eLearning Roadtrip

PS. A Summary of Classic ID Models

Ellen Wagner is a learning industry analyst with a passion for sustaining innovation and accelerating enterprise adoption of technologies for education, training and performance support. This is her blog.

Allison Rossett once wrote an article for Performance & Instruction magazine that described how I tried to teach her to cross-country ski and did the whole thing wrong. Having just seen Allison this past week I am mindful of always striving to do my best and to do things the right way.

I have made a number of references to Instructional Design models without providing clear or direct access to those models. I expect that, for those who have not had the experience of having the models drummed into your head by your ID professor, it's all a bit like code. Here is a very brief de-coder. I found a very nice introduction to ID models that Dr. Steve McGriff, San Jose State University, prepared for his EDIT 226 class a few years ago. The whole thing is posted here. Download Models. I have extracted 4 instructional design models from his handout that will be familiar to those of us who have taken graduate courses in ID in an American University in the past 20 years.

NOTE: The Assure Model, below, is the one that Sharon Smaldino was talking about in my last post.

Enjoy!

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The ID Grrlz are Alright

Ellen Wagner is a learning industry analyst with a passion for sustaining innovation and accelerating enterprise adoption of technologies for education, training and performance support. This is her blog.

I had the opportunity to spend Friday in Marina del Rey with several very smart women who have had significant impact on how I think about instructional design (ID). Serendipitously, it also happens that two of them are the authors of two very important non-ADDIE models that have been used for designing formal learning for more than 20 years. It seemed like a perfect opportunity to ask a few pointed questions about the roles that models play.

I joined Doctors/Professors J. Ana Donalson, (Northern Iowa University), Sharon Smaldino, (Northern Illinois University), Allison Rossett, (San Diego State University) and MaryFriend Shepherd (Walden University) to talk about leadership and management in educational technology.  A video crew from Laureate Education, Inc. recorded a series of panel discussions and individual interviews with each and all of us for use in Walden ET classes later this year.

If I were to tell you about the credentials and achievements of my co-panelists I would run out of space for today's post so please take a look at the link for each to get the full picture of their diva achievements.

I've known each from back when I was a baby assistant professor who hung around the big dogs hoping they would let me play with them. They held the interventions when I left teaching to get involved with my first company. We've watched each other's careers take off and mature over the years. It was wonderful to reconnect with people who have been a part of my evolution - my ID Grrlz. I told them I would name a blog post after us. Here it is :-)

I mostly told them about my recent posts about instructional designers and pontificated a bit on the need to get serious about upgrading ID skills for the future of new media.  They made me wear the devil horns in the segment we did on "The Many Hats of Leadership and Management".  Coincidence?

As it goes, Sharon is one of the authors of the ASSURE model, used by instructional technologists who are supporting classroom teachers in schools at all levels. It is also taught to students in NCATE -approved teacher education programs by virtue of being featured in THE textbook used for "technology in teaching" classes required for teacher certification. As it also goes, Allison is one of the authors of the Human Performance Technology (HPT) Model, used to differentiate between designing instruction, and designing performance improvement solutions that may not demand a class. (In other words, the HPT model helps designers conceptualize ANY kind of performance improvement solution, from instruction to informal learning solutions.)

All agreed that ID models are best served as heuristics, "rules of thumbs", that help a designer navigate his or her way through the process of designing learning solutions and experiences. All agreed that sometimes instruction is just the right solution to improve learning and performance, and that sometimes more informal performance support at the point of need is better. (Sidenote - "learning" and "performance" are not necessarily the same thing in this world. It's worth a post of its own. Some other time, tho.) All agreed that models are very effectively used to help newbies conceptualize the abstract process used for creating experiences that maximize the probability for bringing about a change in learning, behavior or performance. But all agreed that the model is the means to the end, not the be-all and end all in its own right.

Sharon was telling me about the exercise she does with her students to work through the ASSURE model, and how she asks them to take out different parts of the model and see how the process of instructional design works (or doesn't). By the end of the course, the students are asked to design instruction without the model. At that point the students can appreciate the heuristic beauty of the systematic process of instructional design.

And that's when it dawned on me.

If one accepts the premise that models are used primarily with newby instructional designers, then it would follow that the fastest way to show that one was no longer a newby is to break away from the tightly held standardized ID model and add one's own "signature moves" (Remember, designers are artists who create with function and form). And so we use the model like training wheels on a bike, to keep us from tipping over before we really know how to ride.

Here's where it gets tricky. Just at the moment that a new designer gets a job in training or HR or IT or Instructional Support, thinks that the training wheels are off the ID bike and that it's finally time to create engaging, inspiring learning experiences, they learn the hard truth.  ID in practice is sometimes even more locked down to a prescribed ID model, and it's locked down because it is used as an algorithm, not a heuristic. Learning enterprises sometimes feel the need to keep training wheels on the bike, keep everyone safe, traveling at a manageable speed, having everybody doing things, in systematic, reliable, repeatable ways.

No wonder IDs feel disoriented. Just about the time we get our wings, we get clipped back to something that may be more rote than we'd expected.

What's a creative, resourceful ID to do??

Where ID Comes From

Ellen Wagner is a learning industry analyst with a passion for sustaining innovation and accelerating enterprise adoption of technologies for education, training and performance support. This is her blog.

Some of the questions I've seen in recent days about ID, ADDIE and other related topics remind me that some of us coming to the practice of ID haven't necessarily been exposed to the depth and breadth of ID's epistemological underpinnings. 

Quick History of ID

So, for those of you who have come to the practice through engineering, graphic design, HR, or  business, here is a quick history. With its roots in behavioral psychology, the professional practice that we now call ID first emerged in the 1920s. This was right around the same time that Thomas Edison declared that his moving picture machine would make textbooks obsolete. Another way of saying that the links between ID and learning and between iD and technology are long-standing.

ID ultimately came into its own thanks to its successful use for training large numbers of soldiers during World War II. In those days ID was all about stimulus - response learning. By the late 1940s, developments in communications technologies (specifically TV) pushed us toward Sender/Receiver, Feedback/Response metaphors.

In the early 1960s IDs gravitated away from behavioral and communications-based approaches and moved toward computer models that considered inputs, process workflows, and outcomes. By the 1970s the discipline we now know as Instructional systems design (ISD) jumpstarted programmed instruction and computer-assisted-instruction. Cognition reintroduced the notion of learning-as memory, not just learning as behavior.

In the 1980s Digital era, the focus was to move learning content into digital forms that could be distributed via "sneakernet" - disks, CDs, videodisks. The divestiture of AT&T started converging computers with telephony and TV.

In the Web 1.0 era, ID has been marked by greater dependence upon online courses and digital learning content creation and networked distribution. Distance learning. Our ability to construct relatively personal learning experiences gives rise to constructivism. We started becoming reliable, scalable, repeatable. The emergence of "eLearning" started bringing many new practitioners to the practice - people who knew how to code and script and build the back-end data bases, who could create animations and websites. People who knew how to administer program and manage a training management system / learning management system / learning content management system / content management system. We also cared about our networks and connections. But what about testing and assessment and evaluation?

Web 2.0 technologies have enabled greater interactivity, richer digital experience, and far more mobility that ever before. While it would be tough to shake behavioral training altogether, today's models of learning engagement depend more upon social learning theories.

What IDs have needed, currently need, and must be able to do in the future

Whether one is dealing with representative media, digital media, Web 1.0 media or 2.0 participative media, In each and all of these venues, IDs must be able to......drumroll, please....

• Analyze the learner, the context, the situation.
• Design an intervention.
• Develop and produce it.
• Implement it.
• Evaluate it.

Whether its ILT or CBT, eLearning or mLearning, 2.0 or 1,0. IDs are responsible for managing the conditions , inputs and outcomes of experiences that actively promote and enable an improvement in learning and performance. Yes, IDs DO need to understand the technology du jour, of that there is no doubt. But in my experience, an ID is not necessarily someone who identifies him or herself by the technology tools that they use.

So for those who don't understand why we haven't come up with more than ADDIE. Well, in fact, we have. Let's us not forget Dick & Carey, Reiser & Dick. Heinich, Molenda, Russell and Smaldino's ASSURE Model. Kemp, Ragan & Smith. Merrill. Reigeluth. Rossett. Tessmer & Grabinger. Ryder. To name just a very few.

Mostly we talk about ADDIE because it's shorthand. We all know what it is. It's easy, it's non-contextual, it's media-independent. It helps guide new practitioners who don't have a lot of experience so they stay on "on design". It provide structure, which seems to engender predictable, quantifiable results.

But ID is much more than any single process model. And my ID is more than a multimedia content author. Not that there's anything wrong with that, of course.

How do your IDs help transform intangible information assets into things of great business or epistemological value?

My Prerequisites for IDs

Ellen Wagner is a learning industry analyst with a passion for sustaining innovation and accelerating enterprise adoption of technologies for education, training and performance support. This is her blog.

My interests in this ongoing discussion about instructional design competencies are both professional and personal. I have always been drawn to the way that one can structure, direct and produce a learning experience very much in the way that one can construct a museum exhibit, or art-direct a photograph, or write a screen play. Today I continue to be drawn by the possibilities for ID that are emerging at the intersections of RIAs, social networking, new media, e-publishing and mobility and games. 

Today's IDs are guided by an instructional design/media model that virtually every aspiring teacher and certified learning professional in America must learn. And that model, of course, is ADDIE, the Analysis-Design-Development-Implement-Evaluate model that I have been poking at in the last several posts.

My issues with ADDIE have nothing to do with the model. It's a fine model. My issue rests with the naive expectation on the part of some that knowledge of the 5-step ADDIE process model is the same thing, or as good as, knowing how to do all of the things called for in each step of the model. And that is just not the way it is.

One of the biggest "a-Ha" moments of my ID career came after years of seeing ID models as a way to guide our professional processes. I came to understand that value is realized from ID models when they are used to guide production - of solutions, of interventions, of digital learning products. A focus on production suggests that something real is being created. In other words, an ID model may serve us better as a product model rather than a process model. For better or worse, a " process model" suggests "that which someone should be able to do", without insisting that one can actually do that which is being specified.

This would suggest that before one even gets to the point of thinking about ADDIE as a product model, there are some prerequisite skills to be mastered. In order to be productive and all.

There are essential things that an aspiring ID - well, an aspiring new media professional of any kind - will be well-served to know. Even before analyzing audience requirements, or producing a solution to a learning or performance problem, or creatively express ideas and information in digital form, or measuring the impact of a lesson on knowledge or performance. If an ID model can effectively guide production, than all IDs must be able to produce.

First, one must be able to express oneself effectively in writing, using a variety of forms and styles to achieve different effects. Of course this means emails, blogs, IMs and tweets. But also means knowing how to write a variety of types of documents, including things like a status report, a review of professional literature, a market analysis, a course syllabus, a creative brief, a grant proposal or two or three, project proposals, a statements of work, a bid for services, white papers, press releases, website copy, research proposals, case studies, a business case or two, a concept specification. If only I'd known.

Second, one must know how to present ideas to others in such a way as to inform, engage, persuade and to get a response to a call for action.This means expressing oneself verbally, both with and without a variety of presentation media, using a range of forms and styles.  This includes public speaking, conference presentations, teaching, training, briefings. But it's more about learning the psychology of persuasion, overcoming objections, inspiration, engagement and motivation.

Third, one must develop a moderate level of technological proficiency, and will need to be able to demonstrate those proficiencies using a variety of software. Powerpoint, Excel, Word. Photoshop. Premiere Elements. Garage Band. Illustrator, Fireworks. Web tools. SWF tools. Acrobat or some kind of PDF/ portfolio platform. Web conferencing platforms. Social media tools. User-generated media production. Yes, you really do.

Fourth, one must have an appreciation for design. So many instructional designers jump into the work without have a broad view of the process of determining the form, function, appearance or characteristics of something. There are many categories of design, including graphic design, industrial design, fashion design, and interior design. For some, design is closely linked to art and can be considered the expression of an artistic aesthetic in a practical environment. For others, design is a process of specification, composition and construction. A large element of contemporary industrial design is web design, which includes both the technical and aesthetic aspects of creating websites. Increasingly, rich internet application design emphasizes user experience, demanding even more sophisticated design sensibilities.

My .02, anyway.

Walk Before You Run

Ellen Wagner is a learning industry analyst with a passion for sustaining innovation and accelerating enterprise adoption of technologies for education, training and performance support. This is her blog.

I closed my last post by saying that, when I envision my ideal instructional designer, my ID looks a lot like a decathlete. As part of this visioning exercise I had planned to think of the top ten events designed to demonstrate the levels of excellence of what I think the quintessentially excellent ID should achieve. My reason for this is simple - If we want to ensure that ID as we the practice defines it will be relevant in the  RIA-driven, cloud enabled, UGC-powered, multi-dimensional learning metaverse then we're gonna have to know what to do, and we're gonna have to show that we know what to do.

I'm not using the ADDIE model to frame my thinking. Not that there's anything wrong with good old ADDIE. It was always intended as a way to teach people about the processes that instructional designers use in their work. With all due respect to those who use it, it serves as a reference model for newbies. Looking forward, it is going to take thinking differently about what we do if we ever hope to get different results than the ones we've always had.

ADDIE is used something like this - "First, you analyze the situation. Then you figure out how to design your idea, then you produce (develop) it all of the things you need for your idea to work, then you implement it, and finally you evaluate it to see if it did what you wanted".  These are not a bad things to think about, especially if you have to start planning for a class project, or a grant proposal or a beginning brainstorming session where you don't have to worry about external constraints. If one is trying trying to put instructional design to work in a "business" setting - and my that, I mean any kind of situation where there are stakeholders to be served through your efforts - then there are a a lot of other things you need to be thinking about BEFORE you start planning an intervention, as well as after you put it in place. ADDIE ends up being one of a number of process models linked together over an extended learning value chain.

And that really is the place that ADDIE is insufficient. It's simply one link in a much longer chain. Practitioners need to know that there is much that comes before, and much that will come after, that has more to do with the ultimate life or death of an idea-as-solution than will the instructional design. If ADDIE falls short, it's because we expect it to do more than it was ever intended to do.

So maybe, before we jump from ADDIE to the TOP 10 ID COMPETENCIES OF ALL TIME  and start getting too focused on what the ultimate performances of our practice should be, that maybe we can start at the baseline requirements one must meet to metaphorically qualify for the events. Pre-ADDIE stuff that anyone who has held down a few ID (and related) jobs can tell you. Some things that every single one of us should be able to do.  Then maybe with each level of competition - e.g. whatever analogy we can come up with for regionals, sections, divisions, leagues, etc - we can start raising the metaphoric bar for the performances we expect.

I started making a list of all the things I think a competent ID should be able to do, and I have to tell you that my list looks very little like ADDIE.

More on that in my next post.

Competing in today's "ID-cathelon"

Welcome back to the eLearning Roadtrip. Have you said your daily ID affirmation?

In the last post I had suggested that maybe the best way for IDs to start reasserting the value of our practice is to start with a bit of self-reflection, maybe even starting the day with something that goes something like:

IDs help transform intangible information assets into things of great business / epistemological value*. 

(*feel free to pick one or the other. Academics seems to prefer the e-word, while business types prefer the b-word.)

I had also suggested that every time someone said it, he or she needed to think of what they do to make this true. My point was that if you can't name something you are doing to drive value that is concrete and operational and measurable, it's time to do more than think about it.

And the more I thought about that, the more I realized that it might be time to think about spring training. You would never expect to run a 10K race without training for it. For many of us, the evolving expectations for operating as a competent professional in the learning technologies metaverse may be the professional run of our lives.

ID is actually more like a decathelon than a 10K race (which is all the more reason for more training!!) You may remember that decathelons feature 10 track-and-field sports events where aggregated results of all events determines an overall winner. In ID, instead of 10 events we have ADDIE and the five-step process model to guide our success. For ID types, ADDIE is sort of like the "Holy Trinity"  although in ADDIE's case there are 5: Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation and Evaluation.

When you're actually doing ID work, it is really nice to have these 5 ideas as a checklist to navigate one's way through whatever part of the learning metaverse you happen to find yourself in. But it's even more important to have the skills and competencies you need so that the activities called for in ADDIE can actually be implemented. You need to be "good enough" to stand toe-to-toe with experts working along the long value chain where ideas and information are transformed into achievement and results.

This tends to draw a certain kind of person to the practice. The best IDs I've known are great team members. IDs like to bring a better sense of order to a situation so that things can get done. Competent. They are there to make others look good.  Maybe our best IDs don't get the rewards or recognition of, say, a scholar - or a designer - or a business leader. People drawn to being an ID aren't necessarily looking for rewards. But recognition is certainly in order. Particularly during times when we are going to see a lot or organization change, where those who thrive will be those who are relevant for the demands of the day, and can flex to anticipate the needs for tomorrow.

When organizations need to restructure, reorganize or resize, it is really important for contributors to demonstrate value. Even more importantly, when organizations are in the midst of their own reorganizations, IDs need to have a better sense of where they stack up given what is hot and trendy and hiring in the current marketplace.

Let me just say that I do think there is value in the MA courses and programs offered by many of the institutional out there, My remarks are not meant as program dings. It's just that when I think about what it is that most IDs learn in school, and what IDs actually do once they get hired to work as IDs, I think there's an opportunity for fine-tuning ones experiences through which competencies are developed and maintained.

Additionally, when I look at some of the industries experiencing growth where ID may be able to make a contribution if willing to stretch a bit it offers another reason why IDs may want to get in better shape for the opportunities that will be available in the months ahead.

So - the answer to the question of yesterday's question of "Who is my ID?" My ID is a decathlete. There are 10 Events in the "ID-cathelon" that I see in today's market. I will take a look at them in the next post.

FINAL NOTE: Regarding questions I asked about  in yesterday's post are (1) At Adobe it depends on the business unit you ask. (2) At various points in Macromedia's history it was Authorware, Director, Flash, Dreamweaver, Breeze and Captivate.

   

Who's your ID?

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?

Getting down to business

eLearning has been a relatively bright light in the economic downturn, particularly in essential vertical markets such as education, government and health care. When travel dollars gets cut, when services are needed but there are fewer people to provide them, when it's time to get serious about developing new job skills, it is no longer a hard sell to get decision-makers to see that elearning offers solutions for getting smarter faster in a variety of different technology-mediated ways.

Even so, it's a relatively difficult environment to get business decision-makers interested in doing work differently if there isn't a good business case for implementing changes. Many of the IDs I know have not had much experience working with line of business operations, annual plans, budgets and forecasts, revenue and expenses, so we lack the language and the skills to effectively communicate with business owners. It's hard to change a business owner's mind when we talk about learning, change or professional improvement. For better or worse, if one can speak intelligently about year-on-year growth or opportunities for new customer segments, it's a whole different conversation.

From my perspective, IDs owe it to ourselves to be more effective at flexing our business muscles. For all of the conversations, and books, and lists and surveys describing all the things that IDs do - content analysis and storyboarding and web production and video production and assessments and the like - one of the things that IDs rarely address is developing any business acumen.  It never really entered my mind that I would need to know financials until I found myself running a growing ID company and spending a lot more time on things like pricing and cost analysis, building bottoms up budgets and revenue forecasts, worrying about pipelines and lead conversion. It made me come to realize that questions really need to be answered before diving into the middle of an audience analysis -- such as "How many people out there are likely to care about this?", and "what other alternatives exist" and "What are the problems that my innovation can solve, and how much is it worth it for me to solve it?"

To repeat the point I used to close the last post - An innovation without much likelihood of adoption may be a great intellectual curiousity, a worthy candidate for a research project. But during times when "just the right app" may be just the right thing to spark new business success stories, we need to know how to figure out "who cares" and "how much" right along with "what if". Metaphorically speaking, it's all part of learning to skate to be in just the right place at just the right time.

Skating to where the puck is going

I have been thinking a lot about Kendall Whitehouse's March 18th interview with Stephen Elop, president of Microsoft, in the recent issue of Knowledge@Wharton . Having connections to both men help make the interview particularly enjoyable; I had the pleasure of getting to know Kendall and his team from the Wharton School when they were the rock-star, go-to team for telling the Macromedia Flash platform story in education and I have continued to be an avid reader of their Knowledge@Wharton e-zine since those days. Stephen was our EVP of the worldwide field organization at Macromedia when I started working in solutions marketing, and my boss, Penny Wilson, was a direct report of Stephen's, so I have my "close to greatness" connections here as well. I have positive memories of Stephen's leadership at both MACR and ADBE, so it was great to catch up on what he is doing up in Redmond.

In the interview, Stephen shares a great point with Kendall, about how in tough economic times it is incumbent upon smart companies to think about where they want to be when things improve and to make investments in those areas to build future capacity. I do remember his talking on this topic in a number of education customer meetings - when there's no market for your goods, don't spend your money where it won't matter. Instead, invest in where you want to be when the markets turn around. This was regarding the Macromedia decisions to focus on Flash research. One direction, looking at RIAs Flex and AIR, is now the daily bread of many a developer. The other direction, Flash on mobile, is now coming into its own as an issue for North American businesses to attend to, finally.

Stephen's point is reminiscent of the advice that was supposedly given to Canadian hockey legend Wayne Gretsky by his father when teaching his son how to play the game. Walter's advice included to "skate where the puck's going, not where it's been."

Two parallel thoughts. One relates to the ongoing discussion I've been having with industry friends over the past several weeks about how now is the time for forward thinking individuals and enterprises to consider how to take advantage of the great economic and market changes that are going on around us. The other relates to my recent diatribes on the topic of rethinking professional preparation for instructional designers so that this profession has a shot at ongoing relevancy.

I think it would be enlightened self-interest to demonstrate the value of crawling beyond the online course management swamp, sharpen our learning, programming and production skills and reach out into the metasphere, the game zone, the mobile web and the cloud. We owe it to ourselves to learn how to flex business muscles. Big questions really need to be answered before diving into the middle of an audience analysis, like "How many people out there are likely to care about this?", and "What are the problems that my innovation can solve, and how much is it worth it to them for me to solve it?" An innovation without much likelihood of adoption may be a great intellectual curiousity, a worthy candidate for a research project. But during times when "just the right app" may be just the right thing to spark new business success stories, we need to know how to figure out "who cares" and "how much" right along with "what if". Metaphorically speaking, it's all part of learning to skate to be in just the right place at just the right time.

iPhone 3.0, mobile learning and the ID

The blogs and news feeds have been filled with news from yesterday's Apple's press event during which the iPhone 3.0 was announced and profiled. There are many learning industry practice leaders who believe that Apple's iPhone has jump-started the long-anticipated adoption of mobile devices, products and services for learning and performance support. Therefore, yesterday's press event announcing a new iPhone version certainly attracted the attention of many of us from the elearning side of life who like to keep an eye on what the mobile tech leaders are doing.

Ian Thain has written a nice summary of yesterday's Apple event.  His Apple mobile stats are impressive:

• iPhone now in 80 Countries - 13.7M units in 2008
• 17M altogether.,.. including iPod Touch 30M units
• 800,000 downloads of the SDK & 50,000 companies & individuals join the Apple iPhone Developer Program (62% never developed for Apple before)
• Over 25,000 Apps Submitted 96% approved... 800,000 downloads

This still represents a relatively small percentage of the overall market penetration for smartphones, but the growing ecosystem around the Apps developers has been seen by many to be a transformative aspect for the mobile industry at a time when the rate of device adoption seems to be slowing. In another related article Thain goes on to predict that iPhones will be the most adopted enterprise smart phone for 2009.

As a mobile learning fan, it pleases me to see these discussions taking place. As the mobile web goes, so grow the opportunities for new and improved mobile learning applications.  As we're hearing from Apple about iPhones, from Steve Ballmer and Microsoft about the improvements in Windows Mobile OS, as RIM continues to rock with Blackberries for all, more Android and the G1 phones are on the way for 2009, and as Pre may give Palm another shot, there seem to be a number of places where US-based app developers can begin to anticipate what mobile learners want.

So, back to a point I had raised in the past couple of posts - a knowledge of learning theory and practice can be a great secret weapon if you happen to find yourself in a discussion on how to design games, apps and experience. Do not assume that many of the people currently involved in developing apps for learning have any background in learning. They may be great developers - or artists - or programmers - but they may not have much background with things like performance objectives and learning goals. Game and experience developers have recently come to understand that they have an opportunity to share what they know about mobility and games with the education and learning communities, and that we have some things that we can share in return.

But the learning community often presumes that those from outside learning are hungry to learn all about learning. And that is so often not the case. They just want to know how our knowledge of learning and cognition can make the game or mobile app better. We need to be mindful not to prosletyze ID methods and to focus on results, so we can let the results speak for themselves. With all due respect to Mark Prensky and his poke at ID fun-suckers, the 2007 Slate magazine piece entitled World of Borecraft also spawned much discussion about how educators often underestimate how hard it is to create something fun that has learning objectives.

We also often come to these conversations without the technical acumen needed to understand what some of our cognitive design specs entail.  I am so grateful for my years at Informania, Macromedia and Adobe for giving me exposure to really smart engineers who helped me understand the world of IT. It's hard for an ID to be credible if we don't know the basics of the technologies affecting our practice.

Out of curiousity -- how many IDs among us have ever tried to design a mobile learning application? Would you know where to begin?  Would you know when to hand it off?