Where is the study of what we do?

Let me caveat this whole thing by saying this isn't a rant (well not entirely) but really a plea for conversation (more on Conversations coming soon).....

Like many, I've traveled an odd path to get where I am today. My undergraduate degree is in business/management. Case studies, accounting, finance, the works. Then something happened and instead of going on to get my MBA, I decided that I wanted to study history and anthropology so off to grad school. I'll never forget my first grad school seminar in history. All the other follks in the room had history undergrad degrees so I felt really out of my domain depth. That class was a M,W,F and on Monday the class would be assigned a topic along with a list of potential books on that topic. Come Friday, each student was to have prepared a 5x8 card (both sides) that contained a critique of whatever work they had selected. Not of the subject of that work but of the work itself. Historians refer to this as 'historiography.'

"Furay and Salevouris (1988) define historiography as "the study of the way history has been and is written — the history of historical writing... When you study 'historiography' you do not study the events of the past directly, but the changing interpretations of those events in the works of individual historians."

 So you read your book, you write your card and you show up on Friday and you have to defend your critique of the work to the rest of the class. I was nervous but when other people started going something became clear to me - these people might know more about history than me at the moment but no one had ever taught them how to argue a point, at least not in front of anyone. Clio however (the muse of history) is a demanding taskmaster. Soon enough my peers raised their game and we all came out of the class sharper than we had been. 

That interaction, the discussion not just of subject matter but of how that subject matter was constructed, is I think critical to a field. It helps keep a field and its associated theorhetical base, sharp and current. What I am looking for now, is historiography's corollary in the instructional design field. 

Where are the conferences or conference sessions that examine critically the canon upon which ISD as a field, rests? Where are the contrarians of Bloom, Gagne, Kirkpatrick who go after them not in an ad hominen way but in a way so that not only their conclusions and models are laid bare but also the methodology upon which those conclusions rely? I look at post like these (Vygotsky - the Lysenko of learning, Piaget – why teach this stuff?, Learning Styles Challenge -- Three-Year Update) from Donald Clark and Will Thalheimer and I want more. I want to know where this kind of critical inquiry is part of the ISD curriculum. I want to know where the great keynote speakers are speaking on this and what rooms their sessions are in. (another great one By Donald on "Don't Lecture Me") Give me some Socratic Method please!

Why does this bother me so much? The same reason title like "The 7 Habits of so and so" bother me - are there really only 7? What was #8 and why did it get left out? When self-help speakers do that, its a problem on one level, when people do it in a field as incredibly important and potentially powerful as training, its orders of magnitude more important to be addressed. When someone puts forward a model expounding on the 9 Events then is your first reaction - why 9? That model precludes a discussion about #10 and it also precludes a discussion about why #6 is till in there when its clearly wrong (as example). 4 Levels of evaluation rules out both the 5th and 6th levels but also rules out the notion that maybe evaluation doesn''t break neatly into levels. I'm not saying oppose all models but I am saying that all models and their proponents should be called on regularly to defend themselves and not just queitly adopted

 Therein lies I think a HUGE problem facing the training industry and the academic programs that support the education of ISD professionals. These models, rightly or wrongly, soundly designed or based on Flat Earth-level thinking, have not only been adopted but entire business models have been constructed around them. This makes change at the industry level incredibly hard. Add in the fact that entire text books and courses have been written incorporating these models and now change is made difficult at the academic level. This academic portion is even more insidious in a field where there is not an incredibly strong and vibrant sub-discipline of professional self-critique. 

So now industry is locked in, academia is locked in, conferences are locked in and at best you have a small population of innovators and thinkers at the edge trying to affect change being resisted by an entire ecosystem. I mean really, look at this post by Will Thalheimer on the crap/fraud/intelelctual crime that is the marriage of Dale's Cone of Experience with percentages. This post came out in 2006 and yet I'd wager you'll find it in slide decks today being taught in conference sessions and classrooms as gospel. We must develop some sort of professional nervous system - some way to relay messages across our entire corporate body that these need to be expunged. One way to do that is to build a strong, independent model of self-inquiry and demand that the canon upon which our field rests, be sharp, current, defensible, based on sound methodloogy and research and we must not tolerate a creeping acquiescence of neatly numbered models into a field of such importance. 

If I'm wrong or even if I am right - let's have a conversation about it. 

Comments

[Jay Cross]

Okay, Mark, let's huddle when I'm in No. Virginia next week.

The challenge goes beyond making ISD rigorous. As work and learning merge, ISD has to resonate with management practice at large. No more hiding under the training umbrella.

[Beats]

I was studying something else regarding this on another blog.This is my first time I stop by here. I found a lot of exciting stuff in your site especially its discussion.

[Roz]

One of the issues I face as a Learning Designer stems from the inherent limitations of all of these models. What does a true "Piaget" or "Vygotsky" learning piece look like, in the real world? Well - to be honest it could look like anything. It could even look almost exactly like a learning piece or experience that adheres to a different theorists principles.

And really, no one who actually teaches, facilitates, or designs learning pieces well just draws on understanding from one place alone.

But the people who buy and sell what I do want a neat label. They want to point at it and say "that's constructivist" or "that's scaffolding". One day they will slip up and call it "post structuralist abstract". Even though I try to explain that slavishly following the rules when designing leads to very boring things.

Critical thinking, problem solving, a dash of creativity and the ability to move from detail to big picture - that's the perfect learning designer. Know the rules, then bend and break them.

That is not to say you can't have core principles. But to be honest, anything that comes close to being a prescriptive rule will be outdated as soon as you say it

[Rich Benak]

Guess I should have caveated my statement as well...
Much like Donald Clark, there are those that are formally trained that choose to continually question what they were taught and offer tremendous insight.

[Rich Benak]

Heh...glad to see you're finally bringing the conference backroom/barroom discussion to the stage...

It's interesting, the folks who I find to have the most enlightened, relevant and practical insights about ISD are the ones LEAST formally trained in it.

There does seem to be an odd pandemic of low self-esteem and/or need for acceptance within the profession though; so I think that can help explain how firstly, some feel the need to legitimize their work with models & scientific theories and then second, gravitate to those works who have been able to get significant buy-in (not necessarily because it's right or works, but because it SOUNDS like it's right or should work).

There will always be those people and groups intent on creating a reputation for personal or financial gain; I guess I just find pride/solace in the fact that the people that seem to be progressing the profession forward the most aren't the same people intent on monetizing it.

[Dave Ferguson]

There's so much going on here it's hard to know where to start and hard to limit the coverage.

I will say that the Socratic method, like others that you question, can be just as misused and overblown. Socrates himself (or writings that purport to express what he said) could get mighty cutesy about his pose as a simple seeker after truth. See for example I. F. Stone's "The Trial of Socrates" for his take on the old crank as an anti-democratic reactionary.

So "Socratic dialogue" ain't necessary the ideal, though the ranks of those who praise it may be disproportionately filled with people who see themselves as Socratic.

But we were talking about a field. The writer Frank Macdonald said once that rather than a country, Canada is a collection of historical accidents doing time together.

I think that's not a bad analogy for the so-called field of ISD: a collection of concepts, each loosely tied to one or more disciplines, trying to look as practical as engineering and as engaging as Pixar.

Compared to a hard science, it's more a parking lot than a field. Among the vehicles you can spot some behaviorism, lots of social science, a little tenure-track anxiety, a fair amount of revenue-generation from various bodies offering certification. Something looking like the Merry Pranksters' bus, with MOOC painted on the side. Over in the mall, there's a bookstore filled with habits, cheese-moving, and shiny objects to lure the CEO. It's next to the shop that sells old-lady/young-woman pictures and the nine-dot puzzles. Nearby is a multiplex featuring 24 LMSs, each of them a unique blockbuster.

Traffic through the lot consists of large commercial vehicles as well as private cars, carrying people (including me) who are trying to make a living doing something related to helping people perform better on the job.

The value of what they do is of course what your post is about, as is its replicability, as is its relevance to results that the organization cares about.

You'll get many comments, most far more substantive than this. I have worked in the general area of corporate and organizational [ training / learning / performance-improvement ] since 1977. The lack of a common set of principles, standards, and what-have-you is a reflection of the complexity of learning, on the one hand, and the reality that people gravitate to things that look like they'll work in the short run.

I've seen a lengthy and quite depressing discussion on LinkedIn about the merit of "allowing" people to use cell phones and similar devices during training. I don't even want to think about the ones elevating classroom-based events to the pinnacle of human intellectual endeavor.

Such urges for explaining, for order and control--the idea that the course and the instructor require this--suggests to me that some people are more than content with where their vehicle is in that cognitive parking lot.