I’ve been reading a lot of James Dalziel’s work on Learning Design -specifically his edited text Learnign Design: Conceptualizing a Framework for Teaching and Learning Online. This book takes as its starting point The Lanarca Declaration on Learning Design (2013), which sought to encapsulate the then status fo learning design as a field of Practice and educational research. The first part that I noticed as I read this – and I had a nagging feeling that I have engaged with some of this material before – certainly LAMS (the learning activity management system) is familiar to me, although from where I cannot remember – is that there is a substantial difference in focus when compared to the other approaches to Learnign Design that I have been reading.
Before this, I was reading a lot of Rick West’s work, especially his edited collection from 2018. It’s like a great big shopping bag of previous and current articles covering everything even tangentially related to educational technology, learning design and instructional design. There’s stuff in there on machine learning and data analytics, MOOCs, open access, and, of course, different approaches to learning, and different frameworks to design that learning. There are some excellent articles in there, and it also has the benefit of being open access, which makes it much easier to get hold of a copy. On the other hand, Dalziel et al (2016) is a much more focused offering. Rather than trying to cover the whole field, they instead choose to focus the efforts (at least in the first section of the book) on defining and explaining a way of talking and writing about learning design. In other words, they seek to develop a shared vocabulary (and does that necessarily mean a shared understanding? I’m not sure) about what learning designers do. They make use of a comparison with the development of musical notation; that is, in much the same way that notes on a stave (and I’m hardly an expert in this respect) depict the way music is to be played, so too is there a need to develop a notation for learning design, in order to describe the way learning experiences are constructed. It’s a powerful idea, and I must admit it, I find it very persuasive. In doing so, Dalziel et al (2016) manage to sidestep some of the tricky considerations that often bog down such discussions. Rather than committing to any particular methodology, pedagogy or philosophy, they restrict their conceptual map to simply identifying that these are considerations that a learning designer must take into account as part of the process of learning design.
They are also quick to note that there conceptual map is not a perfect tool. Again, they draw on music here, noting that common musical notation is Western-influenced and biased in that respect, and even within the Western canon it doesn’t take into account all forms and styles of music. They also point out that the conceptual map is no guarantee of good learning actually taking place; rather, it is simply a way of talking about that learning.
This makes me consider that representation is a key issue in Learning Design. This is well outside my normal area of expertise, but I’m curious about it nevertheless. There are, quite literally, hundreds of differnt frameworks that either explicitly try to describe the learning design process or in some other way contribute to it – TPACK, ADDIE, SAM, PICRAT, HPC, ARCV and so many more. Most of these have some kind of technical drawing to represent them, often in the form of a ‘map’ or a cycle.
But here’s the thing: they are generally static representations. To follow on from the musical notation idea, I think it might be worth examining applications as they are used, rather than in an ideal form. For example, some guitarists I know don’t use musical notation at all. They might not even read it. Instead, they use tablature, which is a more practical form. And apps that teach you guitar, like Yousician for example, teach you to play using Tab. So, a question aht should be asked is, “What use is a model or a map if no one uses it?” Another question that is related is, “What use is a model that isn’t timely?” By this, I mean that a model should by dynamic, to indicate pace and flow, rather than a static representation on the page.