Week Seven

 “The history of organized education and training can be viewed as a long struggle to extend opportunities to more people and to devise means of helping those people learn better than through the events of everyday life” (Molenda, 2008, 5).

I earned my B.S. in Education in 2003 and though I’ve not spent many years in the classroom since then I’ve been under the education umbrella enough to see the pendulum swing right and left a few times. There will always be a next best thing. A next best end all be all that turns out to just be another swing of the pendulum. Always things to be learned but there will never be a ‘one size fits most’ solution. Even the solutions that leave lots of space for independence and not pigeonholing will never fully fit the bill.

I am frustrated with the premise of Deepak Prem Subramony’s research—that IT scholars neglect cultural diversity. Although I cannot relate personally to the level of instructional technologists, I can as a graphic designer. I worked for a nonprofit which supported early childhood education. I handled our in-house graphic design. One of the struggles I faced in every flyer, advertisement, promotion, etc was how to visually represent the educators we served as well as the children those educators served. Our scope was birth through age eight serving all over the state of Indiana. My director wanted me to find stock imagery that included kids spanning the age range, races, ethnicities, and abilities in one picture. The more I searched the more discouraged I became until I realized it was a pipedream.  And that pipedream would have been misrepresenting the population we served. From my vantage point, it was a way for my director to feel like we were diverse even if we were not. At some point, I threw in the towel and came up with other ways to ensure various groups of kids were represented visually. I recognize my experience is not everyone’s experience but I’m not sure at what point something legitimately becomes genuinely diverse. And I’m not convinced diversity is the solution. Different people need different things based on their own schema. There is no way that any solution will ever be a perfect fit for everyone or even most because we all come to the table with different things. I do think we are seeing more of a trend of poor design as opposed to when the research was completed and reported. But I believe the reasoning behind that is that anymore anyone with some basic software thinks they are capable of doing the same quality of work as trained professionals. 

 

 

Molenda, M. (2008). Historical foundations. In J. M. Spector, M. D. Merrill, J. V. Merriënboer,
& M.P. Dirscoll (Eds.), Handbook of research on educational communications and technology
(3rd ed.) (pp. 3-20). New York: Taylor & Francis Group.
Reiser, R. A. (2007). A history of instructional design and technology. In R. A. Reiser, &
J. V. Dempsey (Eds.), Trends and issues in instructional design and technology (pp. 17-
34). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall.
Bradshaw, A. C. (2018). Reconsidering the instructional design and technology timeline from
the lens of social justice. TechTrends, 62, 336-344.
Subramony, D. P. (2004). Instructional technologists' inattention to issues of cultural diversity
among learners. Educational Technology, 19-24.
Cho, Y., Park, S., Jo, S. J., & Suh, S. (2013). The landscape of educational technology viewed
from the ETR&D journal. British Journal of Educational Technology, 44(5). 677-694.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Week Three

 As I look back through my notes and highlights from this week’s readings, the theme is pretty simple—a process is helpful for instructional designers but must not be held so high to lose the purposes behind the process. The variables associated with student learning are infinite and thus there is no perfect step by step process that can accommodate for all those variables. There are a few big picture variables that caught my attention. Instruction vs learning. In Chapter 1 of Designing effective instruction, Morrison describes some of the benefits of instructional design to P-12 education, “there are numerous occasions in which the need for teacher-developed materials—drill-and-practice exercises, remedial lessons, problem-based lessons, or even full-fledged instructional units—arises” (p 4). I have previously referenced my experiences as an outdoor/experiential education facilitator and other atypical roles in education. I was also a classroom teacher for a couple years for m
Read more

Week Ten - Strategic Direction

Thoughts on Strategic Direction Convincing consumers they need something can be a slippery slope. Some consumers who will buy on a whim and others will never be convinced. When you instill an appreciation for a company beyond the product itself consumers are more likely to purchase because they have a deeper appreciation beyond a single product. I think this is a similar phenomenon to employers/employees. It’s why in recent years so much more care, concern, and effort has been put into hiring employees who may not have the perfect skillset but do fit the culture and who embrace the mission and vision of the company. Skills can be taught and learned. Culture, mission, and vision don’t come quite so easily. “Watkins, Triner, and Kaufman (1996) suggest that strategic plans frequently fail to guide decision making by focusing on processes instead of results. When strategic plans focus on process, describing what employees should do rather than what results should be accomplished, they lose
Read more