Issues in Technology, Learning, and Instructional Design

Classic and Contemporary Dialogues

Alison A. Carr-Chellman, Gordon Rowland

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317484295
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

In Issues in Technology, Learning, and Instructional Design, some of the best-known scholars in those fields produce powerful, original dialogues that clarify current issues, provide context and theoretical grounding, and illuminate a framework for future thought. Position statements are introduced and then responded to, covering a remarkably broad series of topics across educational technology, learning, and instructional design, from tool use to design education to how people learn. Reminiscent of the well-known Clark/Kozma debates of the 1990s, this book is a must-have for professionals in the field and can also be used as a textbook for graduate or advanced undergraduate courses.

Part 1

The Nature of Design and Instructional Design

Chapter 1

Instructional Design as Design

Patrick Parrish

Over the years I have learned that what is important in a dress is the woman who is wearing it.

—Yves St. Laurent

The relationship of instructional design (ID) to the other design disciplines is to a large extent one of envious outsider. What we produce is not as elegant as a penthouse living room, as majestic as the modernist high-rise hosting it, as sexy as the evening dress worn by the woman living there, or as clever and influential as the iPhone inside the Hermès purse she carries. Our designs lack glamour (Postrel, 2013).

We produce little of lasting utility or global impact. Our designs are typically ephemeral and often intended only for local or narrow use. No consumer magazine is devoted to ID—people do not care to fuss over their learning experiences as much as their gardens or their clothing. Very few awards are given to IDs. IDs rarely, if ever, appear as characters in novels. The profession does not creep into the list of the one hundred best jobs.

We frequently have to explain our discipline even to those on our work teams, and the results are often unconvincing. The content experts we work with sometimes see what we do as window dressing. What we do is not just nonintuitive; to many, it is also nondescript.

How Do We Respond to Such an Unenthusiastic Response to Our Work? One Approach Is to Align ID with More Respected, Nondesign Disciplines, Like Science

Instructional design has long teetered on a figurative edge between design and applied science. At times it is subjected to a game of tug of war between two loosely organized but vocal camps with seemingly incompatible goals: (a) the goal to create prescriptions for replicable and reliable designs of “effective and efficient” instruction, based on rigorous scientific research (the applied science camp), and (b) the goal to develop reflective practitioners capable of finding situated, crafted, or artistic approaches to the task of creating “good” instruction (the design camp) (Smith & Boling, 2009; Wilson, 2005), instruction that serves the purposes at hand well, and does so ethically. Put extravagantly, the goal on the one hand is teacher- and ID-proof design strategies and decision-making tools, and, on the other hand, independent, confident, and creative practitioners willing to shun prescriptions and focus on a unique solution for the situation at hand. The discipline can be seen tottering forward in this pushmi-pullyu state, where both sides feel compelled to make proclamations to claim their ground. But in the end, it is as applied science that an explanation of ID is easier to swallow for those outside the discipline. And if you connect to advances in the popular neurosciences, you are seen as especially well connected.

The same teetering is reflected in (a) the push of technology and its inexorable progress, which defines the parent discipline of educational technology, and in (b) the subtler pull to remain “humane” and egalitarian. These are not mutually exclusive, of course, and may in fact reinforce one another. Still, the mindsets created by these foci generate tension. While we often say, “technology in the service of design,” the reverse is often what we follow as we quickly look for applications of the newest technological offerings.

Another Approach to Raise the Appreciation of ID Is to Aggrandize Design

Aggrandizing design rarely works except among the already devoted, since most people do not possess a very broad concept of design, and they see its connection to ID as superficial, perhaps even grasping.

Nelson and Stolterman (2012), speaking for the devoted, see design at work in just about every activity that does not claim to be either science or art. Indeed, in their book, humans designed fire rather than discovered it. In other words, design is a process not just of invention but of appropriation. Their definition of design would not exclude products like the periodic table that depicts the elements, the institution of marriage, or the to-do-list sitting unattended on my office desk. And maybe this is not a bad thing.

Design is indeed a grand tradition, and older than science by several billion years, yet there is still plenty of room for theorizing and improvement. Unfortunately, Nelson and Stolterman (2012) depict design as a privileged perspective (in the same manner as those who privilege science), calling it “the first tradition,” and also calling it the thing that makes us human. Such anthropocentric statements are unhelpful. This one ignores the design accomplishments of societies of chimpanzees and other primates, and also the constructions of ant colonies, bees, and other social insects. Design is clearly a response of life to the world it occupies, from microbes that chemically alter their environment, to beavers that dam streams to make homes and fertile feeding grounds, and to whales that offer songs to one another for who knows what reasons, and not something unique to Homo sapiens. That humans use their human faculties to achieve their designs does not make them unique. Beavers use their beaver faculties to achieve their designs, after all. Design is the response of life to the challenge of living.

Yet Another Approach to Raise Enthusiasm for ID Is to Draw Connections to Art

Indeed, there are many connections to art, since both artists and IDs are in the business of creating experiences to change perceptions and conceptions, to raise curiosity, and often to generate emotional response. Both aim to prime us to experience the world in new ways. Some propose art as one of the prevailing perspectives of practitioners in the discipline, but at times with the intentional or unintentional pejorative connotation of selfishness—self-expression at the expense of providing service to learners. But art as self-expression is a false lead; it is more accurate to view art as striving for shared meaning through exploration of personal experience. This viewpoint suggests more alignment with ID. But artists and instructional designers ultimately have different intentions, even if they sometimes share means. Serious artists often aim for ambiguity as an expression of the world they live in. IDs can use ambiguity as a strategy for stimulating engagement, but rarely aim to leave a learner in that state. An artist, in particular an actor or writer, may take on a persona to explore perspectives and to understand and reveal alternative truths. IDs may do this in the process of analysis, and they often ask learners to take on personas, but as a step toward more permanent change.

Some design professions lean much more toward art. A fashion designer might even thwart the purpose and practicality of a garment to make an artistic statement, which would be condemning to an instructional design. But such designs rarely reach a large user audience beyond a few gala parties (although one could argue that high heels are such a phenomenon, and some forms of body art nearly cripple their wearers). The line between art and design is at times even more blurred than that between design and science.

Yet Another Approach Is to Align ID, and Design in General, with the Natural Order

Design is a natural, adaptive response for meeting life’s needs and challenges by taking advantage of native faculties and the tools and resources within the environment we are given. It is the reasonable (not overly rational) approach for negotiating one’s needs, with respect for the social and natural environment. It represents a successful strategy for living within a complex natural system, living within natural constraints, and using one’s full capacity for achieving useful outcomes.

Design is pervasive, not privileged. It should be a respected tradition not because it is special or because it represents an ability exclusive to human beings but because it is the most natural approach. Design focuses on good and useful outcomes, and not so much on ideals like efficiency and effectiveness except as they reflect a reasonable response. Design also embraces aesthetics, if only in its broadest, pragmatist sense (Dewey, 1934/1989).

But even though design is natural and exemplified throughout nature, this does not make design easy. In fact, in human societies, behaving naturally is a rare skill. The effort that design theorists make in defining design and design processes is essential to our progress. This effort is as important as the work to understand how to seek a good life and achieve happiness, goals that are equally as difficult as achieving good designs.

I suggest that IDs should embrace as potential models all practices in the family of disciplines we designate as design. This includes not just architecture and industrial design but the culinary arts and fashion design. But, in a way, even science is just a specialized form of design, a more rigid and incredibly successful form perhaps, but still a natural response. Because it is even closer, art and its practices provide even more useful models, even if art has its own purposes.

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ID is a design discipline, but it is more, just as any design discipline is more. It includes science and engineering and many other traditions, including art. For some instructional designers, the “design” association has been a tentative one—but remembering that ID has roots in design makes its inherent complexity more navigable, not fuzzier, because we bring more to bear. Nelson and Stolterman (2012) work to distinguish design from science and art, but in the end it is more prudent to view them merely as domains of activity along a spectrum of inquiry methods, since all three do in fact work to make “the invisible visible” (Buchanan et al., 2013, p. 41). But if inquiry is a spectrum, along what dimension does it lie? Or is inquiry just a collection of lenses, or epistemological stances, for viewing our connections to the world, lenses that include not just science, design, and art, but criticism, social debate, philosophy, craft, and many others. Do they differ fundamentally (essentially), or are the differences only the result of constructed disciplinary knowledge and shared traditions and practices? Nelson and Stolterman use the degree of focus on the “particular” as a promising dimension, but one that does not do so well at distinguishing art and design. Perhaps a better dimension to define the spectrum is the degree of uncertainty acceptance. In this case, art lies at one extreme by embracing uncertainty (from the Mona Lisa smile to Rothko) and science at the other by making uncertainty its nemesis (stochastic mathematics and complexity merely embrace the enemy to keep it closer). Design lies near the middle, allowing plenty of room for the push and pull of its practitioners.

So let us try to define this middle. Let us look at design in a way that does not aggrandize but also does not limit it artificially. Let us also try to uncover the source of the joy that IDs find in their work, despite the inattention they might experience.

Since it is fruitless to imagine what it is like to be a chimpanzee, beaver, or whale, let alone a microbe, I will inevitably, sensibly, and very quickly move into the human domain.

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Design is the process of modifying the environment for use and/or enjoyment through physical effort, as well as both intuitive and rational faculties. Design roots are shared by a broad array of disciplines, from architecture, graphic design, interface design, and organizational development, to even more diverse disciplines like urban planning, politics, culinary arts, and fashion design. Design disciplines may vary widely in terms of their materials and products, but their processes and the impacts of their products reveal commonalities. In very general terms, the phases in their processes typically include the following.

• Yearning, or desire, based on dissatisfaction or need. Instructional designers specify goals or needs to emphasize that they do not design frivolously, but underlying any design is a yearning for change, success, enjoyment, or improvement.
• Gathering. In ID, this phase is usually encapsulated in needs assessment and analysis, but many things are gathered to move a design forward—data, information, opinions, materials/resources, sources/examples, and templates, for example.
• Envisioning. Both rational and intuitive, envisioning is a process of imagining and choosing what specifically could and should be created. An internal process, envisioning is sometimes labeled “instinct.”
• Depicting/forming. In this phase, the emphasis is on making representations or descriptions that make the final product more tangible to the designer and others so that planning and development can proceed with confidence and shared vision. This is the one step that is negotiable but ill advised to skip in large efforts. As far as we know, only humans perform this step.
• Transforming. Design decisions, becoming more refined and detailed, continue during the stage in which materials are transformed into the shape of the envisioned product. Most often transformation also involves negotiation—with others, and between the design and the affordances of the materials used.
• Learning. Design products are to be used and enjoyed, and we learn to improve them and future products by watching how, how well, and for what purposes they are used and enjoyed. We also learn about the world by watching how it resists or accommodates our designs.

This definition of the design process is certainly very close to the list of fundamentals offered by Nelson and Stolterman (2012), but it merges things differently and implies a sequence. The definition is more closely aligned with the theory of inquiry offered by Dewey (1938/2008), which provides a basis for many of the ideas expressed here, which can be regarded as a pragmatist stance on design. It also suggests that the design process can become an aesthetic experience (Dewey, 1934/1989), which is the source of that joy felt by all designers, including IDs.

Designs cannot be fully appreciated outside the context of their use. Different cultures might reject or cling to the same design. Moreover, designs reach their full potential only in use. Yves St. Laurent recognized this and diminished his own world-renowned reputation as a fashion designer by telling us that the woman wearing his dress (firstly a model in his case) made a greater difference than he did to an appreciation of its quality. In addition to the quote that opened this statement on design, he was also famous for saying that “a good model can advance fashion by ten years.” Can a good set of learners do the same for an instructional design model? In the end, who is the ultimate guarantor of the quality of a design? (Wryly labeled “g.o.d.” by Nelson and Stolterman, 2012.) It is the wearer, of course.

In truth, design is more than the collection of disciplines that share processes—it is a cross-cutting life-embracing activity, wherein our imaginations meet reality to create new possibilities. It is how we shape reality to our needs and desires, reshaping ourselves in return when our designs assume their place in the new reality. The final products of all designs are our reshaped selves. For this reason, one could argue that ID is an exemplar among the design disciplines, perhaps the one most explicitly aimed at changing people. There is no reason for envy.

References

Buchanan, R., Cross, N., Durling D., Nelson, H., Owen, C., Valtonen, A., … & Visscher-Voerman, I. (2013). Design. Educational Technology, 53(5), 25–41, Special Issue, Innovation over the edge, Rowland, G. (Ed).

Dewey, J. (1934/1989). Art as experience (Vol. 10). Carbondale, IL: Southern Illin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Introduction
• Part 1 The Nature of Design and Instructional Design
• Part 2 Preparing Instructional Designers
• Part 3 Contexts of Learning, Design, and Technology
• Part 4 Technology
• Part 5 Learning Science
• Conclusion
• Index