I started a concept map to break down some of this week’s readings. I may add Learning Engineering to the mix at some point and see what connections I can draw, but this will do for now. Let me see if I can make some sense of my random thoughts.
Somewhere in the distant past I heard George Box’s famous quote, “All the models are wrong. Some of them are useful.” What that means to me is that models, frameworks, theories are all to some extent generalizations, so they won’t hold up to close inspection or work in every case, given the complexity and variability of the world. But they do prove to be useful tools in certain situations. So we see a progression or evolution among the various approaches to designing instruction as the field iterates and adapts to changes in populations and technologies. The different concepts expand to incorporate learning from other fields like HCI and graphic design.
Human-computer interaction, while part of daily life, hasn’t been my field of study, but graphic design has. In my OER advocacy work, I often see cases where a designer’s input could greatly improve legibility and comprehension, like books that run text across the width of a 9×12 page.
I found that if you google the principles of these approaches, you will find an interesting lack of consistency in what they are and how many there are, eg:
- “10 Principles of Learning Experience Design”
- “What Is Learning Experience Design? 5 Key Principles to …”
- “Learning Experience Design: 8 Principles You Should Adopt”
Perhaps that implies that the field could use some more rigor. Or, since it’s education, maybe it shows that some people have more opinions than expertise. When the big names in tech (Kahn, Gates, Zuckerberg) wade into education, they tend to be dismissive of theory and research, perhaps because they’re less interested in education as a process than as a market.
The four stages of experiential learning resemble what my students do in Digital Storytelling ds106, a course I sometimes lead. They experiment with digital media, and they blog about their creative decisions and processes. I wouldn’t say I have practiced ID or LXD in the course though. I just work with the template I inherited and tweak it when necessary, or as the mood strikes me. Due to the creative nature of the course, the outcomes are a bit fuzzy: Students will make stuff, and they will reflect on their creative processes. And learn through that process.
