Brandon Hall Innovations in Learning 08

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.