Brent Wilson schmoozing begins

9:10 – after some introductions and handshakes around the room, Brent is sitting down and Rick is giving an impressive intro. Jay is videotaping the proceedings – this may show up on one of Rick’s classes in the future ;^)

BTW I apologize in advance for all misspellings of people’s names. Feel free to comment and correct me if you wish. Also this is not a verbatim transcript – just my notes as the conversation ensued. Once again, corrections and criticisms may be added by commenting this posting.

Q and A begins

Rick: What do you really love about ID? What’s neat about it for you?

Brent: I care about the issues – how do you design good instruction and support instructors? What does good ID look like? Those are important issues – as important as any other issues out there.

Rick: Who is there in the field that you admire?

B: Ellen Rose at UNB (New Brunswick) – offers good perspective on ID. She has an article from about half a year ago that calls for us to think more broadly about our field. Tom Reeves from Georgia – consistently good insights and he’s a productive thinker.

R: The field seems to be bringing in a lot of outside influences and also fragmenting into specialized areas.

B: We started off (50 years ago) with just us involved in our issues, but now faculty from all different areas are interested in what we do. This may lead to a loss of foundational principles by everyone who is innovating the use of educational technology. In some ways, that’s a loss but in some ways its also an opportunity; there needs to be a reminder of some of the foundational principles to those who are coming in from outside disciplines.

R: So what do we bring to the table for instructional design?

B: Say you’re an educational psychologist. You know about learning principles, but maybe we can help people stay grounded in their instructional outcomes. Or when the work is being cranked out, maybe we can help with that practice.

If someone is coming in from math without a background in the field of learning, we can offer a more general support.

R: We do bring in from a lot of areas. Where do we fit? We’re in Curr Studies right now which has a lot of overlap, but its not always a perfect fit.

B: Most programs fit within Ed Psych, especially for research methodologies, although Curr Studies is maybe the second best fit. In our college right now there’s discussion of changing the name to broaden the context.

(OK – I’m getting more interested in the conversation and less interested in typing, so I’m switching from transcriptish mode to mentioning interesting points)

There is a lot of clash between contrasting ideas like the dichotomy between objectivist and constructivist. Brent tries to take a look at multiple perspectives.

Our theories are tools, like any other tool. They are there to help us do what we have to do. Judgement should be used to select the tools (theories) that we use. The world is more interesting and complex than any theory. If we mistake the sign for the thing that is signified, we’ve missed what we’re trying to do.

Practitioners who have been doing the work for years have great tacit knowledge that doesn’t fit into any theory. What can we do to find those ideas and do a better job of sharing those ideas with each other? Narratives contain knowledge just as well as boxes and arrows.

“Design problems are particularly wicked” – best quote of the day!

Jay questions the value of online interaction in a learning situation. There’s a lot we don’t understand about this – we advance our knowledge both by narratives and by model-building. Is there a dissertation in there or what? (Jay hopes there is :^) )

Barry: The assumption that interaction in online classes is necessary is based on a false premise that interaction in real classes is always perfect interaction, and its not. good point!

Mary: conflict with faculty instructors over content vs. process

Brent: content needs to be packaged in a certain way in order for it to be useful. Grounding things in problems, projects, inquiry cycles can be very useful without sacrificing content.

Mary: problem is with transfer of knowledge, especially regarding information literacy. Students have a strategy that works with finding information for psych. but they are lost when looking for info for English.

Problem-solving techniques can be taught best when grounded in a subject matter. Problem solving techniques may sometimes be domain specific.

On ethics and morality: A good IDer gets results that work. That means having technical expertise, but also being true to clients and self – doing good by the people you are working with and working for.

Where does morality/guidelins come from if one doesn’t get tied to one specific philosophy? Our habits of approaching problems/projects have a default schema that help us to approach the problem, and reflection is necessary to guide us.

Barry: talking about k-12 – what can we do to bring ID practitioner knowledge to service and pre-service teachers?

IN the U.S., there has been a cycle of creating standards (for teachers and students), accountability for those standards, and high stakes for not meeting those standards. concerns arise about the integrity of assessments, but the language of ID is found increasingly in the arena of educational decision making. There is some question of the quality of the system based on these standards, assessments and outcomes – IDers can give some guidance in that to help prevent teachers from becoming technicians to the system.

This approach is not without negative aspects – a sense of deprofessionalization amongst staff.

ARGGGHHHH! Battery is dying. Here endeth my blogging, but if you have any notes, please add them as comments!