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My name is Nicolas Peterson! I’m 26, born and raised in Indianapolis and became an elementary teacher after graduating from Baylor University in 2017. I lived in San Antonio, Texas for several years before moving up to Bloomington. This year, I decided to take a break from the classroom and evaluate what I wanted to do, and I decided that I wanted to do something that could help teachers. Teaching online the past two years showed me how poorly functioning online tools and software can make education very hectic and confusing for teachers, students, and parents. Having used so many tools with different features in the classroom, I would like to bring that experience to bear as I help develop those tools in the future.

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The first time I read Dewey’s “Pedagogic Creed”, I was a Junior in college taking an introduction to education class. I was inspired by the way in which Dewey advocated for the whole child to be nurtured, both as an individual and as a community they are a part of. Six years later, having worked both in and out of the classroom in Title I public and charter schools, I catch a more bittersweet taste as I revisit this text. The educational paradigm that I found to dominate the schools I worked in was one which pitted the individual against the demands of a hierarchical corporatized system, or to borrow Dewey’s words, one which ends up “subordinating the freedom of the individual to a preconceived social and political status.” (Dewey, 1897) As a teacher, I felt a tension between the expectation to raise my students’ scores on a high stakes test and the expectation to foster a community where kids felt safe to try new things and be themselves. The pandemic especially killed any sense of school-wide, much less city or neighborhood-wide sense of community, and I think administrators only tend to see the effect on kids’ test scores. As a designer, I want to spend time exploring the question of how I can help to reconnect communities and foster learning as a social process to order and encourage the authentic interests of students.

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This week's reading has been very enlightening when it comes to the general theory and processes involved in IST. Since I am taking 641 and 541, I'm already thinking about ideas for projects. I feel like at first I was running in circles because I was starting with a medium in mind and then trying to think of how I could apply it to teaching something I have knowledge about. M.D. Merrill shook up my thinking with their "Pebble in the Pond" model: begin with a conception of what you want the student to be able to do, then allow more complexity in as it suits your initial goal. This is the kind of thinking that informs lesson plan design today, but in practice a teacher is limited to the media they have available and have the skill to use, so we ultimately use a limited array of realistic media choices as our starting point. So I decided to back up and to begin my planning process by simply ruminating on my experiences as an educator. What did kids really enjoy? What did they struggle with in my class? What did I enjoy teaching? What did I find difficult? It doesn't feel reassuring to say something general at this point like "I want to design something that helps in the process of running book clubs" because I don't know what tools I'll need to use much less what I'll need to learn, but I'm already finding that taking the time to analyze first is holding room for more ideas.

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What if feels like interpreting these ID model diagrams :P

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Hey everybody, sorry for the delay getting this one out! I got very caught up in my thinking about projects I have going on in other courses which bear a heavy relation to the things that I am reading about design models and processes. In R541, I am working on an infographic for a brochure that will be used by a local volunteer agency. Creating this infographic has featured an analysis stage in which I am talking to a client, establishing objectives and audience, researching tenets of good design, researching good brochure design, doing technical trial of Adobe Illustrator using expert input at the library and LinkedIn Learning as a resource, and I'm realizing that each of these stages can look like a lot of different things, and some aspects will be ongoing while others are essential to nail down before moving forward. In this context, the core elements of the ADDIE model make sense as explained by Branch & Merrill (chapter 2). In my 641 class, I find I'm organically constructing a process of development specific to where I am as a learner. It feels like I'm constantly readjusting my objectives the more I read about the topic of my project, book clubs for online students. Even though I taught an online book club for one semester, I don't have a complete knowledge about the topic and am constantly adjusting my idea of where the greatest needs lie in this area.

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Reading about Gagne as well as Merrill's "First Principles of Instruction" took me back to when I was a campus contact for Raise Up Texas. A major component of the campus-wide procedures we implemented was called the "unit organizer." Teachers across subjects and grade levels were expected to plan out each unit of instruction using this model as a framework, then create a document like this and distribute it to their students. Before each lesson, teachers were expected to "FLOAT" the UO (they love acronyms in education), which involved walking students through the flow chart, focusing on the objective and key questions of the lesson, situating them in the larger context of learning happening in the unit. Each objective bubble likewise would have an accompanying bubble chart breaking down the skill further.

Looking at this routine through the lens of Gagné's theory of instruction, the routine did an excellent job of stimulating expectancy, retrieval, selective perception, and semantic encoding (Driscoll, 2000). Teachers were also pushed in this process to more closely align their assessment with their stated objectives.

Looking at this routine through the lens of Merrill's "First Principles of Instruction," however, the UO routine by itself does little to center learning around real world problems (Merrill, 2002), although with some reworking, it could also serve this purpose. Rather than moving from topic to topic, the units could move from problem to problem, breaking down the component skills that will be used as the student engage with the problem. Another criticism that came to mind as I was reading Merrill was that teachers were expected to reword objectives into student-friendly terms, but nothing else. Adding a component in which the teacher demonstrates the learning task or invites the class to examine a completed version of what they will do would give students an even clearer idea of what they were about to learn and why it is important (Van Merriénboer, 1997).

What do you think? If you were a teacher at a Raise Up Texas school, would you view this UO structure as helpful or as just another thing on your crowded to-do list?

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I had to look up what the law of effect is, namely that reinforcement will increase the occurrence of a desired behavior as an effect. According to B.F. Skinner (1954), an appropriate system of reinforcement is all that is required to provide the conditions for learning to occur in. I wonder if perhaps a dog trainer broke Skinners’ heart, because he makes digs at dog trainers, describing their previous methods as incapable of “constructing such a social relation” as his experiments have, while simultaneously using their adoption of his practices as evidence in support of his theory of learning. I don’t find myself particularly disagreeing with skinner in the examples he cites in the area of mathematical instruction, but his dismissiveness of new ideas like “educating for democracy, educating the whole child,” and “educating for life” makes it seem like learning in its many forms is a zero sum game. Skinner himself admits that “techniques which are emerging from the experimental study of learning are not designed to ‘develop the mind’ or to further some vague ‘understanding’ of mathematical relationships.” I think that at this point in time, elements of Skinner’s ideas have been integrated into instruction where they are most relevant, such as in highly logic based tasks.

Mayer (2004) takes a somewhat less critical approach to constructivist learning than does Skinner, cautioning against the application of pure discovery learning. This echoes a concern I have expressed in conversations with classmates before that discovery learning without structure and guidance is no more likely to guarantee the desired type of active learning than traditional behaviorist methods.

Driscoll’s assessment of behaviorism (2005) is that Skinner wasn’t introducing a new idea by suggesting that behavior is the only way to observe learning. Essentially, Skinner was just applying the scientific lens of psychology to education. Cognitive and constructivist theory naturally emerge from the questions raised within behaviorist frameworks of thinking, such as which reinforcements are better at stimulating students to complete given tasks. Again, it seems like some middle ground is necessary in which we distinguish between different kinds of learning necessary to arrive at goals we set for our students. Neither completing a series of tasks nor participating in “pure discovery” should be the sole purpose of education.

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Reading about project based learning this week reminded me of a district wide competition MCCSC has each year for 4th grade called the Maker Challenge. During my first year at Fairview, it was the middle of the pandemic, so the theme for the challenge was to create a prototype of something that would help with a problem in the community caused by the pandemic. First, students had to identify a problem in their community. Once one student proposed “not having enough fun” as their problem, this caught on with about half the class and became the basis for their projects. Out came the bird feeders, model jetpacks, and rolled up cardboard bludgeons. The other half of the class strongly felt that their design needed to address a serious problem, so the other half of the projects involved spraying hand sanitizer or providing people with masks and other such supplies. At the end of the day, all of us teachers knew that the kids were just going to pick a problem that fit with what they were interested in creating in the first place, so we didn’t push them too hard. In his paper comparing pedagogical PBL models (2019), Savery reserves true problem based learning for adult learners who have an extensive base of knowledge at their disposal. I would agree that the fullest embodiment of problem based is reserved for people with a significant base of knowledge to draw from, but it helps to expose younger learners to the style of learning in a limited capacity so that they will be prepared for the complexity of problem based learning at higher levels.

Image Credit: NC State University
Accessed at https://diversity.ncsu.edu/news/2020/07/16/students-moving-forward-begins-fourth-year/

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Lave and Wenger both introduce complications to and cast light on apprenticeship and situated learning in their chapter discussing “legitimate peripheral participation.” My initial impressions about apprenticeship reflected a similar naivete to that which the authors describe: anything which occurs in an authentic setting with any sort of social interaction to make meaning of it can qualify as “situated learning.” (Lave & Wenger, 1991). Even though I was aware of the long apprenticeship traditions still active in European countries like Germany, I never considered how our theoretical conceptions of situated learning line up with the reality of these programs. It would be a fascinating thing to study, so I did! I wasn’t able to find out much about the details of particular training programs, but I read that German apprenticeship programs are usually 1/3rd general education and theory and 2/3rds job training on-site with the employer. (Elliott, Farnbauer, 2021). I’m curious to find out more of what German training standards look like and will be researching further, but looking at this fact, I would think that German apprenticeship programs take learning in an authentic context very seriously. I would also be curious to see if German apprenticeship standards have begun to reflect developments in constructivist / socio-cultural learning theory.

Lave and Wenger also posit that abstract principles can only be truly understood when applied to an authentic problem in context. (1991) Jan Herrington seeks to bridge this divide between theory and practice when it comes to situated learning in her keynote speech “Authentic e-learning in higher education.” According to Herrington, this gap of praxis is starkly evident in online learning practices in higher education, where courses are designed with “information delivery rather than learning” in mind. (Herrington, 2006) It would seem, based on Herrington’s discussion, that plenty of teachers apply authentic learning in their online courses, but I’m curious to look at case studies which document the design process as one of these courses is made!

Image credit: Retrieved at https://socialhistory.org.uk/shs_exchange/apprenticeship-evidence-from-stationers-wills-1600-1641/https://socialhistory.org.uk/shs_exchange/apprenticeship-evidence-from-stationers-wills-1600-1641/

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First of all, I'd like to apologize for the break from writing on here! I will be sure to share my takeaways from the last three weeks of reading as I go back over the reading and develop my thoughts more. This week's reading, which focused on comparing the learning theories, is an excellent entry point since it will provide me with a larger framework as I familiarize myself with each theory in more detail. I liked the systematic way that Etmer and Newby unpacked behavioral, cognitive, and constructivist theory (1993). This reading was also especially useful in the way it addresses the practical question of which theories are appropriate given certain goals and circumstances. I am personally very interested in understanding constructivist theory as it will apply to my book club project in 641.
Reading Bonk and Cunningham threw a curveball for me however in two ways. First, they caution against the "eclectic approach" to learning theories promoted by Etmer and Newby, pressing the reader to understand that each represents a fundamentally different conception of the human mind and the goals of learning (1998). By mixing one learning theory with another in ones instruction, they risk each undermining the goals of the other. I also learned new vocabulary which helped further refine my ongoing research: social constructivist and sociocultural approach (p. 26). Book clubs are inherently dialogue-based, so I want to really understand how technology is being applied with this theoretical basis.  I got pretty overwhelmed at the tables full of unfamiliar vocabulary, so I made flashcards!
Wagner and McCombs' article about learner centered instruction in distance education rightly predicts that distance learning would become increasingly used. They state that online instructors generally plan for highly motivated and self directed students (1995), but having taught younger learners I can say that the most successful online learners were students who had parents at home. Motivated and capable or not, that was, in my experience, the most significant factor in students' success in online learning.
I can't wait to see what everyone has written in the past couple of weeks as I get back in the blog saddle!

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Looking at Bonk and Wiley's preface on new waves in the field of IST,(2020) as well as Reiser's chapter, "A History of Instructional Design and Technology," (2018), I get an impression that computers and internet technology are either the culmination of previous developments in media or have achieved something which no new media before has achieved. As Bonk points out, however, web based technologies are often yoked to outdated education systems, becoming little more than a replacement for physical textbooks. Much of what computers are used for now in education is the same kind of thing that overhead projectors and transparencies were used for in the past. Reiser cites teacher reluctance to change as a prominent reason why previous media developments had so little relative impact on educational practices, and I wonder if the ubiquity of computers now explains why teachers are willing to use computers and the internet, but not rethink their pedagogical practices.

Photo credit: Wikipedia (retrieved at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transparency_%28projection%29)

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Reading Boling and Smith's chapter on "Changing Conceptions of Design" has me wondering whether I should take a design class for one of my electives! It seems like much of the pressure to view IST as a science comes from the desire to be able to point to a specific set of skills which an instructional designer will have to offer. Just like a nurse, once hired, should have the training to do a predictable set of procedures with predictable outcomes, I think companies and schools want to know that an instructional designer will be able to reliably produce what they expect from them. The only difficulty is that IST is such a broad discipline! In light of the sheer number of things an instructional designer may be asked to do based on their job, it also makes sense that we would want to be equipped with the intuition to make sound design choices, filling in the gaps in our knowledge where necessary.

Since there's a lot to unpack from the remaining readings from this week, I'll be making a second post about Clark and Kozma's views on media and learning, so stay tuned!

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I share much of Clark’s skepticism about technology in education as someone who helped shop for new ed tech services and saw how expensive they can be for the return they give on learning. If teachers were just trained better and received more support, we could accomplish the same things with a projector, right? The sad reality in education is that there are plenty of companies looking to line their pockets with public money for shiny but ineffective products. This is why looking for the right performance data before committing school resources to a product is so essential, as well as properly training teachers to use the media and measuring learning outcomes. According to Clark, educational media is nothing more than a tool for delivering learning experiences, and any inquiry into what works should focus on the soundness of the theory on which the instruction is based and an evaluation of the efficiency with which the technology can deliver the desired instruction (Clark, 1994).

After reading Clark, I felt like the things he says are simply common sense. After all, what can a laptop do on its own to save students from lousy instruction? What Kozma ultimately argues in response to this, however, is similar to what Bonk and Wiley wrote in their reflection on the evolution of the field: educational technology from the last century has largely just been iterations of finding more efficient ways to present information, but the computer has introduced new possibilities for how we conceive of learning which are only beginning to be realized (Kozma, 1994). As an IST Master’s student studying the way that social/collaborative media is carving out new boundaries in learning theory, I can say that I can now understand both sides of this argument.

Clark, R.E. (1994). Media will never influence learning. Educational Technology Research and Development. 42 (2),  21-29. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02299088

Kozma, R.B. (1994). Will media influence learning? Reframing the debate. Educational Technology Research and Development. 42 (2), 17-19. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02299087

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Something that really stuck with me reading "Technology and Knowledge Management" (2010) by Cheng, Son, and Bonk was the concept of "tacit knowledge." I’ve been thinking a lot about communities of practice as a part of my job with IU’s Course Materials Fellowship Program. Specifically, we are trying to foster a community of practice using a combination of face to face meetings and online knowledge sharing on Canvas discussion boards and Microsoft Teams. In the process of developing this program, the need to shift my perspective on knowledge became apparent. Previously, the most information sharing going on was on Microsoft Teams via shared folders, i.e. knowledge as an object. The problem with this approach is both that the location of information was not universally known and that there was no structure to facilitate the sharing of this knowledge except in online workshops. Now, my objective is to support authentic interactions between fellows in which knowledge sharing can happen spontaneously and with maximum relevance to the fellows, i.e. knowledge as a process. I think much more of an emphasis will need to be placed on getting fellows to share their successes and challenges and form deeper connections with each other, not showing them slideshows over Zoom. It sounds basic, but the section “Conversations as the most fundamental mechanism for knowledge management” spoke very clearly to my experience as a teacher, both in troubleshooting copy machines and learning new techniques to manage my class and boost engagement. All the learning I did on Canvas to earn my provisional teaching license was essentially useless when it came to performing the primary functions of a teacher, but any time that I could talk to a more experienced teacher and ask them questions, I would learn something profoundly useful which I could follow up about later after I had tried it.

Reading Atul Gawande’s (2007) description of the revolutionary impact of checklists in overwhelmingly complex and specialized systems like flying planes or running hospitals, I am starting to catch onto a difference between HTP and IST. Whereas IST often draws on more abstract learning theory which touches on the purpose of education and other such things, HTP is entirely driven by the need to efficiently organize the actions of many individuals so as to produce a predictable outcome. To be fair, learning theory is a substantial part of this effort, but only to the ends of getting a series of tasks reliably accomplished.

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Reading Pershing, Lee, and Cheng’s study on the “Current status, future trends, and issues in HPT”  (2008) helped me with fleshing out my concept of what the field of HTP actually is and how it is evolving as the world changes. The messages surrounding technological development were a bit garbled. Barbara Bichelmeyer is skeptical that information technology has delivered promised results on its own, and adds that this technology will continue to grow, but at a slower pace than before. I wonder, if this survey were taken again in 2023, whether she would say the same thing given the disruptive role Artifical Intelligence is playing across business, the economy, and society. Geary Rummler, on the other hand, likens instructional designers in training to “training barbers for a civilization that is rapidly going bald.” While I certainly hope this isn’t the case out of personal self interest, I feel that Geary Rummler touches on something that has been borne out by the development of technology over the past decade and a half. Humans, being both expensive and unreliable, are increasingly being replaced with artificial intelligence where possible, rendering the need to instruct those humans increasingly obsolete. Just going to the grocery store, you see people scanning their own groceries with little need for assistance or instruction (just the occasional assist from the attendant when the camera over your head thinks you're trying to shoplift). It will be interesting to see how this development pans out, but I hope that technology will settle into a role as more of an assistant for human workers and learners than a replacement.

Rummler’s "Eyewitness account of the evolution of HPT" (2007) sheds a lot of light on the nature of how the field has operated throughout the previous decades. It makes sense that, if all of the influential professionals in the field were consultants, they would develop slightly differing ways of approaching similar problems. Applying this to IST, I also noticed that many professionals who spoke at our zoom meetings are consultants in addition to their academic or corporate work.  Reading Rummler’s warning not to “fill[s] the air with distinctions that are not real or important” between different models and methodologies, I went back to the drawing board on Task 6, “displaying an understanding of IST/HPT” to make sure that my personal distinctions were consistent with the way that professionals in the field use the many terms associated with it.

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I hope this isn't too controversial, but in my experience, reading corporate ethics and DEI literature can tend to leave me feeling a little underwhelmed and frustrated, like the authors are intentionally ignoring major blindspots in their thinking. The article "Professional Ethics and Social Change" by Banaji, Bazerman, and Chugh (2003) left me feeling similarly. The article is framed as a guide for managers to assess the ethics of their own behavior, but each form of bias explored is ridden with caveats and  assumptions of good will on the part of those making the biased decisions. Ultimately, the authors can only offer the advice that managers be more aware of their biases and apply a knowledge of psychology to attempt to counteract it. In each category of bias that the authors explore, what stands out to me is that in a system in which managers and executives are granted unlimited power over their employees, bias of all kinds is inevitable. In my head, this reads a little like the exhortations of 17th century English political theorists who, accepting as unassailable the divine right of kings, argued that rulers must however model ethical decision making and moral living for their subjects. In the same way, these authors argue that the problem is not that employees most affected are excluded from decision making, but that managers and executives simply aren’t aware enough of their own psychology as they make those decisions for their subordinates. My own skepticism of corporate power structures puts me in an uneasy place as I contemplate my future in a discipline so embedded within these power structures.

In her article, "Reconsidering the Instructional Design and Technology Timeline Through a Lens of Social Justice," Amy Bradshaw shines a light onto the context of much of the commonly accepted narrative of the development of Instructional Systems Technology. This ultimately helped me make sense of why the field is the way it is in many regards. For example, we heard in class about the roots of the field in military training development, but never explicitly connected that with certain prevalent assumptions present within instructional design or even power structures to which the field bears a greater affinity. I certainly hope that more literature is written (perhaps a book by Bradshaw) on IST through a critical theory perspective, as is the case in other departments like Philosophy and Policy of Ed. I would certainly enjoy getting that added context to the historical developments I read about in class!

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After reading Kang and Ritzhaupt’s analysis of job postings (2015), I plan to borrow their framework of knowledge, skill, and ability statements as I explore career possibilities via job posting sites. Some of the findings of this study, however, were somewhat discouraging considering the path I have chosen to get into instructional technology. I was already aware before reading this that most job postings in IST do not require a masters’ degree, but I started a master’s program regardless thinking that it would provide me with a more solid foundation in the skills I would need as well as access to more opportunities. At the very least, it probably helps my chances. But I’m always making a cost-benefit analysis in the back of my head and wondering if there isn’t a less resource intensive way to go about getting into the field of IST. In any case, this article is something I will keep on hand and use as I decide which skills I want to work on in the short term with my electives.

Kumar and Ritzhaupt’s study of instructional designers in higher education is largely consistent with the advice we received in class from our guests. It seems like the size of the institution is a major determining factor in the nature and scope of an ID’s duties. One thing which seems to be consistent with instructional design in other contexts is that technology is always rapidly changing, requiring that instructional designers be avid and self-driven learners. Some aspects of a career in higher education which I would like are consulting with and training faculty as well as managing projects, although I know I will need to step up my time organization skills to keep everything on track and not get mixed up or fall behind (and this is true regardless of what sector I end up working in!) I’m hoping this coming semester to work on these skills as I will be doing at least two group projects, which will entail juggling multiple projects and effectively communicating with my classmates and other stakeholders.

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Basdogan and Bonk's study of job postings (2020) meticulously lays out the priorities companies looking to hire an instructional designer. I wish I had finished this reading before attempting task 6 (displaying an understanding), because it very clearly delineates the differences between jobs like “Educational Technology,” “Educational Design,” “Instructional Design,” etc. Due to concerns over timing and considering I when I am finishing these assignments, I will leave my graphic representation as is, but if I had time to make changes, I would locate LXD in a spot where it would overlap with all of the other terms in the graphic.

I chose to read "Getting a Job in Business and Industry" by Gabrielli and Branson (2012) to balance with my reading last week about instructional design in higher education, but after reading the first page I realized I had something even more useful than that. While some of the advice was pretty universal job search / interview advice, such as to customize your resume to match the skill and experience statements in the job posting, I plan to keep coming back to the industry-specific advice such as to look at smaller companies and non-profits since they tend to hire more and provide more introductory opportunities. Hopefully if I avoid complacency and stay hungry for knowledge and opportunity, I will be able to find somewhere where I can become indispensable and grow along with the organization. Overall, the last two weeks of reading have put a nice cap on everything we have learned this semester. This class has introduced me to aspects of the history, theory, and career of IST which I knew nothing about before starting this degree, and my concept of where I will be in five years or less has changed significantly as I feed more and more possibilities to my imagination.