In the 21st century, instructional designers will find great opportunities but also corresponding challenges – pressure to abandon essential characteristics of educational approaches, and settle instead for routine practices that do not preserve the quality those approaches originally expressed. Because of the ubiquity of this pressure it has sometimes been called “technological gravity.” This presentation considers how designers can avoid technological gravity, and better achieve the quality expressed in the design approaches they adopt. Read the rest of this entry »

“Concepts, theories and models have an ecology, a context within which they function. Importing a theory or model from a significantly different context, without attention to contextual differences, violates this ecology, and subsequently results in inefficient solutions to instructional problems.” We are ID practitioners creating an Instructional System of Design (ISD) for higher education. We will share with you what we have developed and then break into a workshop and a focus group. Read the rest of this entry »

Utilizing Web 2.0+ and collaborative practices, this session will provide K-16 educators and trainers with the means to engage and motivate their “alternative” students – touching on all learning styles while remaining within curriculum guidelines. Read the rest of this entry »

Presentation Handout (PPT)

• Purpose of presentation (why is this important and who is the target audience)
Many TTIX attendees are involved in some aspect of instructional design. The literature about instructional design fails to mention some key ideas that lie at the heart of design activity. Operational principle is one of these ideas. The purpose of this presentation is to dramatize the concept of the operational principle by highlighting it in other design fields and then demonstrate how it applies as well to the creation of instructional designs.

• Objectives of the presentation (what are you planning to do)
Objective 1: To define the concept of “operational principle”.
Objective 2: To demonstrate the usefulness of this concept in the progress of other design fields.
Objective 3: To show that operational principles exist in instructional designs by demonstrating the abstraction of the “model-centered instruction” principle from numerous existing research designs.
Objective 4: To show the applicability of operational principles in the creation of instructional designs.

• Practical applications (how can your results/strategies be used by others)
One interesting aspect of operational principles is that they are employed in making designs whether designers are aware of it or not. Artifacts designed by humans all involve operational principles. If the designer is unaware of the use of operational principles, then imitation becomes the major technique of designing. But imitation of other designs and modifications made in the process often destroy the effective principle of the original in the copy, and the designer can find that something that seems just like the original model does not work as expected. Awareness of the role of operational principles underlying designs helps designers abstract ideas from other designs without losing their essential qualities. Moreover, a designer who understands an operational principle can use it as a generative engine for multiple designs–ones that need not look similar on the surface but which share a common underlying architecture.

• Information (data or theoretical base) to support what is advocated.
The literature describing the operational principle exists outside of instructional design, in other design-related fields. Polanyi, a philosopher of technology introduced the idea in the 1930’s while writing about the distinction between science and technology. In order to describe technology as a knowledge-producing endeavor and to justify it as a pursuit with equal footing with science, he had to describe the theoretical constructs of the technological realm. Operational principle was one of the key ideas he used in his argument. The concept–and Polanyi’s dream of establishing technology in its own right–passed on to Herbert Simon, who in his Sciences of the Artificial talked about operational principles obliquely in terms of means-end analysis. Vincenti, in What Engineers Know and How They Know It, described the operational principle as one of the key theoretical constructs of technological research. The explosion of science and the diversion of funding through scientific research channels, as well as the university’s desire for scientific respectability described by Simon, has pushed the discussion of technology as a knowledge-creation field and with it the notion of the operational principle out of the spotlight. This presentation will introduce the useful concept to an audience of instructional designers.

2nd-Day Hands On: Applying Operation Principles in Instructional Design
We will use the “model-centered instruction” operational principle introduced the first day to generate a variety of designs, all sharing the same underlying architecture, but dissimilar on the surface. Through this, the attendees will obtain a better idea of how architecture, not surface resemblance, determines the effectiveness of designs.

Biography
Andrew S. Gibbons (Ph.D., Instructional Psychology , BYU) worked for Courseware, Incorporated, an instructional design firm for five years, heading up projects to design training for military planners and helicopter and fighter pilots. In 1979 he was employed by Wicat Systems, Inc. (Orem, Utah) as a project director to work with military and industry, designing innovative training solutions. In 1993, Dr. Gibbons accepted a position with Utah State University, where he taught and conducted research for ten years. His work has centered on the architectural aspects of instructional designs and the abstractions designers use as they design. In 2003, Dr. Gibbons accepted a position at Brigham Young University as Chair of the Instructional Psychology and Technology department. His research and teaching continued and has produced a theory of design architecture involving design layers and design languages.