Avatar and Game Design with Clark Aldrich

After taking 2 somewhat quiet weeks (of reading, with little synchronous or even formal online participation) in the #change11 MOOC, I am glad to be able to spend a little time this week with the current area of discussion as facilitated by Clark Aldrich. While Clark will speak about Advanced Learning Strategies and Designing Sims, based around his book Designing Sims the Clark Aldrich Way, and given that I have never found games or sims or avatars useful for my personal learning, I think this week may be a nice (or challenging) stretch for me to see potential in areas where I may have missed it previously.

While Clark is evidently a very serious, talented, and sought after professional in this space, I noticed that his work seems to follow (in a most basic manner), the traditional ADDIE model of instructional design. This makes me feel comfortable, as it is somewhat familiar.

I then stopped in my tracks when I read his book, where at its beginning  (pg. 11) , he said:

Competence plus Conviction = Comfort
One core reason to do a sim is to drive competence and commitment. In fact, sims do this better than any other media.

Competence is the ability of a learner to apply the right skills. It can even include use the right words.

But developing conviction in an audience is even more important for most applications. Conviction is the enduring understanding and drive in the learner to do the right thing.

Nothing particularly revealing here, except that this seems oriented toward a positivistic approach where there are right (or correct) skills to apply in this or that situation. After all, how else can a system determine I (or somebody) is competent, unless there are clear guidelines against which one may be measured? This may work well in factories or the military, where a certain compliance to working toward a goal seemingly requires a consistent approach for all people to the same matter; how else can consistency be attained (and thus measured)? While I often build learning interventions in my professional work that meets certain similar approaches, I also find this quite contrary to my own learning preferences.

I struggle when generic learning or processes are applied to me; somehow I often feel I do not readily fit into these sorts of patterns that many learners seem to fit into. No, I am not special or anything like that; perhaps the issue is just that my education and experiences make it increasingly difficult to pigeon-hole me in a way that the objective approaches of sims or games that have clear objectives seek to measure in standardized ways. Perhaps this can be done for repetitive tasks that can be taught to be done in a seemingly mindless way (making widgets, for example), though I struggle consistently doing repetitive tasks! All my efforts right now are toward my doctoral thesis, which is all about creating new knowledge (in some established semblance of a recognizable process, of course!).

With all this said, I look forward to hearing what Clark says about all this in his synchronous session today.

Constructivistic Instructional Design

A colleague of mine, Catherine, had a wonderful blog post this week entitled ADDIE Deconstructed, which is somewhat related with my own recent posting on this topic, and is nicely juxtaposed with the work my students are doing with my online PPOCCID course.

Constructivist Instructional DesignThis area around ADDIE (Analyze, Design, Develop, Implement, and Evaluate), which is an instructional design model I use all the time, constantly reminds me of issues of power and positionality that arise when we determine how others have to learn this or that. In many ways, this reminds me of a blog post that really stopped me to think about these issues, Why you want to focus on actions, not learning objectives. For those of us in the learning field, it is easy to either get so wrapped up in learning objectives that we neglect the learners as people, or to get so vague with our objectives that we can never really measure (or determine) if anything is learned at all.

All of this consideration of whose objectives we have to consider, and how that balance works within organizational dynamics, leads me to the text that Catherine pointed out and I just ordered, Constructivist Instructional Design (C-ID). This looks like just the right text to help consider some of these issues around ADDIE, which increasingly seems to be a simple model with grate implications.

More to follow . . .

A as in ADDIE

analyze-fingerprint.jpgI asked my students in my a PPOCCID class to do some searching for online references / discussions about the ADDIE (Analyze, Design, Develop, Implement, and Evaluate) instructional design model. I find this model very useful in many applications (especially in project management of learning initiatives), though have recently been more intrigued with the A as in Addie.

What does it mean to Analyze the needs of the audience? Well, I have to make sure this is a need the training or learning or education or development can address. Who needs to learn what? Why do they need to learn this? What are the obstacles? Who are the proponents of this (often these are not the learners)? What do they want (and why)? Are the goals the learners have (if they even have any, and if they can be articulated) and the goals of the proponents of the learning the same (or at least close enough that they are not opposed)?

What roles does this power play, especially within organizational dynamics? Can what works for one be transferable to others? Have you ever found it is easier to analyze the needs of others rather than ourselves? Always more questions than answers; while this can be frustrating at times, I find this endless interest quite enlivening and engaging!

I suppose I am considering these issues right now as I am beginning a Module 3 in my doctoral program at Lancaster University. Nice how various parts of my professional, academic, and personal elements of my life tend to fit together from time to time!