approach that he took to working
with a lot of his faculty. I remember thinking
as well that if he ever were to write with
a computer, he would be completely unstoppable. But
he was someone who tended to be rather impatient with
mechanical kinds of things which, um, many of
our colleagues knew. And that leads me to a
story that I wasn't going to tell because I thought
this was, um, Stuart Story. And I
don't know that this was something I actually experienced with
Bob. I did travel with him, some to
a er a, uh, but I actually thinking
something Another student mentioned to him and and they knew
that when Danny traveled, he tended to be very
impatient with airports and, you know, things that
have to do an airport. I can't imagine what
it would be like for him today in today's world
, but now remember, this is a er a
, and, um, this is a five day
long convention and one of the things that you actually
see in the pictures. Bob always used to wear
this gray suit that was in the white shirt,
sort of rumpled and offered by the end of the
day, you know that the shirttail would be partly
out and maybe a button unbuttoned and, you know
, just looked like your typical absent minded professor.
Well, this student and I don't recall who it
was when we got to the destination. Said to
Bob. Well, Dr Daniel, if if you're
trying to be nice, if you'd like me to
get it If you give me your claim, check
for your luggage. I'd be happy to go get
it for you. Tuck. Illness? No need
. Got it right here and lifts up his briefcase
. Yeah, what we want, Please. Um
one of the things I remember very much about Bob
when we did travel together and to a er a
is, he had a real penchant for fast food
. Um, and I can recall one day in
the office he asked me to go to lunch with
him, and, um, he I said,
Well, where would you like to go? So
you features and I said Okay, so I named
a place that was sort of had good, healthy
alternatives. And Bob's face just fell, just fell
. So I said, Bob, where would you
like to go? Wendy's. So from then on
, I said, Father, anytime. If you
want to go to lunch, why don't you give
me two or three places? You'd be Willie Deed
, and I'll pick from one of them. But
whenever we went out, yeah, right. That's
the very first thing he would do his scout out
, the nearest McDonald's and something he just loved,
Uh, fast food. One of my favorite 80
our stories. And I have to tell you,
this is something I tell my students in my class
I teach a learning class, Um, and this
actually having several stories related to the learning class?
I When I was first hired there, Bob and
I actually did team teach. We had very different
teaching styles and that Bob was very much of sort
of the old world lecturer, a wonderful lecturer,
somebody you could sit and listen to for quite a
long time understand what he had to say. He
was extremely clear. He was interesting to listen to
, but it was very much of a didactic kind
of style. Whereas mind tends to be more of
an interactive style. I really want to engage students
in conversation. And so it was an interesting tension
for us to work together in the same class.
And there are times that the questions would somewhat take
him a bit off guard. And I recall one
of the questions, like the one that Stewart mentioned
about PJ that all almost always came up because we
taught this was the course that Bob had put together
. We taught, uh, we taught, um
, Groner. We talked Skinner. Um, we
taught possible We did not teach any casual. So
one of the questions invariably somebody would ask is,
Why don't you click cash A in this class,
and immediately you can start to see the bread.
And it's basically because because, yeah, it is
a developmental theorist, not a learning theorist, A
developmental theorists, Of course, by this time he
looks like he's about to explode. For half the
students simply shut up Another occasion. I was teaching
a course that was a doctoral seminar, and we
were talking about researching theory development and model development.
And I asked Bob to come in and talk about
some of the thinking that went behind his development of
his instructional theory. And one of the students asked
a question that just said, Well, thought,
Dr Gang, how did you come up with this
theory? And he kind of paused and looked thoughtful
for a moment and kind of shook, as he
says, because you said, You just think it
, Yeah, but yeah, All right. One
of my favorite stories was a panel that he and
Bob Blazer were asked to debate. Um, and
and it was moderated kind of debate where I think
there were some canned questions and then they were asked
to sort of go at each other. And so
far, Blazer kind of went first. And Glaser
says to Daniel, Uh, Bob, why do
you think there are eight kinds of learning? And
I assume eight comes from one of the early editions
of the conditions of learning where the taxonomy had reached
its final stage and immediately canceled our date? That's
fine, fine. So Glaser said, Well,
okay, why do you think they were fine signs
of learning and again, again it kind of kind
of sits there and puzzlement from against because it's all
over in Okay, But that is something that when
I when I talked to my class about Daniels theory
, because I do think this is one of the
contributions that he's made to the field is an integrative
and comprehensive theory. And one of the questions I
ask is, Is that all there is? And
it's often very difficult as we think about potential examples
of learned capabilities to come up with any that cannot
be classified using the Gangsters taxonomy. And I haven't
yet seen a real clear example. I think there's
some that perhaps, are borderline, but I think
that's a lasting contribution, Um, that he's made
, Um, I think I'd like to end at
this point with simply saying that that Kanye certainly had
an impact on my thinking. Um, he continues
to have lasting impact on my thinking, and on
the field, at least, his theory is something
that is still very useful today. Um, it
hasn't yet supplanted. I don't think I've been supplanted
by other theories. Certainly others are competing, but
he had an incredible mind and he was someone that
was here as I mentioned, Very, very curious
. And so I think he would be happy to
take to be challenged, to say, Well,
is that all there is? And I think that's
the challenge for us as a field to take his
work even further. Yeah, right. Okay.
We're moving from Tallahassee to San Antonio. When I
met Dave Maryland Bob Gagne at the same time.
In fact, an association with the project at the
Air Force Armstrong Research Laboratory called the Advanced Instructional Design
Advisor. Uh, Bob, I think was wearing
that same suit. Hadn't washed the shirt. And
, of course, he was wearing the tennis shoes
that he always wore when he wore suits. Um
, and I thought I'd just tell a couple of
quick stories. I'm not gonna take very much time
, and then we'll leave the last word today.
But, uh, two things struck me about Bob
. A number of things. One was, uh
, his inquiry in mind. Uh, he basically
retired from Florida State and came out of retirement,
so he hadn't really retired. He remained active,
quite active. Um, and I had come from
a different field from philosophy than a computer science and
then to this field. And I had a number
of philosophy books on my shelf and and he asked
me, What should he read? So the first
week he was there, he read Hume's Treatise of
human nature. Uh, the first week. I
mean, this is an enormously thick book. He
would have soared things. He was interested to find
out new things. He spent an incredible amount of
time talking to the many young scientists and technicians that
worked at the lab. He was very generous with
his time. I remember on one occasion we were
visiting Aircrew Training Facility and Phoenix, Arizona, driving
around. This was the case when he wasn't looking
for fast food, he was looking for a state
. So Bob also was a carnivore. He liked
to stay looking for a particular restaurant that he had
visited before. Black Angus was the picture that he
remembered, and he thought it was the name of
the restaurant. It wasn't. We were lost,
and I was driving around, lost in Phoenix,
trying to carry on a conversation with Bob, and
I was struggling with how to design computer based instruction
so that it wouldn't lose student interest, which we
knew was happening in a lot of cases. And
I tried to initiate a conversation. What would make
a particular interface attractive, memorable and so forth.
And he came back with an answer that didn't really
seem quite right. It was too mechanistic if you
had things balanced and the colours were clear and the
objects were distinct, that kind of answer. You
can imagine Bob saying that things had to be clear
and distinct and readable, and and it seems like
, well, I wanted more. So I said
, Well, what makes a poem memorable? And
he gave the same kind of answer. Rhyme and
meter pounded his fist, as he usually did.
So he knew the answer, Rhyme and meter was
said, Well, isn't there something more? Tell
me a poem you remember. And so then he
proceeded to recite without hesitation. Edgar Allan Poe,
The Raven, which is a very long poem.
It's about five pages long, so this really struck
my curiosity. He's in his seventies, and he
remembers this poem word for word. It just happened
to have been my favorite as well. So I
said, What were you forced to memorize this when
you were a Brown or Yale or some time in
your career? No. When did you learn it
? He had met Pat and they were dating and
he was not sure how romances go. And he
was really different authors and he chance to cross pole
When he was in the life. He committed this
poem to memory and 50 years later, driving around
, Lost in Phoenix, he's able to recite the
entire poem. He just had an incredible mind.
One other short, one that passed the microphone today
when we're at the laboratory, we worked on this
project, the Advanced Instruction Design Advisor and Bob said
his office was next to mine, and his task
was to lead direct the building the construction of a
what we called a case based advising approach to instructional
design. So we would have examples exemplars of computer
based instruction that we knew worked and then we would
have an elaboration of the rationale. For one particular
design was affected, what the designer was thinking and
why things were done certain ways. The other project
that we had underway in parallel with that was a
system that Merrill design, which was really to eliminate
the instructional designer to automate the process as much as
possible. So we were trying both approaches and and
then one of the things we did with the day's
work was we connected it to a database that had
all of the content material for F 16, F
18 electrical avionics subsystems. So we had technical descriptions
of the radar in the database. We had troubleshooting
procedures, and then we would have a subject matter
expert. A technician say I need to provide some
refresher training for this particular newcomer out of out of
the text school. On removing the radar from an
aircraft, for example. The system would generate the
instruction on the fly. And I thought, Well
, this is wonderful and Bob was sitting next to
me. So I took this achievements that didn't this
wonderful box here. We we even conducted a test
. We had a human expert designer do the same
task that took in three months that the computer did
in three minutes. Basically so. And you can't
tell one from the other, you know, and
Bob's response, and this really stuck with me.
It wasn't at all interesting what the computer. Did
we understood how the computer was able to do that
? The interesting thing was how that expert designed that
instruction. That's what we need to find out.
Like so I was excited about the wrong kind of
thing, but he had such a general way of
telling me that I was walking down the wrong path
. Mhm. We are allowed to borrow. And
I got kicked off the project in Bob ST.
Uh, I'm very honored to be here, I
think, especially since I was never really a student
of Bob Young. Yeah, but I don't suppose
there's anybody in the professional field that had had more
influence on me than Robert Young. He has.
And I thought I'd trace just briefly the history of
my involvement with Bob. And I'm gonna tell funny
stories, and I'm certainly not going to try to
imitate him. After Marcy Uh huh. In 1964
I was in graduate school and I wrote a paper
that I thought was extremely insightful, called two kinds
of Learning, and I submitted to my professor,
Jack Adams, who said he thought it was also
very insightful and, uh, said perhaps I'd be
interested in reading a manuscript that he had just received
to review called The Conditions of Learning. And so
I read the conditions of learning in manuscript form in
1964 just before it was published. And I wrote
a letter to Bob Gagne, who was then at
Berkeley and said, uh that I was very excited
about his book, but very frustrated that he'd just
written a book I intended to write. Uh huh
. And so that was my first introduction. A
few months later, I went to my very first
professional convention of the Southeast Psychological Association, met in
New Orleans, and, uh, I went to
present my dissertation study that I was working on,
and there were three people in the audience. I
don't remember the other two were but one. Was
Bob gone yet? And, uh, after that
meeting, Bob and I sat and visited about my
dissertation for about 30 minutes, and that was my
first association with Bob, uh, subsequent to that
because of the contributions which had made and especially the
conditions of learning, Uh, we were always trying
to BYU, and we're trying to get BYU on
the map, uh, to get seminars at a
er A and a CT and other meetings. Uh
, we always invited Bob Young you to be on
our seminars. So I can't tell you how many
different panels that I served on with Bob over those
years, and that was a really great experience.
And so he had a tremendous influence on me and
on my students during those years. I suppose to
really highlight of my career with Bob was in 1987
when I first went to Utah State University, and
when I got there, they knew of my association
with Bob and said, We would like you to
have We would like to have a debate between you
and Bob Gagnon instructional design theory, And I said
, I refused to debate Bob Gagne several reasons,
one of which, I knew I wouldn't have a
chance. And second, uh, I said,
I don't disagree with anything. There's nothing to debate
. I said, I I don't have any disagreement
. I do not see my work as contrary to
what Bob has done, I said, But I
would be delighted to have a discussion with Bob Gagne
. And so they said, Well, if you
want to call a discussion That's okay. Would rather
call it a debate because it would sell better.
And I said, I don't want I don't want
to debate. I want to discuss This was a
very interesting arrangement happened to be on my wedding anniversary
on July 10th. I remember that my wife said
this was a very interesting way to spend an anniversary
, and we were on a raised platform. There
were about 200 people in the audience. We were
both seated in an armchair with an overhead projector next
to us. And so we were where we could
touch one another. And then on the outside of
our armchairs with the overhead projectors that were behind us
and they televised or they video this discussion, this
went on. We had 4 90 minute sessions throughout
the day, uh, where we just sat the
two of us and talked. And then at the
end of each of these sessions, we had a
set of questions. Now, if any of you
would like to view that it's on video, and
if you will send me an email, that video
is available. I know some of you have that
, uh but the the video was heavily edited,
by the way. So the videos are only about
an hour each. Uh, but that was put
on video. And subsequently, uh, the essence
of those discussions were published in it technology, uh
, in, uh, seventh consecutive issues in the
1990 I believe. Is that what it was?
I think it was 99. Uh, but any
resemblance to what's in it technology and what was actually
said I would invite you to read and listen to
the video and then read, and because there's almost
no resemblance because by the time Bob got to editing
, uh, the two things are quite different.
But this was a great experience for me, and
I think I remember very strongly in the second hour
. Uh, it was not really adversarial, but
a kind of a debate format in the first hour
and in the second hour, as I was talking
about my ideas about knowledge, structures and so forth
, Bob turned to me all of a sudden,
put his hand on my knee, and he said
, You don't really disagree with me, do you
? And I said, No, Bob, all
I've ever tried to do is say what you said
or should have said, He said. You're not
kind away at the last category, uh, which
is probably true subsequent to that. The next day
I said to you know, uh, he was
getting a little long in years of those points and
I said, You know, why don't you stay
one more day? We'll go up to my Bear
Lake cabin and, uh, we just sit and
relax in the sun before you fly home. And
he agreed to do that. So the next day
we had a very informal, lovely day sitting on
the deck, just chatting about all kinds of things
, and during the afternoon, he said, You
know, he said, if you and I could
get together and agree on some vocabulary, we'd really
influence the field. And I thought that was very
nice for him to include me in that I said
, That's a great idea. Let's do that,
he said. Let's find a way to get together
. Well, subsequent to that, Eric Roberts and
some others arranged for Bob Pyongyang, and I'd immediate
the American Academy of Science for an entire week.
Just Bob and I across the desk from each other
with the recorder and Eric in the room and to
have a conversation about instructional design. And our agreement
was that we would come up with some vocabulary we
could agree on. And so we talked for six
hours for five days. This is 30 individual hours
. That's probably more than all these graduate students got
with, Uh, what a great opportunity that was
for me. It was a little frustrating, however
, because the end of every day, I thought
I'd really convinced Bob about some things. The next
morning would be right back to where we were a
previous morning. Um, but we had a really
wonderful conversation, and at the end of that,
we agreed on one vocabulary word which no one had
used before Enterprise. And, uh so we weren't
successful at our goal, But we had a tremendous
opportunity. The really sad part for that to me
was that the all of the audio recordings of that
when I got home, I put them in the
recorder and it went, uh, no one had
checked the mic and the technician that we had recording
these. So I have a box full of recordings
. 30 hours of conversation with Bob Janjuah, none
of which is audible to me. Um, so
some of you are really great audio technicians. You
may want to look at that. Maybe it could
be resurrected A nevertheless, that was a great opportunity
. We decided to write about our discussions. And
so I wrote the first draft of this turned out
to be about 65 pages long, uh, of
our discussions and send it to Bob for editing.
It came back. It was 11 pages long.
I then rewrote it and send it back. It
was about 50 pages long and it came back and
it was nine pages long and subsequently it was published
. Uh, it's included in the Legacy book,
The book on Enterprise, uh, which I think
was an important contribution. And I was really thrilled
that I could be a joint author with Bob along
with some of his students. Also subsequent to that
, we went to Florida State for the to replicate
what we had done at Utah State, and they
again wanted to suppose this is a debate. And
this time Bob said, No, I will not
debate Dave Merrill, and we had a great discussion
about knowledge, objects and, uh, about learning
objects and some of the things that before the learning
objects got famous, uh, subsequent. And we
had a great discussion there at Florida State as well
. Um, and I don't know if that was
ever recorded. I don't think so, but and
subsequently and I was meeting in his office and I
talked to him and I said, Bob, you
know, I'm trying to push you to go to
computerized versions and how we represent knowledge for computers.
And he drew a line on a piece of paper
and he said, What I've tried to do,
he said, is to prevent there's present recommendations for
designers that life designers could use. He said,
I'm not too interested in putting things on a computer
. But he said, I think that this is
a great way to go. So he said,
he shut the paper with a friend and he said
, So you take it from here. I felt
like that was a really kind of handing off of
the gunman. Let me just quickly closed by summarizing
some of the influence that Bob has had on my
word. Uh, in 1964. When I read
the manuscript copy of the Conditions of Learning, I
thought it was the most important book that I had
ever read in this field, and I still do
. I think that the conditions of learning are the
classic, and I'm disappointed when people don't still read
it. I think it should be required reading for
every instructional designer. I think it is one of
the classic works and that that work is still extremely
important. Uh, component display theory. My own
word was really an attempt to clarify the conditions of
learning. I just felt like there were some things
for me were not as clear as they could have
been. We came up with a two way classification
. We came up with the notion that I thought
the conditions weren't as clear as they could be.
My father was an artist and always taught me that
you could paint any picture of the red, yellow
and blue crayon. So I thought we ought to
come up with primary presentation forms that we could clarify
Gandhi's condition. But in fact, come on display
theory was really an attempt to clarify the conditions of
learning, uh, elaboration theory that I worked on
with Charlie Raglan and Charlie went on to really extend
a great deal. Uh, it was really an
extension of hierarchy analysis. Charlie and I worked on
extended task analysis and elaboration. Theory was really grew
out of our trying to deal with hierarchy analysis and
how it worked, and we thought that there needed
to be more than what was in the literature.
So these are some of the things I thought Bob
should have said. And as we moved into that
area more recently worked on transaction theory, which was
an attempt to capture in an algorithm in a computer
algorithm those conditions of learning for various learning outcomes.
So we tried to automate that to capture it,
and then more recently than that, we worked on
knowledge objects, which is really an attempt to take
the type of outcomes and make it more explicit and
talk about how we could represent it. So almost
all the work that I've done has really been an
outgrowth of Junior, and finally, the most recent
work that I've talked about recently is first principles where
I've looked at a lot of theories and tried to
look at the principles they have in common, and
and they thing that we've decided there is that really
effective learning. His problem centered, This is not
the problem based. We make that distinction. And
as I looked again at the article above and I
wrote an enterprise, I said, Oh, my
gosh. Here. This is exactly where I got
that idea from. And so I am really have
been influenced in my career by Bob Gagne and Bob
, If you're here today, thanks for the contribution
you made to my career and remember, all I
ever did was say what you said or should have
said. Well, that was definitely an interesting hour
. I want to thank everyone who contributed to this
all of you. Wonderful stories. Thanks, Bob
. He is here, and I'm sure he was
laughing the hardest at the stories we told about him
. Right party. I guess I have nothing else
to add except to extend my thanks for for coming
and celebrating this with, uh, we had a