Tag: design

I do not think this little fact can ever be overemphasized: Learning Theory Does NOT = Instructional Design Theory. The minute we confuse our prescriptive theories with the descriptive theories upon which they are based it becomes impossible to accurately study or develop our theories.

Learning theory is a descriptive theory and instructional design theory is a prescriptive theory which should have learning theory as a base.

Good catch on that one Rovy.

This is slightly off the path of the original discussion, but when Rovy said “it would be great to have adaptive, exploratory, multi-path instruction for everything we have to learn” it got me thinking. Would it be so great.

Rovy would probably agree with me – based on his post – that there are some things where it really makes no sense to go to the expense, time and effort to produce that kind of instruction. When we attempt to make everything so interactive etc. what we end up with is edutainment at its best. While we could certainly use more well designed and interactive instruction our goal should not be to make everything so engaging but to use engaging where it actually enhances learning.

I think that Alan has perfectly illustrated the difference between a “design formula” – ADDIE in this case – and real design. It is not that ADDIE is not good design, but if you A then D then D then I then E you have copied someone elses design.

We need to get better at teaching how to think through design so that there is no more need to rely on ADDIE or First Principles to produce our instruction. We can use them to help us understand how the learning process generally occurs and then think about the layers of design and the criteria for the specific project/product and create a design rather than finding the material and then following a rather rote procedure.

Paul Kirschner is exactly right in saying that providing for good group work or good online collaboration is not the same as ensuring good group work or ensuring good online collaboration. I also liked his point that developers most often do not use different pedagogy for computer based learning as they do for classroom learning. This new technology as David Wiley said in TechTrends “should be approached on its own terms.”

The IMS machine readable notation system – part of IMS LD – could be the basis of a notation system for instructional design which allows us to talk about instruction. We would need to have it become human readable before it would actually be useful in teaching ID. This kept reminding me of a session on notation systems by Andy Gibbons and Sandy Waters given here last year.

According to David Wiley it will take a lot of work before it could serve that function.

I read a copy of this presentation from when Andy Gibbons gave it in Orlando in June 2004. Being in a live session was interesting as one of the participants in the session suggested that the trial and error method of learning something was inherently inefficient. I wondered once that comment was made if perhaps efficiency is not always the best standard of what we should be doing. Perhaps the “inefficient” method causes the information and knowledge to be more firmly grounded in the mind of the learner. The second thing is that there is a chance that the trial and error method may in fact cause the interactions of the various pieces of information to be more firmly linked in the mind of the learner.