Recently, I had the chance to take part in the Educ8 conference, which was a 24 hour (or longer!) event across multiple time zones, hosted entirely on Clubhouse, the new audio only social media app. I was invited by Mark Parry, a fellow Learning Designer, to work with him to contribute to a session all about designing for learning and what we learned during and after Covid. We decided, from the outset, that we wanted a lot of audience participation – almost like it was a Learning Design Swap Meet. This is something that I’ve felt strongly about for a while: there is a need to create the spaces for Learning Designers to share their examples of design – like a concept show for cars, I guess.
Anyway, I was keen to try it out as I had heard about Clubhouse, but not had much to do with it previously. This was an opportunity to address two problems at once. It wa an interesting experience. The audio-only format took some getting used to, although I noticed that people were already adopting strategies to manage some of the confusion involved in having lots of people trying to talk, and no visual cues about who wanted to talk next, or whose turn it was. Of course, there are already some mechanisms in place, but they’re not always used – instead, lots of people embraced the ‘I’m so and so, and I’ve finished speaking idea’.
The other challenge that I noticed was that even for a relatively new format, it has become quickly colonised by people who have their own particular wheelbarrow to push: the edupreneurs and such like. Although our session was on learning design, some fo the contributions were only tangentially related to that topic, and instead appeared to be about people trying to interest others in their products. I’d dropped into a few of the other sessions for the conference to get a bit of a feel for it, and I recognised some people presenting the exact same ‘thoughts’ in this session as they had in previous sessions, which took the lustre off the experience.
More broadly, I think the session also identified some of the confusion about what learning design is, and where it fits within the broader education ecosystem. In this session, people wanted to talk about learning design, which was the point of the whole session, but also more broadly about design practice and design thinking, which his not precisely the same. They also wanted to talk about STEM education, as if that’s the only aspect of education that’s relevant for learning design – which is certainly something with which I don’t agree.