Now onto the heart of the matter…

While I’m sure I’ll need to defend saying this to my fellow ISDs — I just think instructional design has a different role to play when it comes to Gen X and Gen Y. I’ve been having a lot of conversations with Gen X and Y workers of all stripes — not a lot of Knowledge Workers — mostly blue-collar and white-collar order taking kind of jobs. They’re blogging in workgroups. They’re broadcasting video on YouTube. They’re putting together informational, if not instructional video. They’re just figuring it out and “gittin ‘er dun.” Seriously. I have another post coming up about an old, old friend of mine who I found out was not only blogging for the last couple of years, but has been blogging as a means of keeping their distributed workgroup organized — and they’re not creatives or knowledge workers — they’re school photographers. I was completely floored.

My point being that like organizations that have to take a long, hard look in the mirror to confront the generational realities that Gen Y brings, so too must they consider the realities of a world that works just fine in unstructured knowledge gathering. There’s an important role for ISD to play in that world, but it’s not “taking orders from the customers and giving them to the engineers” — it’s being the bridge between understanding how learners are learning, and contextualizing the information that Subject Matter Experts put out for consumption. The people who need that information will find it if it’s out there, but ISDs will be like information brokers — they’ll make it easier to find.

i worked in college radio for years (http://ktuh.org if you’re interested in the stream). in that era (early 90s) we were wary of commercialization and dutifully snubbed anything resembling a pop radio hit, including the waaaaay overhyped grunge movement. if it was on MTV, i avoided it like the plague (with the exception of 120 minutes-type material).

but my girlfriend and her best friend — both fellow DJs — had a love for duran duran and would buck the unwritten rules and put some DD on the air every week.

and i didn’t mind.

i had an awakening… i realized that yes, i still loved duran duran, just like i had when i was in 5th grade. and it was *ok* to like them! i went out and bought all the CDs, and the 3 of us (with a friend) even flew to the mainland to see DD in concert in San Diego.

(if it helps restore my ‘rocker’ street cred, i got a tattoo in LA during the trip, and talked to the tattoo artist about danzig while listening to smashing pumpkins!)

when i wrote my journal entry lines in the sand, which discusses my inner turmoil regarding cookie-cutter-style elearning development and related tools, i was thinking about my duran duran revelation… about how i loosened up and stopped being a music snob. i was thinking “maybe i should do that with elearning, too, eh?”

i’m trying, but it’s hard when the industry still puts out relatively low-quality tools aimed at novices who don’t know any better. did you know lectora still outputs table-based layouts with bloated and unnecessary javascript-based menus? just check out the demos on their site… yuck.

and what you said about SMEs being content creators… i think it can work, but it would help them (and alleviate some ID concerns) if they were given a framework to work in… some ID guidance to ensure the bases are covered.

- philip

PS: my wife and her best friend (80s/90s aussie music fanatics) saw crowded house in Oakland last August.