The Learning Circuits Blog, an online forum from Learning Circuits / ASTD, recently began a discussion about the role of instructional designers and when / how they should enter projects. They asked their monthly Big Question:

For a given project, how do you determine if, when and how much an instructional designer and instructional design is needed?

I have been an instructional designer (or rather, a Sr. Instructional Designer, thank you), for a number of years, and am not interested in explaining what the field is all about beyond stating that instructional designers systematically determine learning needs and create learning interventions to meet them (my definition). This is a broad definition because there are such a variety of learning needs within different organizations. I do not formally create eLearning in my organization because we have a department that serves that function; my time is spent doing more internal consulting and project management of the learning initiatives than anything else.

My internal consulting is somewhat Socratic, and is intended to save everybody time later on as well as clearly understand what expectations are upon me if I take the project:

• Why do you believe you need that training?
• How have you determined those people need to learn that?
• In what ways will the budget and person-power be used to evaluate the program as you are describing?

My project management of the learning initiatives is all around managing the steps in the instructional design process as they are worked on by a team. I often work with technical health content, and rather than expect me to be proficient in a field where I am not formally trained and certified, I work with experts who I move through the project and help them remain focused on the goals.

I have been following the discussions raised by the Learning Circuits blog with great interest. Cammy Bean’s blog, Learning Visions, really sparked my interest as she discussed many shades in instructional design. Yes, as she mentioned, I do create classes and specific training materials and methods at times, but that is a narrow view of the scope of my abilities (partly due to my fascination with so many items in and around organizational learning and culture). My organization prefers for me to use my skills and experiences and education to influence evidence-based learning design on a project level.

As a project manager, I always focus on meeting the needs of the end-user, rather than just the check-off list of tasks and deliverables. This is my way of responding to Tony Karrer’s discussion about the models–they are all fine, but they all fit within larger projects (that in turn fit within departmental goals toward meeting organizational strategic objectives which fulfill the vision and mission).

So where is instructional design today? I think of this within the context of the elevator speech I use to answer the question “What do you do as an instructional designer?”:

I am an instructional designer. I am an internal learning consultant who manages educational projects.

The rest of the world does not need to know how I do it with this or that model. All they care about is that the project to teach X to learn Y is done and now we have more learning that positively impacts our meeting of our organizational objectives.

I recently read a post on Andy Wibbels’ blog about shyness, and I find myself often returning to it to the extent that I had to process it in writing. Taken originally from Zen Habits, they are:

1. Introduce Yourself
2. Don’t Feel the Need to Qualify Yourself
3. Ask More, Talk Less
4. Be Generous
5. Don’t Judge a Book By Its Cover
6. Remember a Detail
7. Compliment Others
8. Think of Others

Are these factors applicable both online as well as off? Tara on Andy’s site claims they are applicable online, while Zen Habit is somewhat silent about shyness online. While I think shy behavior is shy behavior, I think the medium affects how it is manifest.

Take for example #2 above. When there is a F2F conversation, I find the need to qualify myself and “be as good or better” than others (for the sake of confidence) to be very different than if I am communicating in an online class or discussion board. I feel an awkwardness with people F2F I do not know well when there is silence, but when this occurs online I find it easier to move on (to another website, discussion, research, entertainment, etc.) while not getting so intimidated. Perhaps silence online is expected? Safe? Disengaging?

I wonder if there are not many of the same underlying causes with different ways of expressing them based on the situation? Hmm, I smell a research project here, perhaps one fitting media psychology?

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!

I love how the Times is liveblogging both the Democrat as well as the Republican races. Of course, being Super Tuesday with 24 states holding their primaries.

Without a central location or event or person, and with such a variety of dates and times and places and candidates, how is liveblogging of any value?

This is yet another example of an issue to bring to my Northern Voice presentation on liveblogging in two weeks.

Did I read the last two posts on the Twitter blog correctly?

They stated “You may have noticed we had an outage last night/stretching into this morning,” but instead they should have admitted that their service in the past few days has been intermittent at best.

On the heels of this, they then began today’s post with “We have a stated goal to make Twitter a reliable global communication utility. ” Really? Are they serious?

They have to know their service glitches have been lampooned in the blogosphere, and their credibility has seriously eroded as being a reliable (aka business-able) communication and microblogging (liveblogging?) tool. Many of us have started to rely on Twitter as a communication tool (via Web, BlackBerry, a whole host of applications, etc.), using it from everything from liveblogging to self-marketing and branding.

I know whenever I tell colleagues and friends about Twitter, the platform sounds so silly until I show people how it works and how I use it. Now, I really love Twitter. I like how my Tweets get archived daily on my own blog. How I am able to join a new organization and suddenly begin to have other people interested in reading my daily Twitter musings.

I really hope Twitter becomes more reliable. While this all this costs money, is there enough financing coming in to create and maintain the very reliability we all expect? 

Our long-awaited presentation we are doing at this year’s Northern Voice has finally appeared on their website. As an all-volunteer conference, I really appreciate all the work and efforts the organizers are giving to make this year’s personal blogging and social media conference a success.

My session will be on Friday, February 22, 2008, from 14:00 - 14:30 (2:00-2:30pm) in a new track–Internet Bootcamp. Entitled Liveblogging 101, it is meant to introduce newbies to liveblogging.

As a technologist and qualitative researcher, I am really interested in how liveblogging is an act of involvement and participation. It is not a narrative of the events–that is stenography. It is an interactive co-creation of the event itself from the perspective of an active participant. This in fact summarizes what my blog title, Silence and Voice, is all about. With liveblogging, the silence is ended as participants take up and use their own voices to record the event as they experience it.

Liveblogging:  Unfiltered. Raw. Authentic. If you want it nice and neat, buy a book.

Technorati Tags: nv08,Northern Voice,liveblogging

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.

It seems bloggers are not welcome shoppers at Target.

One of my colleagues at NYU Stern pointed out a disturbing article that is fit for a discussion within a communications course. Today’s New York Times reported that Target snubbed a blogger from Shaping Youth who complained to the retailer about its seeming insensitivity to women in one of its current ad campaigns. Rather than provide an informed and sympathetic response to this audience of concerned shoppers, Target appears to have replied that it does not communicate with new media.

Huh? With all the edgy commercials and friendly feel of its stores that it tries to promote, it seems customers who question innuendo within its advertising just do not matter. With all the work and cost involved in television media advertising, is there such a thing as an accident or something that is not planned? Doesn’t the Target symbol of a bulls-eye have several connotations? Since when is it good policy to offend your customer audience and then not want to discuss it? Smells like a potential public relations nightmare. Doesn’t Target realize how online communication can spread in ways far more widespread than traditional, static media?

Too bad my Business Communication course just ended yesterday, as we could have had a field day with this one!

One of the communication items I stress with my students is that PowerPoint slides require Message Titles, not Topic Titles. The difference? A message title tells the audience what to think, believe, do, or say as a result of your slide or presentation. Don’t just tell them the topic and allow them to draw their own conclusions, whatever they may be. If you have gone through all the work of gathering your message and are preparing to deliver it to an audience, you must have some point you want them to take away, something you want to persuade them to do or think, of even inform them that your vision of a situation is the most accurate one. To help them with this process, tell them by embedding your message or point in the slide title. When presenting, leave as little to chance as possible.

I started thinking about this with Garr Reynold’s post today about Bill Gates, where he compared a slide presentation from Bill Gates to one by Steve Jobs.

Bill Gates’ slides are overwhelming in content, the colors look dark and dreary, and as I scan the slides, I have no idea what main message (point? take-away? idea? belief? action?) he wants his audience to leave with. Granted, I am a huge fan of the business prowess of Bill Gates, and he undoubtedly said some interesting and challenging things while presenting, but I was not at the conference. I only have the slides, and reviewing them now does not help me at all. If anything, it has the opposite effect–what is he talking about? When they get printed and/or electronically distributed (as is happening here and at countless desks around organizations), they lose their meaning. That is not what a communicator wants.

Steve Jobs’ are clean, straight-forward, and more compelling. They follow what Seth Godin suggests with minimal text on slides so they help to reinforce the speaker’s message. Great for the audience that is there, perhaps, as long as they are primarily auditory learners. However, I have another reservation here–I was not in the audience at the time, and while the slides may indeed reinforce the presenter, that doesn’t do anything for me. Is Steve suggesting Apple is aiming at all-in-one? They have already achieved it? They want to ultimately sell only one all-in-one product? I am not sure. Once again, without message titles, I am clueless and left to my own thoughts.

Yes, presentations still have that “had to ‘been there” quality. BUT, as social media changes the way we work, it is also having an effect on how we communicate and consider the primary and secondary audiences we face. Message titles, even if they are just scattered through a presentation with the other slides filled with images and other engaging devices, will definitely help the various audiences far into our digital futures.

If only Amazon will hurry up with the delivery of Garr’s book Presentation Zen!