5. You get to write your thoughts down, then erase them, then write them down again ... in a different way.
[gulp] ... the pitfalls of syntactical perfection. Who really likes manhandling their thoughts onto paper or on screen? Maybe some masochist do. But me? I side with Hemmingway. Ernest mused, "There's nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.” Writing instructional content is meticulous business. After all someone's career, well-being, or in some cases life hang on the ID's word choices. So being careful, correct, and judicious about how things are said is critical to meeting instructional objectives. The unintended inference is the designer's worst nightmare. No designer or SME wants students inferring something incorrect from the content. We don't want students filling in gaps the content should have addressed. Thus the onus of scribing ideas and concepts transparently and thoroughly is the designer's responsibility. No sentence nor word of the content should be above revision when it comes to clarity. Instructional designers are used to writing down their thoughts, erasing them, and writing them down again ... in a different way for the sake of instruction.
4. You get to play with puzzles.
Designing instruction is part performance art, part scavenger hunt, part novel writing. The pre-assessments and gap analysis give direction over what needs to be developed. But actually developing what needs to be developed is where rubber meets road. How do you assemble seemingly disparate procedures, facts, processes, interview notes, and photos into something that instructs? Which skills are terminal? Which are enabling? How many learning domains do you address? Pulling from best practices in curriculum development, pedagogy, educational assessment, the ID assembles information into a logical sequence for third party learning of an intellectual or psychomotor skill. Gagne, Kemp, Dick, and Carey all mapped out ways to deal with developing instructional material out of pieces of associated data. The puzzle for the ID is his or her curriculum and/or content outline. Before the narrative writing begins, the outline suffers the sequencing and re-sequencing, the arranging and re-arranging of topics until there is logical, pedagogical progression. Where there is logic and proper sequencing there is learning.
3. Experts respect you.
Sometimes projects require significant interaction with SMEs. We interview them; we study their work; we learn their business. And good or bad we develop relationships with them. The well-working SME / ID team grows from trust and integrity. Still it's not a stretch to say that most folks have no idea what instructional design is or what instructional designers do. So to some SMEs, an ID asking rounds of questions can be seen a threat or a hindrance. "You're here to watch and report me," or "Good luck trying to understand what I do," may be on loop in the SME's thoughts about the ID. But the ID isn't there to judge, nor is he there to document steps or video-tape activities or screen-capture desktops necessarily. While those things are part of the data-collection process, more accurately the ID is there to learn from the SME. That learning includes learning the task(s) and the "universe" in which they are performed. It means learning enough to ask informed and important questions about the task(s) and of the task-performer. And it means taking what the ID has learned and weaving it competently back into the SME / ID dialog. It means researching the topic outside of SME meetings. On any given project, the ID serves as - documenter, researcher, writer but none more important than learner. The conveyance of knowledge from SME to ID is unavoidable. But the ID that exerts energy to speak with growing confidence in the SME's occupational language is due to capture the SME's attention. The result can be earned respect for the instructional design process and the instructional design practitioner.
2. You get to tell people about stuff ... in a pedagogic kinda way.
The ID is a middle-man. He stands between the SME / trainer and the learner. The ID records, researches, observes, and then assembles the information into a format that conveys knowledge from one person to another, as in from engineer to technician or from craftmaster to novice. Respective task-skill experts know their game; they know what they do. IDs experiment with communicating an experts' knowledge, assembling and presenting it in ways that support learning. IDs love being part of the both communication and learning process that exists between instructor and learner. IDs facilitate the learning transaction by expertly sequencing, organizing, and interrelating information so that it tells a learnable narrative to the student - be it a process, a procedure, a practice, a concept, a theory, or a policy.
1. You can get your curiosity on!
Curiosity is the nine iron in the instructional designer's (ID's) golf bag. Why? Because it's curiosity that ultimately powers content development. And it's the ID's questions that evince curiosity. The conscientious instructional designer isn't a just a documenter and step-explainer but she's an investigator. She peels the steps back to understand what the steps mean in context to the performer, to the task, and to the overall job. Asking questions -the right ones at the right times- is perhaps the easiest way to unpeel a job. SMEs are ripe with answers about the tasks that they do. But SMEs are also great for forgetting about how they came to know what they know. Within that forgotten bank of information are perhaps entry-level skills and knowledge that influence their performing of a task or their mastery of some knowledge. Refusing to leave questions on the table, allows the ID to broadly consider the SME's real association with the featured tasks on knowledge. This "real association" includes how the SME knows to do something that's not evident in the worksteps and why the SME knows to do it. Exploring the SME's knowledge base can help the ID determine what entry-level or prerequisite knowledge and skills could or should likely be addressed in the training content.
