I just read a fascinating discussion that Cammy Bean and John H. Curry had on the Effective Design blog. They raised a number of great issues about instructional design and how the academic approach to it does not always match the work in practice.

Ahh, how I love when the gap between research and practice becomes so apparent. As a self-described scholar-practitioner in the area of human resource development (an a professional instructional designer), I found their conversation engaging and respectful, while also raising countless issues about the field of ID / ISD:

• should there be professional certification?
• are the certifications already out there not doing their jobs well enough?
• who should decide?
• does Corporate America care?
• what will gap(s) will this type of certification fill?
• who will make money from the certification process?
• how if at all will universities change or even become part of this process?
• is there enough of a market for this?
• is there enough research to actually have a body of knowledge, or is it only best practice?
• is research needed outside of best practice at all?
• how have related fields, such as training, OD, HRD, workplace learning and performance, and what have you addressed this and to what success?

These are just my first thoughts from a conversation that occurred in the recent past. I wonder what can be next to consider with this?

I really like the ASTD Learning Circuits  Big Question this month, which is “What would you like to do better as a Learning Professional?”

This hearkens me back to a blog post I wrote yesterday, Whose Objectives Are They, Anyway? I want have better conversations, discussions, buy-in, and agreement of learning objectives between learner and instructional designer / trainer / instructor within higher education. 

The current system of instructional designer designing objectives based on a needs analysis that often does not acknowledge direct input from the learners does not respect the experiences and freedom of an adult population. While I follow the ADDIE process in everything I do, as a higher education instructor I create the objectives based on university expectations and often give them to the students without their input and buy-in. Common for higher education, but unaccaptable for adult education that seeks to acknowledge the active role of the learner in the learning process.

So, what do I hope to improve? Collaborative agreement on learning objectives within higher education.

I just received news that I have been appointed to the Editorial Board of Advances in Developing Human Resources (ADHR), a peer-reviewed journal sponsored by the Academy of Human Resource Development and Sage Publications.

As a research-to-practice, or evidence-based practice, journal, it is scholarly and research-driven, with an aim toward researching areas and meeting the needs of practitioners.

As a peer-reviewed journal, ADHR:

focuses on the issues that help you work more effectively in human resource development. The journal spans the realms of performance, learning, and integrity within an organizational context. Balancing theory and practice, each issue of the journal is devoted to a different topic central to the development of human resources. Advances has covered subjects as wide-ranging and vital as performance improvement, action learning, on-the-job training, informal learning, how HRD relates to the new global economy, leadership, and the philosophical foundations of HRD practice.

I look forward to my three year appointment serving my professional colleagues and my field.

I recently stumbled across an interesting website in the field of Media Psychology–Media Psychology Research Center (MPR). With an ambitious agenda and the energy to realize it, what attracted me to their work is how they approach media (with my own bias toward online and educational uses) from a variety of perspectives with the intention of studying how it relates with human behavior. I like the combination between media and psychology after spending so many years working at the intersection between media and adult education, media and instructional design, media and communication, and media as autoethnographic and narrative vehicle.

From their website, they define Media Psychology as:

Media Psychology Research Center views media psychology an interactive and dynamic relationship between humans and media

This is key to a more accurate and useful understanding of the human-media experience.

We use this model to establish domains of assessment throughout the human-media experience to more effectively assess, develop and produce positive media.

Can we really study media in any interesting way without studying how it affects and is driven by human behavior? That is one of the refreshing realizations I had when I reviewed their list of academic resources on their site. Being a lover of Amazon and continued education, I think I can spend a lot of time fleshing information and <ideally> learning from the materials they are sharing.

Now, perhaps a trackback link will encourage them to discuss their current work on their blog so they can engage the larger blogosphere!

It is nice to see some college classes making use of current technologies that are all the rage in the private sector and amongst early-adopters. It is another thing for a professor to formally integrate this by having students sign up for their own accounts.

Such is the story in the recent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, where a professor uses Twitter to interact with his students. Thankfully I saw this article in my newsreader on the Twitter blog. While I applaud the effort, it will be wonderful when non-technology or media faculty begin integrating these technologies into their syllabi for their educational value alone, even beyond the technical “wow” factors. This is a wonderful start, and reminds me of when I taught high school years ago and began using email with students to review for exams and work on assignments back in 1997. How times have changed.

I wish I would have tried this with my class that just ended. It would have been great to discuss current news stories, share ideas about upcoming assignments, and even debrief what was learned. This debriefing is where I believe much learning is done, yet it is the connection between what happens in the classroom and how that gets realized in life that formally gets overlooked in the race to “do the assignments.”

I would be happy to speak with any of my former students via Twitter.

The first article I have published as the lead author just came out in the Winter 2007 issue of Human Resource Development Quarterly, Volume 18, Issue 4. HRDQ is the research journal of the Academy of Human Resource Development. The editorial is entitled Is HRD Research Making a Difference in Practice?, and I wrote it with my writing colleague, Robin Yap.

As scholar-practitioners, we are very interested in the bridge between research and practice, and how that affects organizations and how people function within them. We discussed the value of scholar-practitioners, those people who seek to bring the findings of research into practical use, so that decisions and processes within organizations have more than simply best practices to follow–they are supported by sound research that is in turn built upon applicable theory.

Our conclusion is that it is critical for the field of HRD that research positively impacts practice. After all, if it does not, then it belongs in the fascinating and grand but practically useless world of Plato’s Forms.

Technorati Tags: AHRD, HRD, scholar-practitioner

He will present the methodological foundation for his entire book.

Axel speaks with a smart German accent. Wow, he is reading his work. Not paraphrasing, but actually reading it.

The political changes have not been beyond social criticism. Wow, he just mentioned Foucault’s work.
Critical theory is out of the Hegelian tradition. The historical past should be understood in an historical way. Positive form in Horkheimer or Marcuse or negative in Adorno or Benjamin.

One of the main tasks today is to develop an alternative concept of justice (not a Kantian way), but rather from a Hegelian concept. From Hegel, the theory of justice is immediately an analysis of society. With Kant, there is a split between analysis and a concept of justice.

Division of left and right Hegelians, and the sense that existing institutions should be given moral legitimacy. In Germany, the revived sense of Hegelian justice. Axel wants to reconstruct Hegel’s theory of right. This can not be resurrected as is, but will need to look at it in light of current society and history.

Axel is concentrating of four premises:

1. Specific concept of society to presuppose of justice. The ordering of society shape the actions of its members into mechanism of different social practices in different spheres. The members of society normally follow the norms that have been established. The economically subsystem as a normative aspect of society. The idea that we should understand society as objective spirit. The notion of objective spirit as an analysis of all of society.
2. Justice as imminent claim of all societies. For Hegel and those in his tradition, such as Marx, the notion of justice indicates the binding intention to render everybody his or her due. Thus, others should be treated in a manner required by different aspects, dependent on the differences of people. What is just is what produces actions in a given society with an ethical distribution of labor. All people produce different amounts and are complementary way. In taking up Hegel’s approach we have to refrain from taking up structures in society before judging them. This immanent approach

• liveblogging is tough when the content is tough. Not much of the this is what I will say, here I am saying it, and this is what I said!

No wonder the Symposium has not yet started; that welcome is outside the room where the presentations will take place. I have no energy to go out there, so will sit here and type and check email. Isn’t liveblogging interesting? It is like longer Twittering. Perhaps Twitter (without formatting or image inserts or tags) is really a liveblogging application?

Technorati Tags: liveblogging

The symposium was started in 1980 by Reiner Shurmann, the chair of the philosophy department at the time. The purpose was to look at the contemporary issues that were important to Hannah Arendt’s thinking. Reiner chaired the philosophy department for many years, especially during the time when the administration was considering eliminating the program.

It was through his efforts that the philosophy department exists and thrives today.

Nancy Fraser gave the introduction.

Many important thinkers have spoken at this symposium.

Critical Theory Today is the theme for this year. It is narrow in that it is associated with the thinkers of the Frankfurt School (even the New School

there is also a broader meaning of critical theory, which also has connections with the NSSR, that include reflections on what(ever) meanings of emancipation means.

Critical theory, in both senses, is at a crossroads, as it is a time for cross-disciplinary work and dialogue for what critical theory should be. The hard and fast lines between the Frankfurt School and french post-structuralism, and critical theory is becoming much more inter-disciplinary sense–incuding historians and sociologists. To foster this cross-disciplinary and cross-paradigm was to bring together the five most interesting thinkers as people who can be identified with charting a path in critical theory today.

This is thus a symposium to get a glimpse at some possible futures.