Instructional Design

I am a dedicated reader of Edge Foundation's annual publication containing about one page written by each of the world's top scientists and thinkers. These extraordinary people, from many disciplines, are given a straight forward question and they do their best to answer. A couple of years ago the question was, “What are you optimistic about?” Before that was, "What do you believe to be true, but cannot prove?" Last year the question was, “What have you changed your mind about?”

Imagine reading the edgy thoughts of quantum-mechanical engineers, mathematicians, evolutionary biologists, linguists, physicists, psychologists, anthropologists--the whole shebang of brains who push the edge of human thought! Every year. Each answering the one new question. When a new issue comes out, I find myself happy I've stayed alive long enough to have the privilege to read it.

I don't recall ever being invited to submit my own answers. Then, I haven't heard from the Nobel group either.

I wonder if most simple readers, such as myself, ever ask themselves these questions. Probably. Yes?

My problem with this year’s question (what I’ve changed my mind about) is that I keep changing my mind about so many things, I don't know which one to pick. I guess that's another reason I'm still in the little leagues.

For what it’s worth, when I got out of the shower today, I was admitting that the topic below is something about which I’ve changed my mind.

I used to think the key to educating people around their behaviour (let’s call that “training”) was to approach the topic conceptually. People would change, I thought, if they had a bigger model of their challenges than they currently possessed. So, I would extend the "size", if you will, of their working model so that, with the new, broader perspective, they could make more informed decisions and choices. You could call that my conceptual phase.

Then I went through my temporal phase as a designer: basing a learning experience on an exploration of the sequential moments in time of a behaviour so that learners could discover the antecedent to the desired behaviour, their historical, presumably not-optimally-desirable response, and the alternate behaviour they could choose instead. Though somewhat Pavlovian in nature (ring bell, antecedent; salivate, consequence), this seemed particularly useful for behavioural learning. For example, “when the customer says ‘your price is too high’, we have been responding with x (whatever the response); instead of choosing x, let’s choose y.”

I loved my temporal phase. I thought I had found the key to the universe (of education). When people become aware that their mistakes occur in a moment in time, immediately after they've been triggered to follow their habitual path, they become empowered to make different choices, to take a different path.

However, it wasn’t so good for teaching people how to devise a strategy for penetrating their accounts or their marketplace. Teaching people to be strategic is not really teaching a behaviour, per se (though it would be easier if it were). There are moments of choice during the development of a strategy, but they are better attacked at the conceptual level.

So, now I’ve changed my mind again. Effective learning design involves a thorough exploration of context (e.g., the process aspect of the thing being learned about) AND the temporal (what choices are available beyond the robotic).

Temporal consciousness might be a beautiful thing, and learning to make different choices as moments pass is a gift we get from educators. But I take my hat off to those who hammer home context as well as linearity, global as well as local, macro as well as micro. How else could instructional design be holistic in nature if it didn't integrate the thing being learned into the whole of which the thing is a part?