Informal Design Methods

1
Informal Design Methods Tools for Developing ID
Competencies conclusions from 3 case
studies (or how to mainstream LD)
2
Fundamentals 1

• IMS Learning Design starts from the premise that
  we can produce a formal LD narrative
• Has nothing to say about how that is produced
• Most teachers cannot do this, or easily
  understand them
• Until this Inconvenient Truth is addressed LD
  will remain peripheral to the Mainstream

3
Fundamentals 2

• What are the Competences required to produce a
  formal LD Narrative?
• Do we have such a competence statement?
• If not perhaps we should..
• A job for Tencompetence?

4
WHY?

• Existing design skills are embedded, in a rich
  working context and therefore difficult to
  abstract in order to share them Koper
• No large tradition of sharing learning designs
• A largely untrained workforce with modest IT
  skills Stiles
• Organisational issues ignored in e-learning
• No tradition of ISD in the UK

5
Reality Therapy.

• Start from where teachers are in reality -
  embedded, contextualised, individual, (sometimes
  isolated competitive) non-transferable.
• Many teachers do not possess a vocabulary for
  articulating and sharing their pedagogic
  strategies and designs with others, particularly
  beyond their cognate discipline areas X4L
  seminar on LD Beetham

6
Systemic Issueshave been ignored

• education is a social and political system, and
  the checks and balances that keep the system
  working may not be shifted by any technology
• Mayes (Groundhog Day)
• .another inconvenient truth?

7
Best Seen as Part of Process Change
senior management engaged
Functional
accurate MIS information
teaching and research separate
management by analysis
long-term
techno-sceptic
systematic
sustainable
evaluation
collective
core business
design once use many
E-learning
no evaluation
design once use once
techno-fetish
individual
Business not understood
unsustainable
short-term
management by budget
fragmented
Dysfunctional
teaching and research conflated
enterprise rhetoric but no decent MIS
senior management disengaged
8
Mediating LD
Contextualised
Abstract
Learning Design
Embedded Practice
Intermediate Descriptions
9
An LD Continuum

• Primitives/Artefacts Informal Formal (LD)

10
Our Experience

• Better to work outwards from teachers existing
  conceptions and terminologies towards new
  concepts and terms, rather than to expect them to
  adopt new frameworks
• Back to
• Prepare
• Teach
• Review

11
Fundamental Systemic Issues

• Learning Technology especially LD and LO has an
  implicit organisational model at odds with the
  status quo (Pollock, N. Cornford, J. 2000,
  http//www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue24/virtual-universit
  ies/)
• This is the real barrier to sharing learning
  materials (c.f. Twigg, C, at Alt-C 2005
  http//www.alt.ac.uk/altc2005/ altc2005_documents/
  caroltwigg_qa.pdf When Worlds Collide - JISC
  2004)
• This dialectic is the driver - how quick do we
  want to go?

12
What a Learning Design Technologist Sees
The IMS Learning Design Continuum A
B
C LD Levels
13
What a Mainstream Teacher Sees
Many Continuums
14
Implications for the Future

• LD and LOs as Boundary Objects (Wenger) for CoPs.
• They Need to Carry some Context and offer
  possible Generalisations (Toshiba Wollongong)
• Lessons from AI Knowledge Elicitation for LD?

15
Getting from Here to ThereThe Bigger Picture 1
Subsistence Economy
Craft Style Communication with Artefacts and
Primitives
Tools Support
Semi - Structured Narrative
Structured Narrative
Sustainable Economy
16
The Bigger Picture 2
17
LD and the Mainstream - an unfolding dialectic

• We may indeed find that learning objects and
  learning design do help in transforming teaching
  in education it just might not happen the way
  we though it would
• End