Loved this posting from Donald Taylor. Because we're naive about silly, spurious data, we're not a profession. Completely agree Donald.

There are other clues.

One of them is ISD/learning design-by-numbers. Just as Donald says that surely, if we'd really been a profession, we'd have questioned some lovely neat numbers like "we remember 10% of what we read...", surely if we were a profession we'd come around to some kind of realisation that neat-'n-tidy learning design processes could never have worked, when it really matters.

Here's a presentation I've done a few times. It's slightly mischievously called "The 7 principles of 21st Century Learning Design". See what you think.

I presented at the Learning Technologies conference (London) yesterday. My talk was called "Re-learning learning design" and if you've read what I've written over the last few years, you'll probably know what is was about.

But here's the presentation anyway. It's not particularly self-explanatory, so do get in contact if you want to know more about it. Alternatively, I understand there will be a video of the presentation on the Learning Technologies site at some point.

What I've found in giving these talks is that there's quite a bit of interest in expanding them into workshops. So that's what I've done. I've currently got one called "A creative tune-up for learning designers" (outline here), and another, based on yesterday's talk, called not suprisingly "Re-learning learning design".

I've not been blogging for the last few months because a number of personal issues got in the way. But many thanks to Clive Shepherd yesterday who introduced my session and, whether he meant to or not, encouraged me to re-start.

There's been a lot of rubbish talked about whether games are an alternative approach to e-learning. The fact that I used the term "rubbish" implies that I disagree. They're just another set of conventions, visual and interactive vocabulary that we, as trainers and educators can pilfer from as we see fit. They provide us with more tools to help people learn; whether we call our products "games" or not is largely a matter of the degree to which commissioners of these products are resistant to that term or not.

Anyway - there's a new beta release of spacetime, a tool I posted about a while ago. Basically, it's a 3D browsing interface. I love it. The reason that a sizeable proportion of potential users will share my view is because 3D games have trained them to expect this level of engagement, flexibility and downright aesthetic gorgeousness. This kind of thing is likely to become the default style fairly shortly (see the music functions in the new ipod, for example). We'll look back with amusement, and wonder why on earth we put up with 2D representations of data for so long.

A few years ago I worked for a while in what you might call “mainstream” web development, with a marketing/advertising slant. Even back then, there was a notable difference in the quality of the relationships between suppliers of web content/services and their clients.

This is probably a gross generalisation, but I reckon that in the web/new media marketing mainstream, there’s a lot more in common between suppliers and clients. Web marketing staff in large organisations often come from agency or advertising backgrounds, and many agency staff develop their careers by moving in and out of large organisations. Quite often, both sides have common professional qualifications and experience. And as a result, they usually speak more or less the same language. Of course, many problems and misunderstandings arise (because they’re human too…), but the relative maturity and scale of their industry provides some kind of common ground.

I don’t think that’s the case in the e-learning industry. I’m often struck by how very different suppliers and buyers are, culturally, in terms of background, qualifications…it’s sometimes feels like we’re speaking from opposites sides of a deep echoing chasm and only catching the occasional word that’s shouted across the void. We’re a young industry with barely a common vocabulary and culture even amongst the fragmented suppliers of e-learning products and services.

So what? Well, I love 2 x 2 matrixes (some would say “putting people in boxes”, but I’d say that’s only so I can ignore them). And here’s another one.

Let’s imagine that you can map people involved in e-learning along a couple of dimensions. The first one is all about knowledge of the reality, the parameters, the constraints of what e-learning can and can’t do. So if you’re a supplier of e-learning products and services, you should probably be on the high end of the dimension: you have a good knowledge of the constraints. On the other hand, while many buyers within large organisations are up there at that end as well, a substantial proportion are not. They simply (and understandably, given their roles and experience) don’t know enough about what e-learning can and can’t do; what it can and cannot be.

I’ve taken the other dimension from various theories of personality and of creative thinking. I’ve found that many in the industry (on both sides) have what you might call a “convergent” orientation or mindset. They like things sorted out, organised, precision-engineered. They start from a problem and converge, through a process of logical analysis, to a single solution. Traditional instructional systems design encourages this, and many of the values surrounding instructional design support it. And it’s certainly a necessary orientation in many cases.

But not all. Others I encounter are more divergent. They dislike organisation and disciplined process and linear thinking. They head off from a single point and diverge. At the extreme, (unless they’re aware of the constraints) they need the convergent types to help bring things to a conclusion (apply your Belbin or MBTI types here if you want). These types are great when you’re looking for new solutions, which incidentally, is what I think the e-learning industry needs to do more of.

So what happens if you map the two dimensions against each other? Probably just another bullsh*t matrix, pseudo-tool. But it may have some use. I’m just wondering whether something like this might help improve relationships between suppliers and buyers. Awareness, as they say, is curative. See what you think.

One thing that really gets me down about so much current e-learning is a lack of consideration of pace; that is, the ebb and flow of events, energy levels, personal involvement and investment. The kind of thing that radio, TV, play and film writers are brilliant at.

So much e-learning that I review is one-paced. It moves along without any great forethought about how quickly a learner will move through it, whether they're interacting or not, how deeply (or not) they need to be engaged, and above all, how this changes over time, in relation to the general flow of events.

This is partly a symptom of the learning object/atomisation/fragmentation disease that infects a lot of learning design thinking, but it's also a misunderstanding about the nature of interactivity. A lot of the debate about interactivity assumes that it is Necessarily A Good Thing. "We'd like our learning to be interactive" I hear so many clients request. Well - interaction is just one part of the jigsaw. Completely non-interactive digital stories can be supremely engaging and wonderfully educational, as of course, can good documentaries. Interactivity is just one way of manipulating pace.

So - here's the appeal. A while ago I produced this simple tool, based on the work of Mark Iliff at PwC in the late 90s. But I think it's out of date now, and too simple. What I'm looking for is a more visual tool of some sort that I can use to help learning designers map out flows - learner journeys - through e-learning offerings more clearly.

Does anyone know of anything? Would anyone like to work with me on producing one?

Am I barking up the wrong tree? Again.