If you brought a programmable calculator to your fifth-grade class in 1965, you would have quickly been bounced out on your ear by Mrs. Clark, your persnickety and vaguely sullen math teacher. You know what she would have called you? A cheater.
LX Perspectives is a series of guided articles by guest bloggers on LXDesign.co. We ask learning designers, education technologists, UX designers and others to share their views on what experience design can mean for education and learning. Each guest is posed 4 questions to explore this topic and free to share other thoughts as well.
The problem with a really great idea is that it usually has to be groundbreaking, remarkable, and dominant before we will ever see it as a great idea. So its greatness brings with it our confusion about how to fit it into our current understanding of the world.
As an LX designer I keep thinking about the relationship between people and tools. It’s always been so polite, really. I’m over here and you’re over there. I am in my personal space. I have control over it and it is defined by me. Or at least it used to be.
Something is rotten in Denmark, and it is not the cheese. As a Learning Architect for the last decade, one thing is really clear to me: Educators keep trying to use an older model of learning and innovate around the technology for its delivery.
It is most certainly true that we can no longer separate the technology we use to learn from learning itself. If we take that as a given, we must concede that we no longer look into technology for answers, but we look through it to see and understand our world.
So, who are you creating training for? I know it sounds like an easy question: I create for the learners. But if we are to be honest, and clever, we know that most of us create it for our boss and our boss’s boss and all the way up the chain to the CEO, whom I believe is currently floating around on a lovely boat in the Maldives.
You, a corporate eLearning buyer, wake up in a cold sweat, vision hazy and the taste of last night’s Ambien in your mouth. As you wake, you realize what you have been trying to forget: Your expensive eLearning development is going south. How could this have happened?
One day, about 20 years ago, my head exploded. I had the idea that people might want to purposely sabotage things they did not fully understand or accept. Like technology. Having completed a new implementation update and thinking all was going well, I realized one person, like the Ted Cruz of my organization, was holding up the whole thing.
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