As a warm-up, we were asked to brainstorm on what instructional design means to us, deconstruct it and contribute to the forum with a non-verbal representation of how we see it.  We are allowed to use images, symbolic audio-visual material or daily and concrete images of our professional space.

This is how I represented my vision of Instructional Design using CC images I got by typing tags to Peter Shank’s  Flickr CC and uploading them to Flickr Toys Mosaic Maker. I could have used VoiceThread and some music…but then words are forbidden.

Not sure it makes much sense without explaining but maybe you would like to give it a try. How would you interpret it? Is there anything you do not quite understand or missing from your perspective?

This was a challenge I set out for myself . It was the first time I sent my work to a Brazilian university . Ironically, what I have been doing at school was first shown and recognized abroad instead of inside my own organization (school) – which does not even know about this paper…so closed it is inside its own processes.  The web and networking was an outward movement.  I am now coming back and trying to find my place in the local educational environment. Not easy.  Second challenge (minor and fun), believe it or not  – I had never made an academic poster before.  Incredible how fussy some people can be over standard, form and norm and how anxious you can get for fear of not being accepted if you do not “conform”.

I had already written about my experience in Portuguese for Praxis (a 30-page ) but needed to condense it twice  – first for the submission paper: “Ferramentas Sociais, Redes e Interação”  (webcurriculo – (thanks Neli for lending me a hand) and then later for the poster. In spite of my lack of experience in this field, I managed to make one after after a quick search on the web. It was a good exercise in synthesis and visual distribution/impact.  Once it was printed, and hung,  I immediately realized I should have done it totally different.  This how one learns – set yourself a challenge, go for it, do your best, verify results, adjust, lather, rinse and repeat…or is it the other way round? 

As I listened to the various presentations, I compared the reactions to mine and was reminded of the steps I have made these years towards trying to find a balance in my courses. At the language institute I first worked,  I was just an instructor, training people to develop their communication and linguistic skills in a foreign language, not really engaged in any reality but the service I was delivering.  However, when I moved to the secondary school, although the job profile was the same as before, I increasingly became an educator and as such, gradually much more aware of the social engineering  we are subjected to through the uniform, over-structured, inflexible and centralized programs imposed . While trying to implement these new technologies in the classroom , I was constantly confronted with the unresponsive wall of institutional bureaucracy.

While writing this post, I dug up this drawing made by the Time Project team and compared it to a sketch late Lee Baber asked me to check some time ago. There is so much talk about different curricula.  Education surely involves some amount and  quantity – skills and competencies -  but I’d say it is mostly about quality – values and a better understanding of action and knowledge in time – Chronos and Kairos. How do you achieve it on the Web?

1. Core Subjects and 21st Century Themes

2. Learning and Innovation Skills

* Creativity and Innovation Skills
* Critical Thinking and Problem Solving Skills
* Communication and Collaboration Skills

3. Information, Media and Technology Skills
* Information Literacy
* Media Literacy
* ICT Literacy

4. Life and Career Skills
* Flexibility & Adaptability
* Initiative & Self-Direction
* Social & Cross-Cultural Skills
* Productivity & Accountability
* Leadership & Responsibility

and four 21ST CENTURY SUPPORT SYSTEMS:

1. Standards and Assessment of 21st Century Skills
2. Curriculum and Instruction
3. Professional Development
4. Learning Environments

]]> http://beespace.net/1st-web-curriculo/feed/ 4 http://beespace.net/on-learning-and-instructional-design/ http://beespace.net/on-learning-and-instructional-design/#comments Tue, 09 Sep 2008 20:27:55 +0000 Barbara Dieu http://beespace.net/?p=572 On the Online Toys and Tools discussion forum,  Sirin Soyoz from Istambul states

As far as I experience, it is instructional design that facilitates learning and learners must take on new roles in the learning process.

This is very much the discussion now taking place in Week 6 of the FOC08 course, which I am also following  and participating in so I have decided to bring them together. Connecting thoughts, weaving threads and ideas.

Like Stephen, I am skeptic of words like “must” and a universal solution. I question the whole industry of e-moderation, e-facilitation that has come in the wake of the e-hype and forces people into fragmented views and compartments.

While instructional design may seem an efficient way of accomplishing tasks,  I do not see it necessarily conducing to learning. Instructional design is just another name for teaching -  acting upon or transmitting (through various methods, techniques and psychological & motivational maneuvers) the content or behaviour deemed to be correct or required for a certain end. So its motives reside outside the learners even if they are requested to take part and may influence the design.

Learning, on the other hand,  is a continuous personal quest towards sense making, expressing it and making it work so as to accomplish not only our individual but also collective needs. Beautiful design, instruction, role taking may facilitate learning but are not a pre-condition for it to occur. Children learn different strategies and have insights while playing without any conscious design or control on the part of their parents.

As Stephen illustrates well, in for some people in some groups or the software community, learning occurs in spite of

commonality of purpose (some people are professionals, others merely interested), far from universal motivation to learn (others signed on for any of a variety of motives) and certainly no professional e-moderation.

He asks:

Given the absence of the elements claimed to be necessary to support learning – the absence of instructional design, the absence of professional e-moderation, the absence of commonality of purpose – then we have to ask, what is it, really, that is fostering the learning in such a situation.

As I see it, from my own experience as a learner/teacher/mother/daughter/wife/citizen and many other perspectives I have acquired during my life, learning happens continuously consciously and unconsciously, by being immersed in life and not separated from it. We observe, relate to others, read, compare and contrast, expose ourselves, dip into the pool of collective knowledge trying to find answers to our questions, try, fail and endlessly repeat what seems to us the correct pattern with slight variations trying to perfect whatever we find incomplete or lacking.

Very often we learn incidentally through exposure, immersion and observing what does not work or went wrong, which is not necessarily very “efficient” if measured against “time and ROI” which seem to drive everyone’s actions nowadays.

I must say I have been very fortunate to have had many people who walked with me along the way – they shared with me some of their own insight,  sometimes held my hand,  sometimes instructed me, sometimes nudged or challenged me to overcome self-built obstacles – they helped me stretch a bit further each time. There are many roads that lead to knowledge and we cannot take them all as this experiment/course well illustrates. Each one of us will follow our own path according to background, assumptions, choices and needs.

However, do we all have the choice, the time, the people and the resources to learn, expand and share our knowledge with others ? Does the economy/society we live in today allow for and recognize this kind of learning ? How can theories map a dynamic process? (remembering that the map is not the territory). Is it possible to measure and evaluate it? What for and how? Don’t we prescribe and obfuscate emergence by enforcing a model, a theory?

Given the pace of info development, we’re going to increasingly rely on tools that provide some indication of the patterns evident in the abundance…

Although word meanings do not have clear boundaries, the picture below gives you a fuzzy idea of what I has been in my mind in the latest posts (front page not counting this post ). It will be interesting to take the screenshots every x weeks to check how it changes like Tom Whyte is doing in What Wordle Shows about the Connectivism Course.

I have just posted my introduction to the Moodle Connectivism and Connective Knowledge Course which is about to start. The course, which has already been nicknamed MOOC (Massively Open Online Course) because of the number of participants – about 1600), will be co-facilitated by Georges Siemens and Stephen Downes

Although open courses of this kind are not new and nor are the tools used (message boards, Moodle, blog, wiki , microblogging, syndication, social networking platforms, Second Life),  the innovation comes from the sheer number of participants involved from different parts of the world.

View Larger Map

What is fascinating, as Clay Shirky mentions in the book I have taken the title of this post from, is how the different people are meeting, moving and gathering online to make things happen, taking them from the global context to discuss them in their own communities. Although the course is in English, translations to Portuguese, Spanish, Chinese, Italian have been taken up by volunteers and are linked from the course wiki.  Special interest groups are being created in different languages, physical and online locations.

As Shirky mentions, the tools for sharing and co-operating on a global scale have been placed in the hands of individual citizens and in the same way the printing press has amplified the individual mind and the telephone amplified two-way communication, all these tools amplify group communication.

The big challenge, in the next 12 weeks, will be to both read, reflect and post, converge and diverge, breathe in and breathe out, listen to the global and think local. An ambitious experiment in intercultural perspectives, scalability and how to evaluate the outcomes of such project. Looking forward to learning a lot from it.