Posts Tagged instructional design
Think Like An Instructional Designer – IA Summit 2010
Posted by Todd Toler in Interaction Design on April 10th, 2010
I’m in Phoenix this weekend for the IA Summit 2010 – which is organized by the American Society of Information Science & Technology (ASIS&T) and is one of the major national get-togethers for Information Architects and User Experience Designers. I’m not sure if there is a distinction between the two titles anymore, but from what I hear this is the first IA Summit in years not to have a session on what to call ourselves in this profession – so that’s progress I suppose. Did you know that Wiley publishes the journal of ASIS&T? This is my first IA Summit and I was pleased to be a presenter. My talk, “Think Like an Instructional Designer,” was inspired by the fact that e-learning professionals and interaction designers are in silo’d professions. The two fields rarely work together and get a chance to learn each other’s theoretical frameworks. Yet all interaction designers face instructional design challenges everyday, and learning theories can be used to make more persuasive, better converting interactive experiences. Think of e-learning as “everyday” learning.
Learning Theories for Interaction Designers #5 – Case-based Reasoning
Posted by Todd Toler in Interaction Design on April 6th, 2010
Roger Schank's most ambitious idea, The Reminding Machine, would be a massive collection of stories cataloguing what "smart people" know and how they deal with complex situations.
In leading up to my presentation at IA Summit 2010, “Think Like an Instructional Designer,” I’m posting on the important learning theories that any interaction designer would be well served to know the basics of.
Theory #5 – Case-Based Reasoning
Most famous learning theories seem to be closely associated with a personality (sometimes a pair of them), but few stand so fully in their author’s shadow as case-based reasoning does in that of Roger Schank. Schank is a bit of a rarefied character in the world of educational psychology – probably because he has serious chops in the far sexier field of Artificial Intelligence(AI). UX people will relate to this theory, because it is basically saying people learn by prototyping stuff. In Schank’s model, learners create generalizations from a rich set of case histories, rather than from explicitly rendered rules or other forms of procedural knowledge. Schank’s theories might be likened to a branching network of potential outcomes in which the learner induces her way to the correct path by failing in the other ones. This is often not the byproduct of actual failure, but the more subtle letdown that occurs when something is not what the learner expects to see. He calls these “expectation failures,” which he proposes are more easily indexed by the brain and therefore are a higher form of learning than, say, rote memorization. It won’t surprise you that a variant of CBR, rule-induction, is a cornerstone of machine learning theory.
Learning Theories for Interaction Designers #4 – Cognitive Flexibility Theory
Posted by Todd Toler in Interaction Design on April 6th, 2010
KANE - short for "Knowledge Acquisition in Non-Linear Environments" was an interactive laser-disc based on the film Citizen Kane. An early example of cognitive flexibility theory put into practice.
In leading up to my presentation at IA Summit 2010, “Think Like an Instructional Designer,” I’m posting on the important learning theories that any interaction designer would be well served to know the basics of.
Theory #4 – Cognitive Flexibility Theory
If ever there was a learning theory that was tailor-made for the web interaction designer, it is cognitive flexibility theory. In fact, the theory’s emphasis on the power of hypertext would imply that it was developed with the world-wide web specifically in mind. Yet it came to prominence in 1992, right about when the Mosaic browser started development, and before the ubiquity of the modern web . So ironically, its most famous implementation deploys a special laserdisc of the movie Citizen Kane that serves up scenes in non-linear “random access” mode.
Learning Theories for Interaction Designers #3 – Cognitive Apprenticeship Theory
Posted by Todd Toler in Interaction Design on April 5th, 2010
Verner Von Croy mentors Lara Croft directly within the main game play of Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation. Most games have dedicated training modules and are therefore less compliant with cognitive apprenticeship theory.
In leading up to my presentation at IA Summit 2010, “Think Like an Instructional Designer,” I’m posting on the important learning theories that any interaction designer would be well served to know the basics of.
Theory #3 – Cognitive Apprenticeship Theory
Cognitive Apprenticeship Theory can be a powerful instructional framework for interaction design, in fact it’s one of my favorites to think about, but it’s best not to take the theory too literally. Collins and Brown, most closely associated with the theory, were writing some 20-odd years ago and they did not have computerized environments in mind at the time (they were mostly interested in classroom pedagogy.) Their genius lay in the recognition of a theoretical gap between students’ learning to integrate sub-skills and conceptual knowledge. Despite the educator’s best intentions, when the two were unintegrated, the information remained inert. They started to notice that the most successful in-school learning had very similar characteristics to out-of-school learning (most notably the concept of “apprenticeship”.) They observed a strong interplay between observation, scaffolding, and increasing amounts of independent practice. And while many before them had emphasized the power of conceptual learning and independent practice (see Lave), they thought more about how to provide “internalized guides” during periods of relatively independent practice. CAT is an extension of situated learning theory, but rather than leave things as a purely sociological construct (e.g. Lave & Wegner’s “communities of practice”) they placed a strong emphasis on methods (modeling, coaching, scaffolding, fading, articulation) and sequence (global before local, increasing complexity, increasing diversity.)
Learning Theories For Interaction Designers #2: Schema Theory
Posted by Todd Toler in Interaction Design on April 5th, 2010
A diagram of a someone's possible schema for the concept of "egg." Source: P.Davis 1991
Schema theory is a foundational element in almost all cognitivist descriptions of learning, and this one will likely make immediate sense to user experience practitioners because it is tightly entwined with the familiar concept of mental models. The theory emphasizes the role of prior knowledge and provides a robust explanatory framework for how expert performance is attained. Ok, so what’s a schema? Piaget defined the term in 1926 as a mental representation of an associated set of perceptions, ideas, and/or actions. Think of a schema as a network of connected facts and concepts into which any newly-formed structures can be fitted. Then think of your brain as a bigger network of overlapping schema and sub-schema. The schema themselves are a markup language for the brain, cognitive XML if you will. Schema theory explains why we remember things so subjectively (In Bartlett’s 1932 research on people’s memory of stories such as the “The War of the Ghosts,” he found that in reconstructing a story they added elements of their own culture. This is famously considered evidence of schema theory’s existence.) More interestingly to designers, the theory can be exploited to provide more effective instructional materials.
Learning Theories for Interaction Designers #1 – Situated Learning
Posted by Todd Toler in Interaction Design on April 3rd, 2010
Microsoft's famous disaster, "Bob," was an early attempt to introduce situated learning theory to mainstream computing.
In leading up to my presentation at IA Summit 2010, “Think Like an Instructional Designer,” I’m posting on the important learning theories that any interaction designer would be well served to know the basics of. Even if you are working on a project that is not explicitly “educational,” knowledge of how people absorb information and build meaning out of your content will strengthen your designs.
#1 – Situated Learning Theory (or “Situated Cognition”)
Think Like an Instructional Designer: Structured vs. Discovery Learning Environments
Posted by Todd Toler in Interaction Design on March 31st, 2010
In the Diamond Age, Stephenson imagines the ultimate discovery learning environment.
Let’s look to the fictional near-future of Neil Stephenson’s The Diamond Age in order to set the tone. Nell is the novel’s young protagonist. She is born of limited means to a lower-class single mother named Tequila, but then rises to be a free-thinker and a leader who transcends her class with the help of a nano-technology powered instructional aid, the “The Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer.” The Primer is state-of-the art interactive technology. A fairy tale book, of sorts, but one with amazing properties. First of all, it talks – and not in that robo-voice of the Kindle 2’s text-to-speech feature, but in an uncannily human neo-Victorian contralto. The Primer not only recognizes the user and the details of her environment, it can actually work those into the narrative flow. When Nell wonders aloud during one story “What’s a Raven?”- the book stops and explains it to her – then it gives her a brief, age-appropriate quiz on how to spell the word. It is, in other words, a rich, engaging, and perfectly scaffolded learning environment sensitive to the needs of the individual learner.
Think Like an Instructional Designer: Germane Cognitive Load
Posted by Todd Toler in Interaction Design on August 20th, 2009
It’s been understood since the 1950’s that human cognitive processing capacity is severely limited. In fact, you can put a more or less precise number on the amount of discrete pieces of information that a person can manage in their working memory at any given time – the “magic number” of seven. (see Miller, 1956) When asked to repeat a list of random digits or tones (e.g. 5,6,2,10), most people can manage about 5 to 7 of these “chunks” of information when drawing only from their working memory. It is no accident that we can all remember our phone numbers but only the most acquisitive of us can remember our credit card numbers. Of course, it’s a complicated business of how information gets moved in and out of working memory from long term memory (the closest thing nature has to the $4.4 million hard drive, the RamSan-6200). To get into that we’d have to talk about schema theory and the expertise reversal effect and all sorts of other cognitive science concepts… so let’s keep this simple. How can a basic understanding of working memory and cognitive load theory make us into better UI designers?
Think Like an Instructional Designer: Website Imagery
Posted by Todd Toler in Interaction Design, Visual Design on August 14th, 2009
Everybody Loves Puppies, but The Instructional Potential of This Image is Zero
Careless use of imagery – particularly photographs – is often the difference between a dull “brochure-ware” site and a persuasive information experience. When we redesigned www.dummies.com, we initially populated our design mock-ups with the type of stock photography that professional designers mostly use… only to find that the otherwise attractive imagery added a level of generic-ness that felt downright off-brand. Then we created a style guideline only to use imagery that had true instructional value, whenever possible framed and centered on the action that was being discussed in the content. This applied not only to imagery embedded in the how-to articles, but also the landing page teaser thumbnail photos for the articles and videos. This is a policy the mega-successful book line has had for years, but it wasn’t immediately obvious to us on the web design side. Once we made this change the site felt instantly better. The difference? We thought like an instructional designer.
Interaction designers, graphic designers, and anybody else involved in the ongoing production of commercial websites should pay a lot more attention to instructional principles – even if the site is not overtly instructional. What makes material good for learning also makes it good for other conversion goals – such as explaining products, services, and brand building.
Dummies.com Uses Explanatory Imagery Even in Thumbnails
In fact, why not audit your site’s imagery right now for instructional potential? If you find that most or all of your visuals are falling into the “decorative” category – unless of course it’s fluffy puppies or blondes on the hoods of sports cars (two time-tested exceptions) – then it’s time to make a change. Fortunately, the educational psychologist Richard Mayer has conveniently classified types of imagery in terms of their instructional benefit and effectiveness for learning. The good folks behind the Wiley Visualizing series, which is a textbook line that is highly committed to applying cognitive theories of learning to the design of their products, put together the following summary table, which I’ve adapted with examples that might apply to a typical web designer’s challenge…
Recent Comments