we're with Doctor Mike Hannafin today um here at the
2012 convention of A E. C. T.
In Louisville Kentucky. And thank you Mike for joining
us for the history makers interview. So what we'll
first do to get started is to have you tell
us a little bit about yourself, where you're working
now and what kind of work you're doing currently?
I am on faculty University of Georgia and I direct
the Learning and Performance support laboratory at the University of
Georgia, which is kind of an R and D
center that focuses on innovations in technology and teaching and
learning, simply stated, How long have you been
at the University of Georgia? I'm doing a quick
check. I think it's my 16th year but can't
hold me to that exactly. I think that's about
Okay, great. Oh, tell us a little
bit about the primary focus of your work and your
or your resource focus. Well, I'd like to
say there's one focus, but probably the best way
to describe it is that through the laboratory we've really
about a couple of initiatives, some of which I
have a more major role in than others. So
recently, for example, we've done a lot of
work with video analysis where we use video to sort
of capture and then mark up and evaluate video samples
based on attributes and whether or not certain things are
not there. So that so a big part of
what we did for the past five years really focused
on applications of video in largely in either development or
self assessment or evaluation. Eventually in those range from
teacher practice to medical school preparation to pilot training.
Okay. Yeah, my my real focus on the
things I've kind of done the most sustained most is
really on sort of the the trying to work with
issues about how do people actually come to grips with
understanding things where there's no real structure to do that
? Some of those current school, some of those
occur when we go home and need to do something
, want to figure something out. And we've got
this world of resources out there that are, that
are there. And so the good news is,
there's tons of stuff out there. The difficulty is
that it's rarely organized to get what I want to
learn at that time and there's a lot of competing
, somewhat very contrasting contradictory information. So we've been
very interested in sort of how do we help,
uh, learned how to guide people's ability to make
judgments about what they're learning or not learning when they
have or have not learned when they're in these kind
of open ended environments. Tell us a little bit
about how you got interested in this field. Well
, it was probably like a lot of folks,
wasn't one of these great plans. I was a
school psychologist for years and years and moved to phoenix
and actually thought I'd do in my doctoral studies in
school psychology. And when I went over and started
looking and talking to people, I realized I didn't
really like what school psychologist had to, didn't like
what I was doing all that much, but I
thought it would be more if I did it as
a doctorate. And but when I was there,
I got to know a couple of people from what
was, what was, I can't think of the
educational technology program, particularly Howard Sullivan norm Higgins and
some others. And so I got, as I
start to describe what I was interested in, which
is really more about the, the idea of how
do we support learning and so forth there. Um
I spent more time talking with them and that's really
where I began to see more possibilities for what he's
doing. So I had had a background in psychology
, it was a psychology major school, Psychology.
Um so my interest really was in this notion of
the relationship of that to teaching and learning, and
so that's how I ended up in. What was
the educational technology program you fit? Okay, so
along those lines, um starting back with your graduate
time at Arizona state, can you describe your career
path from grad school on? I can do it
now, but if you ask me then what I'd
be doing now, I have no idea. I
think probably like certainly the students that I've worked with
many, I've known my initial work was really influenced
heavily by the folks I was working with Sue,
um kind of the issues they were interested in.
So I became a part of some of the work
they were doing and kind of learned the ropes to
some extent around that. And did my dissertation work
actually visual learning and so forth there, which I've
always had an interest in. Um and so the
idea of sort of picking up and growing from there
became this, that, that was, that was
really my, my first several things I did focused
on that. It was really the transition from that
, that was sort of a combination of life events
and just sort of saying, wow, that's different
ah and truthfully, probably the most importance it was
having a family and seeing kids growing up and realizing
that a lot of learning involved a bunch of things
that have nothing to do with instruction. Kids learn
stuff spontaneously, they invent new things and, and
I was working in schools at the time and it
seemed to me there's a huge mismatch between what instruction
was for in terms of direct and learning school and
really what learning was for kids and sort of disappointing
and seeing how a lot of that kind of interest
and ingenuity sort of starts to wane for young kids
. And of course that's one of the big chronic
problems is that kids come in all kinds of excited
over a number of years that kind of lose some
of that interest. So yeah, that was a
lot of, it was really sort of recognizing that
I was more interested in getting that question. Well
, how do people learn? Not so much how
to instruct them, which I think is useful,
so, but if we were interested in how people
learn and how they ultimately think about ways of helping
people learn what they're trying to learn, that's kind
of how I migrated over time for saying, well
, I got more interested in. Okay, well
, well, some of that has to do with
how do we support them, psychologists call that scaffolding
. Some of them have to do with things like
resources like encyclopedias, things on the web. So
over time as as sort of things began to emerge
, the technology emerge and so forth. A number
of things. The components of initial interest began to
sort of take some different forms. That's kind of
where I'm focusing now is sort of, well,
we're in this kind of open ended digital world and
some of them we try to work with in schools
, but a lot of we don't, and even
the stuff at work in the schools, a lot
of what goes on has nothing do with that has
to do with what are people doing with the information
outside that school. So that's kind of where I
got to write. Okay. So you worked in
the schools for a little while and then where did
you work after? You left kick off school system
? The first position to was the University of Colorado
? Not a bad place to live. Great place
, really, a great opportunity to kind of get
started and lots of really good support. Uh huh
. And that was sort of where we transitioned from
having a young child, having a second child.
And the whole process started over again. And then
I moved to Penn state and as a Penn State
for five years and it's near the florida state and
I think it was there for six years and then
currently in Georgia. Been ever since so far right
. Good day. All right. How would you
describe your research interests and aspirations when you first started
your career? And how did they change over time
? And you talked about that a little bit,
But would you like to elaborate? Yeah, I
mean, the first thing probably supporting said I had
no idea to ever be in higher education. In
fact, I I started out the reason I get
into what I got into with kids and stuff,
but as Children's television workshop, I watched, I
watched my my son at that point, fascinated with
all this stuff and just how it engages himself.
So when I originally went back, I was targeting
, you know, Children's television workshop for Children's television
. So this is really what I thought was through
this sort of contacts and interactions and opportunities really that
were generated through this contact of the issue and my
advisor and work there. I was kind of introduced
a whole world that I just never saw. Obviously
you're a student, you see it, but you
don't really see yourself here. And the more I
got involved in the activities there, the more,
first of all I liked it and I found I
could do something near uh huh and one of those
kind of happenstance things kind of like I was finishing
up and suddenly the question as well, gee this
is positions here and they are, would you like
that? I suppose sure. But that, that
was not me, but it turned out it was
me, so I enjoy that and that's so I
started up very much this Children's television workshop, but
student kid learning and then the risk as I described
before really sort of unfolded over over a period of
years, starting with some early kind of formative views
about, well how do we use pictures and learning
and so forth there, but kind of transitioning,
I think, which is fairly typical. You know
, it's sort of a combination of life with ins
and stuff that goes on in the field and suddenly
say I'm more interested in, I need to figure
out how to. But it's never been kind of
a an abrupt change where I woke up one day
and said all the light is different now. It's
always been sort of an emergence and that kind of
a shifting further and further away from where I thought
I was initially Mhm. Yes. All right.
What were some of the major ideas or approaches that
simulated your professional growth? Well, I think part
of it is their people, first of all,
I think I've always sort of I've always sort of
looked at people who have done interesting things the areas
I'm in and saying, yeah, that's interesting.
How did they get to that idea? So it
obviously there's some, if you look at areas I
work in now and you say, well, there
are people like john transfers were, couldn't you?
Some of my advisors work and some of my students
work who's going to do things, there's a whole
set of things that sort of begin to sort of
give you other ways of thinking about before France would
work was particularly important because in part he has a
strong psychological cognitive sort of background before it got interested
in learning technology per se. Um, he was
doing world class research and theory in the kind of
the site green. So I think part of it
was saying there's a there's a way to root yourself
or ground yourself and how you view these things that
must be fundamentally important. So it was less a
matter of trying to find an area and say,
okay, I need to develop expertise here, as
much less saying, well, the people who seem
to be doing good stuff now, or at that
point in time, they didn't start, they built
it over a period of time with a succession of
experiences, life experience. So I began to look
and say, well actually, core need to kind
of build a strong core in terms of what I
think learning is about, and I continue to refine
that, but I think part of it is to
say if I'm going to look at learning and technology
specifically, which ultimately is what I do, um
I think it becomes really critical for me to say
it isn't just about the technology and it isn't just
learning from a theory, but it really is sort
of the intersection between those and how people interact with
it in a way that involves learning whether it's their
own learning, self, self directed learning, whether
it's learning that might be school based or for,
um, have been some of the most important trends
that you've encountered in the field. Well, you
know, at the time I entered the field,
it was all about behaviorism, is all about directed
learning was all about sort of classic systems ISD models
where there's sort of a a kind of a pretty
well prescribed orchestrated way to think about that, which
Which I think certainly I certainly adopted and endorse and
still use 11. Now, the big changes for
me personally was sort of moving beyond and saying,
well, I'm also interested in trying to understand why
some of the things might happen. That's sort of
my emergency sort of cognitive you about learning. And
so for me at least it wasn't enough to say
this worked. Therefore it's good. It was more
a case of saying, well why did it work
for you? But not for me, why what
do the kind of things did? So I got
more into the business of what the individuals do when
they think and learn. And so that to me
was a big part of that transformation. And then
over time again with sort of shifts in user based
technology. Uh obviously this is going back far enough
now, but the internet and so forth, which
believe it or not was just barely taking inspiration as
there, but Just seeing how that's changed and morphed
over over my 20 something, 30 years, whatever
it is now since graduation, that's become kind of
the the almost testbed for looking and seeing well,
so what's going to happen next that just came from
kelly, it's always presentation. And now this focus
on not just mobile, global device and so forth
, That sort of mobile devices and the notion of
really self designed, self directed learning where there's a
lot more individual sort of regulation of learning by doing
so. It seems to me that for me and
I think this happened to some extent in the field
generally with sort of interesting constructivism interested is that that
these sort of frameworks and models that support different learning
environments or designs have some sort of fundamentally different underpinnings
. Some of them are rooted in a particular kind
of psychology, others the pedagogical strategies that seem to
align with them and seem to be more consistent with
one type or another. And so I became interested
and I do think that the familiar, at least
the focus became so do we. I still use
behavioral principles all the time with a lot of things
, but I like to think I have an understanding
, but what I'm shifting a strategy based on a
different set of assumptions about the nature of how learning
is occurring and whether it's you making particular sentence,
so you understand what I want you to know and
how it is that that might be supported and so
forth. So that I think for me, the
thing is this big shift in epistemology and sort of
a theory, but that complemented by the corresponding shift
in technology and suddenly, what all was possible,
much of which may be very difficult or counterproductive to
some forms of learning, but very necessary for others
. The mask. A related question regarding, um
, your statement about using components of behaviorism sometimes,
but making a shift when needed. Do you think
most um in structural design practitioners today would uh use
a eclectic approach or just in an application? Do
you think that's that's happening? I think I'll say
yes and no because I can get by with both
, because I can explain it. The I think
most people are pragmatic in terms of saying there's some
things that what I'm not as convinced of is that
is that the strategies that adopted differently are made consciously
with regard to saying, is this really supporting your
your thinking? Is this really related to your understanding
versus the other? So, I think, I
think there's a tendency to sort of describe some things
that we do with whatever the popular terminology is,
whether it's constructivism, whatever it happens to be self
senator and uses something, there's a lot of terms
that, that I think I'm meant very differently.
So I do think people for the most part of
pragmatic, um, but in some discussions and some
of the debates I've gotten into with other few folks
in the area. I think this one side of
the field that they says, wait a second,
there's a right way to do this and this is
this is it. And there are others who say
, well, actually there are probably lots of ways
that maybe this is it, or maybe we need
to study more about that. So I I think
that the field is kind of at a point where
we have a lot of these possibilities, but not
necessarily a lot of really strong, either theory or
research to kind of say, yeah, but this
is more likely to be successful doing that particular when
you get to these, use the Senate designs.
Thanks. Who are some of the people who have
had the most impact on your professional growth? How
do they affect you? Well, yeah, I've
already mentioned Howard seldom. I mean he's, he's
still my number one mentor, probably my, the
closest sort of long term. He's retired, but
I just saw him a week and a half ago
. Uh, so part of it is sort of
keeping touch with this sense about somebody who had a
big role in helping you think through what I picked
up from Howard more than anything is sort of that
notion. And I think most of Howard's graduates,
if you ask them to do the same thing,
they all feel this commitment to saying it isn't just
about their work and so forth there and it isn't
just about thanking howard and vowing, but they take
very, very great interest, sustained interest in their
current and recent graduate students. The idea is to
see this sort of nurturing generations of people who hopefully
will have some influence on the field overall. So
I actually just that I probably learned a whole lot
more from my students than they will learn from me
. Excuse me. But I think that for me
, I get probably at least as much satisfaction as
we have seen, seeing how they were able to
impact their students, their field and so forth their
institutions. Uh huh. And the good news for
everybody I think is that they're really not really not
bringing my points of view and it's not a matter
of sort of spreading my word. I think it's
a matter of sort of getting a sense about what
is the responsibility for sort of thinking about the field
increase? How do they lead people in and how
do they guide? That seems to me to be
a more systemic than saying our people 10 years or
20 years or 50 years. They are going to
be thinking like I thought or they are they going
to be thinking things that sort of because they're really
, really engaged in ideas that cause them to have
to think about those in different ways. So yeah
, I mean, I've got Bransford, I've got
some of these others that clearly folks that influenced my
thinking, think for me, the commitment is really
more about what is this sort of lineage of people
who really have a commitment to sort of saying there's
a way to kind of make a difference here.
One is by me publishing million things on my own
, One is by consulting and making$1 million dollars
on their own. Another is by kind of cultivating
generations of people who would hopefully have the same kind
of that's the part I think becomes really, if
there's a legacy, I think that's kind of where
I think Howard's legacy is clearly there. I think
me and some of his graduates would probably feel the
same. May I ask you another question? That's
not sure. Uh, it'll be an easy one
for data. So what are some of the highlights
of your career so far highlights? Um, I
don't want to keep harping on this, but again
, sort of like the paternal side of using activity
really do have Uh huh. Maybe a maybe an
unusual, maybe a pathological pride in the sort of
Children you sort of bring out and their successes and
their accomplishments and so forth there. Um, so
it's not so much that it's sort of highlight in
terms of this was the point at which I got
this award. That, you know, the truth
is a lot of things that I do that other
people do um may get a lot of attention at
a given point time, but the light dims.
It's not so much the idea is that it's designed
sort of hopefully get people to think about things,
not necessarily to say, okay, we now have
a new gospel to follow here. And so I
think part of the idea of kind of what kind
of contribution you really think has more to do with
, again, at least in my case, what
who are the minds and what kind of minds of
what kind of thinking of people who are going at
it? Are they, are they the kind of
person who is likely to kind of have a commitment
to not just themselves, but their students, their
colleagues are the commitment to a field. Do they
see themselves as shaping the future of the field or
they really, are they mainly the kind of,
um, you know, get a degree and get
a job which is perfectly honorable in its own right
, but, and I think for my part,
I try to find students who really see themselves,
the thing that I really, this is a field
I think I belong in and I can make a
difference. So the highlight for me is literally going
back through and we do have lineage of basically everybody
I've had from, from colorado up through now,
not only where they are, what they're doing,
who they're graduates work with graduates, graduates, we
have a, a sense about what that sort of
network of impact is, and to the extent that
they then impart some of the same goals that Howard
imparted with me, then I think you have a
little bit better sense about, Well, it isn't
really just about you, it's really more about,
you know, what is the what is that sort
of net effect of, that kind of thing based
on human capital? Thanks. Your response may be
similar here, but how would you like to be
remembered within the profession? Well, I think that's
probably pretty consistent that I think it's I said,
I look at some of the stuff that I've written
and published over the years, and I'll even have
queries on some stuff that's written 2030 years ago.
And part of my reaction says, I can't believe
I did that, I couldn't possibly be. And
so you become pretty sort of like, you have
the the retrospective benefit looking back and saying, well
, it seemed like a good idea at the time
. It seemed like time, But it isn't necessarily
something that's gonna be a long term. But even
though somebody may ask you for clarification what you meant
in 1981, um then I'll say I'm not sure
if you remember, but I think this is what
, but I do think this notion of seeing things
really is evolutionary as seeing things as emergent rather than
fixed. It seems to me to be the thing
that hopefully, well, commitment, again, part
of it is the ideas themselves. I think some
of it is, yeah, it's great. It
doesn't have to be my idea at the end,
but I'd like to see at some point some of
these things influence how other people thought that whatever it
is, even if they reject the stuff we've been
doing and saying here's some good reason why. But
then again, for me, ultimately, it's what's
the lineage over time and is there when I went
back, which is sort of what the pressure is
getting at? What do you want to remember?
It's not a gold watch. What are you going
to be? I think it really is sort of
looking back and saying, let me see who's out
there and let me take some pride and what they're
able to do. And again, that may be
the father part of being a thought, but I
do think that to me that is the the train
. Well, thanks mike. We really appreciate your
time and your contribution. Thank you. Thank you 478 --> A:middle L:90% .