This line is now the first item appearing on the Sage Road website, so an introduction seems in order. Welcome to the eLearning Roadtrip. My name is Ellen Wagner. I'm an analyst at Sage Road Solutions.
One of the things I love most about the connected web is the way that you can watch ideas and information ripple around the learning metaverse. Let's take the topic of, say, Instructional designers - IDs.
With change all around us, it seems as if lots of IDs are getting a clue that these may be just the right times to get better organized, at least in our way of thinking about the value that we drive. Just yesterday I was retweeting Cammy Bean's request for IDs to respond to Clive Shepherd's call for eLearning Network ID skills survey participation. A few days before, Sreya Dutta shared a list of ID competencies in the blog comments. eLearning Guild AG09 resources are making their way to people who couldn't make the trip to Orlando, many of them dealing with ID full-on, thanks to Jean Marrapodi's ID Zone .
In other parts of the connected web, SXSW sounds like it was a new media madhouse. The tweets, posts and feeds from GDC this week in San Francisco have already been pretty interesting. Jay Cross is hosting a group of his Learning Irregulars over in Berkeley today; as "unlearning" old design metaphors and making room for new ones is Jay's passion, I have no doubt that unlearning ID as we've known it is explicit or implied in many of those conversational threads. I'm still watching how Kim Foreman's ITEC 830 class is exploring different ways to engage learners with Web 2.0 media, and how they are sharing what they are learning on their Ning site. Shaun Hammer has shared some of the stuff his Mobile Learning class at Indiana University is doing this spring in the blog comments from a few days ago.
You may be wondering why I went through this list. You know how it is when you have a hammer in your hand, and all you can see are nails to pound?? I have come to see clearly that as IDs we come in so many different kinds and stripes and sizes that sometimes it is hard to see IDs and the broad sweeping domain we manage very clearly. Every one of the people mentioned above has a very different way of approaching ID work, and yet we IDs recognize them as IDs. Would others outside our "field" recognize us? So the nail I am pounding is IDs self-awareness and self-improvement to deal with the realities of today's changing marketplace.
Let me lead with a concrete example of how different people see very different things when they look at learning professionals. When I worked at Adobe, if I were to say "ID", guess which product most of my co-workers would name? At Macromedia, guess which product most of my co-workers would have named? (NOTE: I will talk about this in the next post, so I actually would be curious to hear what you think the answer to these questions are.) And I guess that is really at the root at why I am so jacked up on this topic.
Three questions for you to ponder:
- An ID is apparently a figment of our collective imagination. Did you know that there is no job category for Instructional Designers in the US Labor statistics? There are Instructional Coordinators. And of course the other usual subjects that we've been talking about - graphic artist, web designer, trainer, teacher. Educational technologists. Nothing for instructional designers.
- Have you ever noticed that when you go to fill in a form for a white paper download or a magazine subscription (or whatever else you request from online vendors) that you have a hard time finding the job classification that fits what you do or who you are in your organization?
- Do you still struggle to precisely describe what it is that you do for a living?
When I used to be working in academic life it was easy to say something like "oh, you know, it doesn't really matter what people call us. As long as WE in the field know, we'll be okay, because we are so fundamental to the process of converting ideas and information into value." In fact, I had this exact conversation with an academic friend just yesterday.
I am here to share a different bit of news. It does matter. Let me say that one more time in a slightly more direct way. It is a bad thing when people don't know who you are and what you do, if you have any expectation of being seen as a valuable contributor to the health and well-being of your organization. When enterprise targets and strategic plans and budget and resources and staffing are being negotiated, if you cannot be seen, you will not be invited along.
So this is something that each one of us needs to say each and every day:
IDs help transform intangible information assets into things of great business or epistemological value. (Note: You can choose one or the other highlighted term, which ever one you think is more fun to say out loud).
Every time you say it, you need to think of what you do to make this true. If you can't name something concrete and operational, you need to do more than think about it.
Um...not to put fine a point on it, isn't this the kind of problem-solving at which IDs are supposed to excel? Performance improvement, learning solutions and all that.
Maybe we need to ask another question.
Who's your ID?
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