If a zebra lost all his stripes, would he still be a zebra or would he be a horse? This is the main thing that I got out of watching Merrill & Gagne. In other words, the two men were discussing the same instructional design only from two different opinions. As humans, I believe we niche our lives and our goals as times go on. This degree is an example of niche-ifying the world and that is exactly what Merrill did to Gagne’s theory. In my mind, we as humans, maintain a drive to be unique, to have something that is like the past, but better. We have refrigerators that tell us the weather now, and yet they still keep our milk and eggs cold. Merrill found fundamentals to be mostly sound, but he extrapolated on areas that were lacking or Gagne didn’t even consider. I liked watching the instructional design because it was a new medium for us to learn from. We are used to reading about theory and learning about particular foundational theoretical foundations in the field, but hearing two professionals debate the topic was nice.
The two men seemed to have the utmost respect for one another since Merrill’s theory was based off of Gagne’s work. The whole principle on remembering was my favorite part. Even down to minute words were a factor within both Gagne’s and Merrill’s thinking. Gagne didn’t like the phrase remembering and instructional designers have those little idiosyncrasies as well. No one wants to be studying a stale theory or a theory that they don’t believe in. Therefore the whole field gets niched out into so many little details that it is hard to pinpoint. Don’t get me wrong, the idea of being in a niche is great, but sometimes going back to the basics is nice.
The basics were exactly what the Vimeo video reminded me of. We may go to all the extent of having the cool technology, the subject matter expert (SME) and awesome acronyms to get us there, but without designing, instructional design is just instruction. I believe that by making the field of ID so complex and gaining ground in the educational realm as an important aspect of instruction whether for training or the classroom, ID has isolated itself. It is tough to think of ID in a silo, but I believe all the psychology, educational theory and understandings about learning make ID too complex at times. This also leaves outside individuals questioning the validity of such a field if it takes so long to design a single training that at one time was just an afterthought without an instructional designer. I’m not in ID, but I could see how design is left out of ID as a whole. People are in a rush and need that JIT training, not the 30 hour brainstorming and planning session on how people learn how to work a textile machine.
I like complexity, but sometimes I think it would help if we could take the complex and make it simpler, but how can we be such a large field without the complexity of individual theories? Psychology seems to pull this off, but psychology is broader than ID. I wonder if it is simply time that pushes a field into simpler times or into establishing foundational understandings to anchor the field as a whole? I know ID has these anchors, but perhaps as instruction changes over time, ID can have larger niches that will become more mainstream (i.e. training, educational, programming, etc.)
On a entirely separate note, my inner ten year old loved that the introduction was by Dr. Smellie (pronounced Smell-lay). haha It reminded me of a cheesy Muppet joke. Also, the music in the intro reminded me of Between Two Ferns with Zach Galifinakis or an episode of Wayne’s World.
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