It has only been a week since I returned from ASTD 2008, and already the Call for Proposals for ASTD 2009 is available and online. Hurry, though–the submissions have to be done by July 15!

I really enjoyed this year’s convention where I presented a poster session. Wonder if I should submit another proposal for next year; if so, on what topic? I have enough interests, so will have to consider this one (but quickly!).

Come to think of it, since ASTD does not seem to be promoting Web 2.0 connections with its members, it should not surprise me that I cannot locate a conference tag to begin tagging my blog (and liveblog) posts and Tweets.

Thus, I will take the lead and create a tag for this year’s conference ~ astd2008. I invite anybody else to use this while blogging, submitting to Technorati, using via Twitter, del.icio.us, and the like.

I am attending the ASTD 2008 International Conference & Exposition next week in San Diego, and have been trying to locate others in the workplace learning and performance field who blog and also Tweet who may want to schedule a meetup. Thus far I have located Tony Karrer and Beth Griese, neither of whom I have previously met. There have to be others attending the largest training and development conference who blog and Tweet, haven’t there?

I wonder why ASTD is not furiously working to catch up and connect its members in the Web 2.0 sphere?

Yesterday I posted some open questions in reaction to a discussion that Cammy Bean and John H. Curry had. They both suggested (here and here) that we pursue this further, so here goes.

While I ask questions because I am interested in my work as well as my research, I genuinely want to inform our field so we can better meet the needs of our clients, colleagues, and ultimately ourselves when we work within organizations. After all, the more we know and the better informed we are, the more we can leverage that knowledge and those experiences to effect positive change.

Of the questions regarding instructional design that I identified (to which there can undoubtedly be more added), this is the one that most grips me:

Do Instructional Designers Need Research to Inform Practice?

Let me share my perspective. I like the concept of evidence-based practice, and think it offers a lot to my work, thinking, and fundamental approach to life. I have written about the area of research and practice, as well as explored some of the questions around what practitioners even mean by the concept of research.

So, back to the question at hand. Can an instructional designer (ID) need formal, peer-reviewed research in order to do his or her job? Restated in a slightly different way, can this formal research support the work of the ID, even if on an infrequent basis?

Answering “yes” may mean that channels of communication between scholars and practitioners should be explored and opened. Answering “no” may show that academics in the field are working on research that has no practical value.

What do you think?

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 am an instructional designer. With quite a bit of education in the area of how adults learn, there is one thing that overshadows everything I do that involves education, human resource development, organizational communication, and the consulting work I do–What needs and expectations do learners have that education and communication try to meet? In other words, when I write learning objectives, they are just that–my objectives . . . and not the learner’s. I would set my classes up for failure if I did not acknowledge this very clear, but often overlooked, fact. The learners come with their own expectations and personal objectives, and for me to ignore them and insist on their fulfilling my objectives for them is just silly. Let’s face it, how can I realistically evaluate how well people meet objectives I am forcing them to accept and work toward?

Of course, that is what instructional design is all about–setting objectives to meet organizational needs.

No, we can not and should not get rid of objectives, because without them we lack some direction at all. I am only concerned when the unspoken, namely whose objectives are they, anyway? is ignored.

I have been thinking about this since I attended a session last night in the New Media Consortium’s (NMC) Symposium on Mashups. The presenter of the final session, Brian Lamb (a distant colleague whom I have met briefly twice at Northern Voice and who is a most dynamic presenter), facilitated an experience entitled “Confessions of a Mashup Un-Artist.” It was described as:

The creative side of mashups results in interesting and often popular-to-the-point-of-viral works, but at the same time, it raises questions about the nature of originality, authorship, and context. In this session, a mashup un-artist will discuss the process and products of his work, address some of the questions raised above, and discuss the relationship between remix culture and open education. Is originality overrated? Do we owe it to the intellectual environment to recycle our intellectual work? Is our existing concept of authorship still valid? Come along for the ride and contribute, collaborate, and mash up answers to these mashup questions. I attended this live in Second Life (where I am a newbie named Chartres Loire) and live in Adobe Connect (a great platform, BTW). There were video clips, music clips, avatar dancing, and various sounds. The session met the description, but nevertheless I was confused. Frustrated. Unclear as to the objectives. Grasping to “get it.” Looking for applicability. Struggling for meaning. I was that student who felt (s)he were the only one confused and not “getting it.”

I processed this a lot with some colleagues on Twitter last night, and it still seemed that I was the only one (of those who replied to me) who did not “get it.” Feeling completely isolated after this learning experience, I again started to think about learning objectives. Were Brian’s objectives the same as mine? More likely than not, the answer is no. How could they be–we did not discuss them (which is normal in most learning and presentation settings). I think I did not “get the session” for the simple reason that my objectives were not met. What were they? My objectives for the session were:

1. understand what a mashup un-artist is
2. apply this knowledge to my practice

After the session and after the Twitter discussion, I am still unclear as to what Brian was trying to demonstrate and I am still not able to figure out how to apply it. At least many of my colleagues seemed to respond positively and appreciate it.

While writing helps me to process my thinking (the entire purpose for my blog itself), I could only make sense of the experience when I finally realized my objectives were not met. This does not mean that other people had the same or different experiences, but I believe it does demonstrate how acknowledging individual (and thus different) learning objectives is so important in the learning process.

I think I still need to process this a little more, but want to share where I am right now.

I am teaching a new class that begins next week — Project Management for Training. The course description is listed as:

Whether you’re conducting a single training session for a small audience or multiple sessions for a large group, a training program–like a project in any other discipline–must have an effective plan to guide and track progress. This class provides you with a planning process and teaches you techniques to prepare and deliver training projects consistently and effectively. Focusing on logistics, rationale, scope, timescales, risk management, and budget, you acquire the skills to communicate with the training project’s stakeholders to ensure optimum performance.

I am looking forward to teaching this class, as I am able to bring my skills as a senior instructional designer (my full-time title) and project management (what I primarily do right now) and merge them with my expertise in adult education and human resource development (two of my graduate degrees).

After working in this field for some time now, this this seems to be my life recently . . .

I am interested in seeing if anybody has any useful references or websites they want to share, as well as any stories about how they have seen project management brought into the training function. Any thoughts?

Technorati Tags: project management,instructional design

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.