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Instructional Designers at Work: A Study of How Designers Design

There's a certain amount of tedium involved in reading this paper (and the next; see below) but there is something worth digging out and highlighting: "Our interviews appear to confirm the findings of Kenny, Zhang, Schwier, and Campbell (2004) that instructional designers do not do their work by following established models, nor by basing actions on theory. Instead, our designers' tactics suggest they view design as an 'ill-structured problem' (Jonassen, 2002; Schon, 1987) or 'wicked problem' (Becker, 2007) with many possible solutions, which they pursue with a large repertoire of social and cognitive skills." Which really forces the question of whether our discipline should continue its ill-founded focus on (this person or that's) theory. Also, again, as with other CJLT papers, ridiculous citations to the (putative) 'literature'. If you're going to cite someone for "wicked problems", at least cite Rittel and Webber's (1973) formulation, a source even a quick look at Wikipedia would reveal as more authoritative (in this topic) than Jonassen, Schon or Becker. Dennis Dicks and Cindy Ives, Canadian Journal of Learning and Technology, March 25, 2009. [Link] [Tags: Wikipedia] [Previous][Next]

Comments

Re: Instructional Designers at Work: A Study of How Designers Design

Karyn Romeis, March 26, 2009

Speaking as a designer, I try to throw away the models at the start of each project, and tackle it as if it were my very first one. This causes me to consider afresh what tools are at my disposal and what approaches I might use. I don't design this project the way I did the last one, because the parameters are different. The audience is different, the objectives are different, the platform is different, the content is different, the constraints are different. Trying to use a set model every time is to force some of those differences out of the picture, which is not fair on the learners. [Comment] [Permalink] [Previous][Next]

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