Knowledge and learning design

This is another unfinished, placeholder entry - apologies...

What it will be about is the relationship between how people define knowledge, and what they think learning design is.

The basic argument is this: if you believe knowledge is something that is delivered, your priority is to design the best delivery mechanism. You try to articulate the knowledge as best you can, usually in words, structure it out, then communicate it to learners. It's likely that you'll try to establish in some detail what the "content" is very early on in the process, as it's the content that drives much of the project management, resourcing, and so on. This will result in an engineering approach, in which requirements are as tightly defined as possible, and are not expected to change.

If you believe that knowledge is created by learners, your priority is to establish environments in which this will most effectively occur. You become a "learning environment designer". You think about what kind of experience you're trying to create for the learner. It can be quite difficult to do this using words, so you're more likely to sketch or model the solution, rather than express it as text. Most important of all, you're less likely to assume you can define all the requirements up front - because learners are just so damned unpredictable in how they create knowledge - and therefore take a more iterative, exploratory, design approach.

To summarise: content/words/engineering contrasts with experience/sketches/design.

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