So what do I understand about Instructional Design? Some of the basics I feel I understand fairly well. I teach a course on ADDIE, so I get to see a lot about that. Especially about this time of the semester when I get to dig through 16 ADDIE PowerPoint presentations. Well, a bit less since I don’t waste time grading the ones plagiarized from Wikipedia. I am starting to see how the specific ID process that you choose to design with can influence the outcomes of your lesson. ADDIE lends itself to standardized testing more so that others such as LTCA. I know some people will point out that you can come up with any type of lesson in any ID process, but I tend to disagree… just because you never really see that happening. I think that is an interesting topic to research in the very near future – have there been any studies that attempt to see if certain ID models produce certain lesson types?

I will be teaching Socio-Cultural Theory for the class. Why did I choose that? Well, time for a confession. I have been struck in ADDIE mode for so long at my job that I don’t really remember much else outside of that. I was kind of hoping for a list of “Advanced” ID models to choose from, but when the time to post our ID choices, the few advanced models I knew were snapped up before I could jump in there. So I did a search for ID models based on constructivism, read through the results, and socio-cultural theory grabbed my attention. I think what interested me the most is that it expanded upon Vygotsky by focusing on the implications of culture on the construction of knowledge. There is really a find line of difference between the socio-cultural theory and constructivist theory, but that difference will be interesting to study. In many ways, what we are doing for our assignments this month could fall into socio-cultural theory, as long as the student presenters are interactive. Our class counts as a specific culture, and our presentations are a way that we help each other learn something we don’t already know. Zone of Proximal Development inside of a certain culture.

Reading Notes:

Click here to read my notes for this week on Evernote

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