Thanks to those who have commented on last week's posts about ADDIE et al that got started following last week's #Lrnchat. To review, #Lrnchat is a regularly scheduled event that takes place every Thursday evening at 5:30 PT/8:30 ET. It takes place via Twitter, with participants using any number of tweeting tools (such as Tweetdeck and Tweedgrid) to keep track of the messages that fly around among the session participants. It is hosted and facilitated by social media expert and learning maven Marcia Conner, a long-time friend and co-conspirator.
If you ever want to see a very cool way of using Twitter as a learning technology you should take a look at what happens in a #Lrnchat session. I had blogged about this a few months ago so won't go back into that now, other than to refer you to the event and hope you enjoy the very lively discussions that ensue.
I seem to have yanked a few chains in last week's blog post about the #Lrnchat and ADDIE! Much emotion in a few of the messages. (As an aside, if you won't sign 'em I won't publish them, and if you use dirty words I just think it's funny).
Might be helpful to clear up what might be a few misconceptions about how I feel about #Lrnchat, ADDIE, and making the world a better place for teaching and learning:
- I think #Lrnchat is one of the best examples of social media in action I've seen in a long time.
- I don't love ADDIE. But I don't hate it either. It's kind of like hating table manners. Sometimes you need to know what the rules are before you can decide the best ones to disregard.
- ADDIE is not nor has it ever been a learning model. Sorry, it's not. It has everything to do with the process of instructional design.
- I think the jargon drinking game is funny. I usually drink mojitos.
- I think it is grand for learning designers to push for fewer constraints and more personalization and lots more innovation.
- I commend Mark, Jane, Clark, and the many #Lrnchat big thinkers who want to push boundaries to make social media and informal learning a bigger part of the world of learning picture.
- I get cranky with hyperbole. Big hat, no cattle. Who cares.
- Innovators are just as hard for an enterprise to work with as laggards when dealing with systemic, enterprise adoption. Each end of the distribution. Statistically speaking.
- I think it is kinda cheesy to call for change without offering suggestions for making change happen.
- Adoption means middle. The mushy middle that isn't going to change unless innovators can give them good solid demonstrable reasons for doing so. Which means being systematic about making the case for making a change.
- Burning down the mission doesn't necessarily get the missionaries on board. SOMEBODY needs to care about applying new ideas into action. I thought that's what designers do.
- Systematic doesn't mean linear. At least it doesn't need to.
One thought I have about ADDIE -- I think I actually threw this into the #lrnchat stew -- is that it's so hard to find a case where the A resulted in someone saying, "Well, it's clear that training's not the solution to this problem."
ADDIE presumes an skill/knowledge gap, which is fine when that's the case. Left unnoticed is a large process element, a performance problem analysis. But that's messier, don't have as large a group of Big Names, and isn't something people get dubbed into, the way subject-matter expertise can dub them first a trainer and then an instructional designer.
I think your comments about the extremes of adoption are very much on target. My unscientific bias is that people who work close to the front lines in large organizations understand all too well the organizational inertia that has to be overcome.
Jack Gordon of TRAINING Magazine once wrote that anytime he hears someone proclaiming how hard knowledge work is, he knew he was dealing with someone who never had to dig postholes in Georgia clay in the summer.
Posted by: Dave Ferguson | August 31, 2009 at 05:47 PM