Everyone who has a desire to improve their own process of learning should spend some of their precious time with this book. This is simply the best book that I have read on the process of learning. The Experience Designer begins by making us conscious of our own narratives, critical thinking, and creativity, and asks us to question the assumptions we have about learning and education. We then walk through network learning environments where we use our inventiveness, cleverness and imagination to interact with a wide variety people, places and things. The design and implementation of network learning environments are a distributed responsibility serving to promote diversity in learning.
Finally, we explore the interactive process of designing hardware and software tools to support human ingenuity. His vision is unique, risky, and compelling. This is essential reading for anyone interested in taking charge of the future of learning.
- Jerome Durlak, Communication Arts Professor, York University and the Canadian Film Centre
A Breath of Fresh Air: It's so nice to read a book about e-learning that focuses on learning at a much higher level than simply transferring information.
From the book:
"We tend to think of learning in terms of lesser aims such as knowledge, skills and attitudes... If learning is to be a 'solution' to anything, it must emanate from ideas about stability, durability and sustainability in the face of change and innovation.
This idea alone is worth giving the book a read, but the rest of it, about networks enabling learning and the future of learning in the 'cybersphere' both echoes and expands on the work of Etienne Wenger, Verna Allee and Ross Dawson, among others. Alger also explores themes like "e-Learning hasn't yet been invented... e-Learning is not the same as e-Education and e-Training" and "The learner is not only a user of tools, but a designer and creator of them. What learners do with Internet tools is of far greater importance than what designers intended."
I predict that this book will become a classic.
Lisa Galarneau, Toucan House: Flexible Training Solutions, New Zealand
With The Experience Designer, the author goes beyond the conventional notion of e-learning to provide us with a comprehensive context for lifelong and personal evolution. I highly recommend this book to everyone with an interest in learning. Brian empowers us to take control of the learning process through his holistic, systematic and inventive approach. This excellent volume should be on every educator's desk!
- Robin G King, President IMAGINA Corporation;
Sheridan College Digital Animation Program
Brian Alger has raised the bar significantly. By challenging all of us as learners and designers of learning to assess our current systems for education and training, he encourages us to make fundamental changes. Thoughtfully implemented, these shifts in thinking and practice will unleash the largely untapped power of e-technologies to help design authentic, interactive learning experiences for students, teachers, trainers, trainees and learners everywhere.
- Bob Williams, Education Leader; Director of Education
Overview
The Experience Designer is an invitation to the reader to engage in an innovative system of thinking that explores, invents, imagines, probes, provokes, and builds ideas about e-Learning. The thoughts in this book are a collage of critical, creative, hopeful, and skeptical probes that are coordinated into a new system of thought and a new vision for e-Learning.
Learning is the most critical human resource and source of stability for the unavoidably lifelong and lifewide confluence of modern life. It is obvious to say that learning occurs over the entire course of our lives. We learn whether we want to or not; it is as much about the things we remember as it is the things we forget, the things we are aware of and the things we are unaware of, the things we do and the things we do not do, the things we make and the things we destroy, and the things we consider to be good and evil. Learning is simultaneously a public concourse and a private discourse.
Networks are a very powerful force in modern life. Network phenomena have a pervasive influence on our corporations, governments, educational institutions and cultural organizations. The real source of design for network design is learning, not technology. The interactive domain leads us to consider a unified approach to learning through networks that facilitate a broad range of communication and exploration across a global repertoire of people, places and things.
The Cybersphere is a term used to capture the cross-media electronic surroundings of the Internet. The purpose of an e-Learning system is to capture, integrate and facilitate the optimum range of possibilities and opportunities for learning and networks, or network learning. In other words, any meaningful approach to the design of e-Learning systems originates in a rich and vibrant conception of network learning.
Part One: Learning
The idea of learning throughout the Experience Designer refers to the lifelong and lifewide experiences of people. The universal motivation for learning is the quest for individual and collective identity. Education and training programs, in contrast, are commonly motivated by information acquisition and skill development. The human phenomenon of learning is far more magnificent and powerful than either education or training.
Chapter 1: Narrative and Modern Life
The idea of narrative is at the nucleus of what learning means. Learning is fundamentally a quest for building connections and relationships that promote stability in our lives. Stability is learned through the development and preservation of our private and public identity. Our interface with experience is our identity, or how we construct our stories about our connections with and relationships to the world we live in.
How did I (can I, will I) learn the things that I have valued the most in my life?
How did we (are we, will we) learn the things that we will value most in our lives?
Information is a completely inadequate source of design for learning. Regardless, it is also the predominant source of design in many education and training programs. Current practices in education and training that emanate from curriculum as information design, instruction as information delivery, and standardized assessment as a right of passage to accreditation are ineffective. The solution is to position the power of narrative as the source of design. In doing so, we are invited into a process of paradigm pioneering.
Chapter 2: Critical Vitality
Critical vitality is a cluster of thinking styles and events that are designed to clarify our current situations and circumstances so that a new foundation for growth, improvement and innovation can be established. The purpose of critical vitality is to clarify the underlying assumptions, tacit conditions, habits and traditions that define the structure and therefore the experiences in our lives.
Who will value my ideas (methods, rules, policies, organizations, systems, etc.) and how can I communicate this value to them in a rational manner?
Whose ideas (methods, rules, policies, organizations, systems, etc.) are these and how can I determine what value they really have to me?
Critical vitality is the synthesis of critical thinking and critical action. It represents a fundamental source of energy for the construction and preservation of the narratives that guide our private and public lives.
Chapter 3: Creative Vitality
Creative vitality is a cluster of thinking styles and events that result in the design, construction and expression of new contexts, situations and circumstances. The purpose of creative vitality is to make and build structures and organizations that promote growth and innovation in practical terms. Critical vitality is the synthesis of creative thinking and creative action.
What can I design, build and take action on in order to promote new strategic directions for personal growth?
What can we design, build and take action on in order to promote new strategic directions for public growth?
The complete integration of both critical and creative vitality is essential in building a narrative. Without critical vitality, our narratives will wander into an abstract and disconnected representation of things (i.e. doing in the absence of thinking). Without creative vitality, our narratives will deteriorate into mere armchair abstraction (i.e. thinking in the absence of doing).
Part Two: Networks
A network is a system of interaction that facilitates the creation of connections and relationships across a diversity of people, places and things over time. It is not an idea that merely refers to the physical hardware and software used to support the Internet. A network is a means to structure and coordinate powerful sets of environmental conditions for learning.
Chapter 4: Network Learning Environments
A network learning environment focuses learning on the creation and strategic use of connections and relationships. It is a coordinated set of situations and circumstances for learning that empowers the learner to create and evolve a range of experiences across people, places and things. In other words, the learner is intimately involved in shaping the learning environment to support their own motivations for learning. The means to coordinate a network learning environment is called interaction design.
What are the optimum conditions to support learning through networks?
A network learning environment requires us to reconsider the nature of power, control, authority, responsibility and entitlement in learning. The result is not an extension of traditional classroom practices that organize learning through information typologies, but a completely different paradigm for instruction.
Chapter 5: The Network Explorers
All learners are explorers; we do not learn unless we explore. To observe a person learning is to view the ways in which they are exploring their present circumstances. The most fundamental and important aim of any instructional design methodology is to promote the improvement of abilities such as investigating, discovering and inventing. Improving the learner's capacity for exploration is the single most important reference point for instructional design. The primary objective of the instructional designer is to establish lifelong and lifewide structures for the development of human ingenuity.
What are the most essential and fundamental abilities for learners to develop in order to fully leverage network learning environments?
Our world is rich with narratives of people making discoveries and embarking on quests and journeys. These are not merely stories to be read, but more importantly they comprise a fundamental repertoire of real-life methods, models, processes, and tools for exploration in authentic situations and circumstances. If we were to build a generic set of "skills" that were aimed at being universal, nothing less than human ingenuity would provide a strong enough foundation.
Chapter 6: Lifework
Lifework is the guiding philosophical force for our use of networks. It is the practical, concrete and observable representation of our learning as seen throughout our daily lives. As an economic strategy, lifework is the single most important means to design and construct a systemic support system for employability skills and career directions.
What is the underlying ground for living a creative and fulfilling life?
The idea of employability is reduced to the mere acquisition of isolated and transient skills sets, or competencies. The idea of a career is often a reactive response to existing opportunities in the workforce. Lifework is a fundamental point of reference for making decisions about employment and career management.
Part Three: The Cybersphere
The Cybersphere is the electronic gathering place for network learning. More specifically, a series of new ideas can now be developed as a direct result of the foundation established in Parts One and Two. The basis of a new paradigm for e-Learning emerges here.
Chapter 7: e-Learning Habitats
The most important design consideration for e-Learning is to think of it as a unique kind of electronic habitat within the more comprehensive idea of a network learning environment. An e-Learning environment is primarily designed to facilitate human ingenuity.
How can the idea of e-Learning be restructured in order to promote more innovative and creative approaches for learning?
The use of old education and training paradigms within new technological environments is, unfortunately, a well established norm. E-Learning has been needlessly reduced to ways of delivering information and traditional course structures on-line. In intellectual and economic terms, this approach is not sustainable.
Chapter 8: Mindware
E-Learning is dependent upon the critical and creative vitality we bring to our use of Internet technology. The ways of using networked software is first and foremost a creative act than it is a technical act with respect to learning.
What is the most effective use of software to support learning?
The technological realizations of such software entities as learning management systems, reusable information objects, and courseware authoring systems are all built on a transient set of assumptions. These modern day software development initiatives are examples of how new technologies can further entrench old paradigms of thought.
Chapter 9: e-Learning Design
The future of e-Learning technology requires a network learning environment that integrates the corporate, government, education and cultural sectors. The rationale for this is based on the following: a) no one sector has the necessary intelligence to evolve e-Learning to new levels of value and performance; b) learning is a source of design that transcends any one sector; and c) network technologies are most effectively developed by powerful, adaptive and flexible networks of relationships.
What are the design requirements that lead directly to new and innovative practices in e-Learning?
In the end, the e-Learning design results in a unified and distributed array of network tools that are combined and repurposed in response to the needs of the learner.
The Experience Designer: Learning, Networks and the Cybersphere
Copyright © 2002 Brian Alger
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced or retransmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher.
2002 First Edition
Published by Fenestra BooksTM
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International Standard Book Number: 1-58736-092-6
Library of Congress Control Number: 2002101049
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