Got back from IIL08 (Innovations in Learning 08) the annual conference given by the Brandon Hall folks. I gave my presentation on instructional design for the semantic web and got fairly positive feedback. However, I do know of one improvement I would like to make to the presentation is to include more examples.
Based on everything I heard at the conference, the movement to structured content is well on its way regardless of whether people understand it or not. The thing that really gets me, is that instructional designers have yet to take ownership of our failed practice and understand that if they want to practice instructional design they need to rethink how they are going to do this. An instructional designer that is developing courses, at the end of the day is a multimedia/courseware developer....which is fine. There's nothing wrong with having those skills and doing that work. But lets face it, thats not where an instructional designer is providing the most value. As content moves into the networked economy, building taxonomies, creating learning meta-languages, looking at standards is where the instructional designer will find a home. We need only look at SCORM as a standard and understand that it was created by programmers and IT folk with less input from instructional designers to figure out that any new version of SCORM needs more of the instructional design input.
I also had some great discussions with Tom Crawford from VizThink about the semantic web and where its going, what role is it going to play and will it be the next 'BIG' thing. We both agreed its coming one way or another. Its impact I think is where we disagree, however as an instructional designer it will be critical for me to research and learn all I can about it.
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I definitely enjoyed our conversations. As always, I learned a lot. With exceptions for a few larger projects for large customers with particular needs, I'm not sure I see the cost/benefit for the semantic design for the average course. It adds a lot of time and money, and often has no discernable value. In fact, the discussion feels and sounds to me a lot like learning objects. Of huge value in the right circumstances, but those are much more rare than we are led to believe. Please understand, I'm not dissing either learning objects or the semantic web. They're very important...in their place.
Let the games begin! :)
--tom
So...
Let me agree on a few points here. First, not all courses require semantic markup to the extent that semantic markup plays a defining role in design and development. Second, learning objects, semantic markup do have their place. My only addition/discussion point with you is that it seems your looking at how the majority of people put these things into practice and making judgement calls based on that. If we redefined 'learning object' as (and we talked about this) the smallest piece of content you need to manage independent from all other pieces of content, and this definition was put into practice, how useful would learning objects be then? Of course to create a learning object without any plan for reuse, I think we can agree this is probably more work than the situation requires.
But we use learning object design all the time for many of our clients with great success. The same is true with semantic markup and using instructional design models as the basis for our markup. What semantic markup based on an instructional design model does, is it preserves the value of content based on learner requirements. We have also learned to scale down our content structures for smaller courses as there is no cost/benefit reuse scenario. It would be a mistake however to judge poor use of learning object design, or structured content development and generalize.
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