I am having a professional identity crisis. So, in the spirit of being helpful, I am going to write about my uncertainty. I imagine this to be something like the approach psychology instructors take when they bring individuals who have suffered from various psychopathologies into class. Perhaps everyone learns and everyone benefits when brave individuals explain their uncertainties.
I think this issue developed when my institution initiated a graduate program called Instructional Design and Technology. I was involved in getting this program started because of my interest in the application of technology in education. The program prepares individuals for a variety of roles in education and industry including those individuals taking positions as K-12 coordinators/facilitators ??? an area of personal interest. As the program developed, individuals hired, and courses developed, I became more and more aware of the importance of ???instructional design??? in instructional design and technology programs. I was not completely na??ve when beginning this venture. I had books by Dick and Carey and Gagne on my shelf. I had friends who worked at Florida State and Indiana. However, I must admit I could not force my way through these books or imagine myself teaching what these folks taught – the nuances of competing design models bored me to death and attempts to prescribe/establish learning conditions seemed very basic in relationship to the research topics I studied and taught about as an educational psychologist. Despite my long-term interest in research on the applications of technology and commitment to the development of K-12 teachers??? capacity to use technology in classrooms, such things were not what I knew or was interested in knowing. So – I have been thinking about what various individuals who work in programs associated with educational applications of technology do – what topics interest them, what topics are emphasized in their teaching, etc.
Such issues have been ???working??? in the back of my brain for several years and have again been brought to the surface by a book I have been reading. A friend (Mike Royer) recently edited a book entitled ???The Cognitive Revolution in Educational Psychology??? (2005). What caught my attention was that the book contained a chapter on ???Instructional Design??? (Marcy Driscoll and Kerry Bruner) and a chapter on ???Instructional Technology??? (Wiley, Sanchez & Moher). Just paging through the two chapters was enough to confirm my expectations; I must be an instructional technologist and not an instructional designer. I recognized the topics in the instructional technology chapter and had read nearly all of the primary sources. The ???movement from transmission to active learning???, intelligent tutoring systems, simulation environments, project based learning ??? the topics were things that interested me, I knew about, and I acted on in my own projects and writing. The topics in Marcy???s chapter were also familiar ??? design models, Gagne (Marcy was a long-time collaborator), conditions of learning, etc. However, I could claim nothing more than awareness.
I thought it was interesting that Marcy seemed to recognize the issue I am raising here. In the beginning paragraphs of her chapter, she notes that the book contains two chapters dealing with technology ??? Instructional Design and Instructional Technology. She makes an effort to define the scope of the field she intended to cover, but did not make clear how her definition of what instructional designers do could be differentiated from what instructional technologists do. According to the description, instructional designers do important and practical things. The focus is ???on the application of learning principles in the systematic process for designing instruction??? ??? sounds good to me.
So, I am still confused and searching. There must be folks who study questions of this nature. Maybe there have been attempts to cluster individuals or identify citation probabilities. Maybe individuals should simply be asked to identify their affiliation and explain the basis for this identification. Maybe an instructional designer could do needs analyses and create objectives for various professional roles. What do classroom teachers need to learn in order to become more proficient? What do those who create instructional materials need to know? How do these skills and knowledge overlap with what designers vs. technologists teach?
